Wanna know why it seems all the good-paying unionized manufacturing jobs went to China? Then be like a hippy and connect a few dots....
Or ask Pop Bush. He knows....his big brother, Prescott Bush Jr., was head honcho for the US-China Chamber of Commerce. Pop Bush was CIA director and Ambassador to China. The outsourcing-banking was primarily their construct.....
Nice, huh!!
fyi....TM7
President's uncle shares Bush family ties to ChinaBy Debbie Howlett, USA TODAY
AP
Prescott Bush
CHICAGO — When President Bush arrives in Beijing on Thursday, he'll embrace a policy that's something of a family tradition.
Bush's approach centers on promoting U.S.-China economic ties. That's a course favored not only by his father, the first President Bush, but also by his uncle, Prescott Bush Jr., a longtime acquaintance of Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
The Bush family's ties to China go back to 1974, when President Nixon named George Bush ambassador to China. The college-age George W. Bush spent two months in China visiting his parents during his father's two-year stint.
Seven years after his brother left the ambassadorial post, Prescott Bush made his first trip to China. He later joined with Japanese partners in 1988 to build a golf course in Shanghai, the first in China. He met Jiang, who was then the mayor of Shanghai.
The Prescott Bush file
• Age: 79. Born Aug. 10, 1922.
• Education: Yale University.
• Background: Chairman, U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce; president, Prescott Bush Resources.
• Politics: Unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker in Connecticut's Republican primary election in 1982 for the seat once held by his father.
• Family: The oldest of five children of Sen. Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. Lives with wife, Beth, in Greenwich, Conn. Two grown children.
Source: USA TODAY research
Prescott Bush, now 79, also developed a close working relationship with Rong Yiren, a former trade minister and vice president, who in 1993 introduced Bush to a group of Chinese business leaders as "an old friend." In 2000, Forbes publications reported that Rong, who has retired from government, was the richest man in China.
The president's uncle concedes that he sometimes relied on his name to open doors, but he says any deals he made were the result of his own hard work.
"You can get a meeting because of it, you can meet a lot of people because of it," he said in a recent interview in Chicago, where the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce has its headquarters. "But I don't get a lot of business because my nephew is president or my brother was president."
Some experts argue otherwise. A name is not just helpful, it's essential, says Nick Larty, a professor of international relations at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.: "Who you get access to in China is pretty much a function of how important you are."
Along with access, the family name has also brought scrutiny to Prescott Bush's deals:
He was criticized in 1989 for visiting China to meet with business and government leaders just three months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which army troops fired at pro-democracy demonstrators.
His Shanghai partnership with the Japanese firm Aoki in 1988 proved embarrassing when revelations surfaced that Aoki at the same time was allegedly trying to get business contracts by bribing Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, whom the first President Bush later ousted from power.
His connections to an American firm, Asset Management, came into question in 1989, when the company was the only U.S. firm able to skirt U.S. sanctions and import communications satellites into China.
When Asset Management went bankrupt later that year, Bush's deal to arrange a buyout through West Tsusho, a Japanese investment firm, raised eyebrows. Newspapers reported that Japanese police were investigating West Tsusho's alleged ties to organized crime.
Bush declines to discuss those controversies. "That's old news. It's in the past," he says.
Last year, he opened the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce offices in Chicago. The membership roster includes United Airlines, American Express, McDonald's, Ford and Arthur Andersen, the beleaguered company that audited Enron's books.
Bush says opportunities abound now that the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis is in the past: "The Chinese are very much interested in getting foreign capital in. They desperately need the jobs."
Last fall, Bush hosted a well-attended trade conference in Chicago at which U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick gave the keynote address. At a dinner he sponsored last month at the Yale Club in New York, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, was guest of honor.
Perhaps the most intriguing question about Bush's China connections is whether he played a role in ending a U.S.-China standoff in April, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane over the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan island, where 24 U.S. crewmembers were held for 11 days.
The president's uncle traveled to China just hours after news of the incident broke. He flew aboard United's inaugural flight from Chicago to Beijing. Other dignitaries on the largely ceremonial flight stayed a few days, but Bush didn't return home for two weeks. Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher met Bush — but not the rest of the group.
Prueher says their meeting was simply a social call.
"I might have joined him for a cup of tea or a Coke — maybe we had a beer, I don't recall," says Prueher, who left his post in June. "We spent an hour chatting."
Bush denies any involvement in the diplomatic settlement that ended the crisis.
"I couldn't possibly do something like that," he says. "It would be very embarrassing for the president if it was found out that I was going to see my friends when he was trying to work things out."
The standoff ended when Prueher sent Jiang a carefully worded letter of regret over the incident. The next day, the U.S. crew was permitted to leave. Bush left a day later.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002/02/19/usat-prescott-bush.htmChina The Bush family: Middle Kingdom rainmakersBy Zach Coleman
HONG KONG - George Herbert Walker Bush arrived in Beijing 30 years ago as the official United States representative to China with one goal above all else: expanding his buddy list.
"My hyper-adrenaline, political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to make more contacts," he wrote in his first diary entry. "And it is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China's leaders - whomever they may be. Yet everyone tells me that that is impossible."
Bush Sr, already a champion networker, wasn't to be denied. In a final triumph at the end of his stay, Deng Xiaoping, then vice premier, threw a farewell lunch for Bush Sr and his wife.
"You are our old friends," said Deng, according to a Chinese government website. "You are welcome to come back anytime in the future."
Bush Sr and his relatives have turned that open invitation into a family franchise over the years, setting themselves up as gatekeepers between lucrative business opportunities created by the opening up of China's economy and the US corporate and political establishment. If Iraq is the place where the Bush men fight once they leave the oil fields of Texas, China is where they have made money.
China policy has been a hot-button issue in US presidential campaigns for more than half a century. This time around, many politicians are linking US job losses to the country's exploding trade deficit with China, leaving the family trade in promoting US-China commerce with the potential to embarrass President George W Bush in his 2004 re-election drive.
Bush Sr and his brother Prescott both lowered their profile in the family business last year. Yet the Bushes' business suddenly hit the headlines again in November, when documents and testimony from the divorce trial of the president's brother Neil showed that he had signed a contract to receive US$400,000 a year from Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing, a Chinese company co-founded by a son of former president Jiang Zemin, in return for business information and advice. Fair enough, but Neil Bush has no background in technology. His brother's administration, however, is leaning on Beijing to reduce tax discrimination against imported semiconductors.
There is no evidence that Chinese companies or officials have influenced US policy under Bush Jr by playing up to his relatives. Indeed, last May, Bush Jr penalized China North Industries (Norinco), a company with which Prescott once worked, by halting Norinco's $150 million annual export trade with the US for two years, after concluding that the company had shipped missile technologies to Iran.
Yet Chinese companies and officials continue to hold Bush family members in special regard.
Last month, the government Xinhua News Agency reported discussions that took place between President Hu Jintao and Bush Sr in Hainan Island province during the Boao Forum for Asia about "issues of common concern". Hu delivered the barely veiled message that the US needed to be more sensitive to China's position on Taiwan's independence in order to get more cooperation on the US priorities of trade and terrorism. Bush Sr replied, according to Xinhua, that Bush Jr "highly valued the important role that China has made in the efforts for peaceful solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula".
US companies also still see the Bushes as Middle Kingdom rainmakers. In December, Bush Jr invited a business group founded by Prescott to send 50 members to a reception on the White House lawn for visiting Premier Wen Jiabao. And a group of bankers and financiers travelled from the US with Bush Sr last month to an environmental protection conference in Shanghai that featured top officials from the standing committee of the National People's Congress and other government bodies, according to the Shanghai Star.
It all makes for a lucrative niche. There are no publicly disclosed figures on how much the family has made overall in the last three decades as China brokers. But the deals continue to add up.
Prescott Bush Jr:
Prescott Bush only made his first visit to China after his brother Bush Sr had moved into the White House as vice president in 1981. He quickly became a regular, leaving behind his 33-year career in the insurance brokerage business in preference for Chinese deal making. A 30 percent stake in one early project, an $18 million golf club in Shanghai, gave Prescott the opportunity to strike up a friendship with then-mayor Jiang Zemin (who now heads the communist party's powerful standing committee of Central Military Commission).
Now 81, Prescott Bush still travels to China two to four times a year, according to the website of Plus Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed company focused on China, which hired Prescott as a special adviser three months after Bush Jr's inauguration. The website features Prescott's picture at the top of its home page. "He has many friends in China," the site says in its biography of the special Bush family adviser.
Prescott Bush Resources, his consulting company, has put together more than 30 joint ventures in China since 1978, according to the website of Global Access, a US consulting company active in China, which retains Prescott as chairman of its advisory board. "Mr [Prescott] Bush has also facilitated meetings and approvals at the highest levels of the Chinese government," the site adds in its biography.
"I don't get a lot of business because my nephew is president or my brother was president," Prescott insisted in an interview with USA Today in 2002, though he admitted, "You can meet a lot of people because of it."
Prescott capitalized explicitly on the family tie-in by forming the US-China Chamber of Commerce in 1993 after serving on its predecessor, the Hong Kong-US Business Council, during his brother's presidency.
"My brother, George, has been instrumental in the development of US and China relations since 1974," he wrote in his letter to prospective members. The chamber pitches itself as a networking hub, which "provides the business communities in both countries with direct access to leading business people and government officials who are important in their business development efforts".
Members of the chamber's "Chairman's Circle" include US agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Wanxiang America, whose parent company markets products made in China to US customers. ADM and Wanxiang are also among the China clients listed on Prescott's corporate biographies, which also typically mention Norinco, Anheuser-Busch and China National Cereals, Oils & Foodstuffs Import & Export Corp (Cofco).
In an e-mail reply to the Weekend Standard, Prescott said his work with Norinco consisted of trying to help the company secure the assistance of a US automotive manufacturer to set up a truck factory. "It was dropped because of lack of financing," he said. "My relationship with Norinco was finished long before 2000."
Norinco has operated under a cloud of suspicion in the US for years because of its links to the Chinese military and a case involving the smuggling of thousands of Norinco AK-47 assault rifles into the US in 1996. The Bush Jr administration last month slapped new sanctions on Norinco for its Iranian activities, which involved shipping missile technologies to Iran.
By contrast, as president, Bush Sr granted a "national interest" waiver to allow a deal to proceed for shipping $300 million of Hughes Aircraft satellite equipment to China in December 1989, overriding sanctions imposed by Congress a month before in response to the Tiananmen Square incident - regarded as a massacre of peaceful demonstrators by most observers. Prescott had visited China just before his brother that February and returned weeks after the Tiananmen violence for talks with officials on several deals, including one for a US company pitching a satellite communications network that would utilize the Hughes equipment.
"We aren't a bunch of carrion birds coming to pick the carcass," Prescott told the Wall Street Journal at the time. "But there are big opportunities in China, and America can't afford to be shut out."
Then in April 2001, Prescott flew to Beijing hours after news broke of a collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet off Hainan Island. He was an an invited passenger on United Airlines' first Chicago-Beijing flight, and stayed on in the country well after the other passengers had returned home.
He told USA Today a year later that he didn't get involved in the settlement that resolved the high-tension spy plan crisis during his stay. Certainly he had business to do.
Since Bush Jr's election, Prescott's China clients have closed a flurry of deals, including some with each other. Anheuser-Busch signed a deal in 2002 to ramp up its stake in Tsingtao Brewery and this month announced a HK$1.1 billion ($141 million) investment in Harbin Brewery. With Prescott Bush's help, ADM opened and expanded a slew of joint-venture factories - including some with fellow client Cofco - to become China's largest oilseed processor. In January, Wanxiang America took a stake in Sageworks, a US financial software company that appointed Prescott to its board of advisers in 2002, and took up Chinese distribution of its products.
Prescott himself, though, has kept a low public profile of late. He says he resigned the chairmanship of the US-China Chamber in April 2003 because "it was time to let younger people take over".
Neil Bush
As a member of the younger Bush generation, Neil only entered the China trade 10 years ago, setting up Interlink Management Corp as a matchmaker between US and Asian firms, especially the Charoen Pokphand Group of Thailand, a conglomerate controlled by a Sino-Thai businessman. Through Interlink, Neil helped CP Group form a joint venture with Koll Real Estate for a $300 million mall in Shanghai and a joint venture with Beaulieu of America to sell carpet in China.
George Herbert Walker Bush
Since his presidency, Bush Sr has stayed out of the undignified business of actual deal making. Instead, he has been collecting hefty fees from US companies to be their icebreaker.
It's easy money. Companies pay Bush Sr $125,000-$150,000, plus first-class expenses for three, and must fly him over by private jet, according to his representative, Brooks International Speakers & Entertainment Bureau. In return, Bush gives a speech at a banquet or conference. His presence alone usually draws dutiful attendance by top Chinese officials, who are then chatted up by sponsors.
Companies that have hired Bush Sr to talk in China have included the CP Group, Arco, the Chubb Group, IMC Global and the Carlyle Group. Carlyle, a US investment firm, appreciated Bush Sr's 1998 China trip on its behalf so much it made him a senior adviser to its Asia advisory board the next year, a position he resigned from last October.
"If you're unknown in China and trying to get known, and you're trying to get a license there, having a former president at a reception might get people to come who might not come otherwise," a Chubb official told the Los Angeles Times. "We get to rub shoulders with them and get to know them better."
Chubb got its insurance license a year after Bush Sr's visit. Similarly, IMC closed a deal to sell fertilizer to a Chinese government agency two months after Bush Sr's talk at its Beijing conference.
With his son in office, Bush Sr's recent trips have more often been sponsored by Chinese government organizations. Last month's Shanghai conference was co-sponsored by the Association for International Understanding of China, the China United Nations Association and the US-China Foundation. The sponsors threw a birthday party for Bush Sr, who will turn 80 next month. The subsequent stop in Hainan Island, where Bush Sr met with President Jintao, came under the banner of the annual Boao Forum.
In 2002, the northern city of Tianjin, together with Business Week magazine, hired Bush Sr to headline a conference in the city. The Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, an affiliate of the Foreign Ministry, picked up the tab for trips that year to Shanghai and Beijing and last October to Beijing. The association also co-sponsored a conference at Texas A&M University in November together with the university, its George Bush School of Government and Public Service and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation that featured a who's who of past and present officials, such as former vice premier Qian Qichen, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger. The Bush Foundation lists the Chinese government as a $50,000- $100,000 contributor in the lobby of the presidential library.
Regardless of who's picking up the tab, a visit by Bush Sr to China is usually an occasion to call on Jiang Zemin and, since his official retirement, his successors. On his October trip, his hosts hustled Bush Sr to separate sessions with Jiang, President Hu and Premier Wen. Bush Sr also met up with Jiang on Jiang's visits to Texas in 2002 and 2003.
Although he has not held a government post in 11 years and has been collecting fees for promoting China trade in the meantime, Bush Sr often speaks up on current US-China relations both at and away from his meetings. In 2000, he weighed in strongly in favor of US legislation that set the stage for China's entry to the World Trade Organization. A year later, with his son in office, he praised China's support for Bush Jr's anti-terrorism drive as "a rather courageous stand". In October, he told Hu that, in the words of Xinhua, "The US side understood China's concerns over the Taiwan issue."
Jiang Zemin made clear to a Washington Post editor two months after Bush Jr's inauguration what he expected from Bush Sr. "The father of President Bush, Bush Sr, came over to China many, many times and had many meetings with me in the seat you are now occupying," Jiang said. "We believe Bush Sr will definitely push Bush Jr to bring US-China relations to a new level."
George W Bush
Bush Jr arrived in China for a six-week visit on June 4, 1975, after finishing Harvard Business School and stayed through his 29th birthday. His father commented in his diary that his son was impressed by China's universal health-care system after getting his tooth fixed for 60 cents - US.
As president, Bush Jr hasn't asked China for help in fixing the US health-care system, but he has drastically changed his policy toward China since the early months of his presidency. In those days, his administration focused on China as a strategic threat and the president had expressed unqualified support for Taiwan, even referring to it directly as a country. Relations reached a low point with the standoff over the return of the US spy plane and crew involved in the Hainan collision.
Bush Sr has sidestepped questions on how much he's talked to his son about China during his presidency. Outside the family, Bush Jr counts among his biggest campaign donors two businessmen deeply invested in China, Hank Greenberg of AIG and Sam Fox of the low-profile Harbour Group.
Certainly the Bush Jr administration's views on China have been affected by the need for Beijing's acquiescence to US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, countries that soared ahead of China as priorities after the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes.
"He is able," Bush Sr recorded in his diary when his son left town in 1975. "If he gets his teeth into something semi-permanent or permanent, he will do just fine."
(Used with permission of the Hong Kong Standard)
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