Wayne O'Leary

American Conservatism’s China Dolls

For Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), it’s definitely been the Year of the Turtle. Powered by the money and influence provided by his Chinese-born wife, Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Mitch has ruled the Senate with an iron hand, ramming through one right-wing judicial appointment after another, frustrating Democratic efforts to call a corrupt administration to account, and burying progressive legislation in a blizzard of arcane procedural minutia. He’s been justifiably called the most successful obstructionist in Senate history.

Reports from the Bluegrass State suggest McConnell may be in trouble back home as he seeks reelection for a seventh time, but don’t count on it; he represents a reliably red state and is wallowing in campaign funds. Democrats could pull off an upset (Mitch’s unpopularity with his Kentucky constituents is said to be flirting with 50%, tops among incumbent senators), yet to do so, they would have to reckon with McConnell’s ace in the hole, his deep-pocketed, ruthlessly partisan, and politically connected spouse.

Elaine Chao is not the first prominent woman of Chinese extraction to have wielded an unusual level of power within GOP circles; she continues a Republican tradition established in the mid-20th century by Soong Mei-ling, better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Madame Chiang (1898-2003) was, of course, the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) forces that held China as a feudal barony from 1928 to 1945, lost it to Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in the ensuing civil war, then established a government-in-exile on Taiwan (Formosa) in 1950, where the Chiangs ruled with US support until 1975.

Madame Chiang, who was her husband’s secretary, advisor, interpreter and unofficial emissary to the US, was the daughter of a wealthy, westernized Shanghai family, American-educated (Wellesley College), a Christian, and the sister-in-law of Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. She was also, along with her husband, a rabid anticommunist. That anticommunism was her entré into Republican politics, a path eased by right-wing publisher Henry Luce, whose Time magazine featured the Chiangs on no fewer than three worshipful covers — in 1931, 1937 and 1943.

Luce, himself born in China of missionary parents, viewed the Chinese power couple as the conservative antidote to Maoist Marxist-Leninism; they became the rallying point for Cold War posturing by the American right, the object of massive, wasted amounts of US foreign aid, and eventually the romanticized victims of supposed subversive American liberals who had deliberately “lost” China to communism — a perspective that led unerringly to the domino theory and the Vietnam quagmire.

While lionized by American conservatives, the glamorous Madame Chiang was the public face of, and spokesperson for, a government that eminent historian Barbara Tuchman labelled an unabashedly fascist dictatorship, someone who could actually advise a nonplussed FDR to execute striking union workers during World War II. A contemporary unmoved by her wily charms, Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, later placed the blame for the Communist victory in China squarely on the Kuomintang, which he characterized as corrupt, inefficient, and oblivious to the needs of its people.

But on the Republican right, Madame Chiang, who outlived her husband and moved to the US, remained the ultimate heroine in the conservative movement’s existential struggle against godless communism, a figure of transcendent nostalgia despite her grasping, power-hungry demeanor. Now, two decades after her passing, Republicans have another slightly tattered and morally compromised China doll to dote upon, the aforementioned Elaine Chao.

Obviously, times have changed: Present-day China is nominally capitalist, though it’s a statist capitalism. The Republican Party has changed, too; its leaders are no longer cold warriors, but free-market ideologues. So it should come as no surprise that today’s China doll is also a different breed; she’s a product not of Henry Luce, Dick Nixon and Joe McCarthy, but of Ronald Reagan, the Bush family and Donald Trump. Her GOP is less consumed by anticommunist crusades than by the almighty dollar.

Superficially, there are similarities in background with Madame Chiang. Like Chiang, Chao was Chinese-born (in Taiwan) to wealthy Christian parents and emigrated to the US. She, too, is American-educated (Mount Holyoke College and the Harvard Business School). There, the two careers diverge: Madame Chiang looked East to a reestablished status quo ante in mainland China; Elaine Chao looked West from the start and toward a deep immersion in America’s Republican politics. Her lengthy GOP portfolio includes mid-level stints in government during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and appointments as Labor secretary under George W. Bush (2001-09) and as Transportation secretary under Donald Trump (2017-present).

It was in the role of cabinet official that Chao emerged as a dedicated GOP apparatchik with an ideological bent honed at the conservative Heritage Foundation. As a conspicuously anti-worker Labor secretary, she came under severe criticism for failing to enforce wage-and-hour laws and workplace safety regulations, and for surreptitiously outsourcing her department’s work to costly private contractors. In addition, Chao’s tenure was marked by Labor Department efforts to persecute unions over alleged financial mismanagement, while giving employers (including coal companies) operational carte blanche.

But it’s as Transportation secretary that Chao has made the transition from charming party hack to accredited denizen of the Washington swamp, using her public position for blatant personal and family aggrandizement in what has become the standard modus operandi of the Trump regime.

Some of the reported corruption qualifies as almost routine, such as Chao’s deliberate failure (until this year) to divest herself of held transportation stocks, allowing their value to appreciate during her time in office and return a substantial profit. Other offenses have been more egregious — for example, participating, in her official capacity, in promotional activities beneficial to her family’s far-flung international shipping empire. (The family earned such special consideration by contributing $1.1 million to Mitch McConnell’s Senate campaigns over the years.)

Chao’s seamiest transgressions, however, have been reserved for the intersection of public money and politics as it concerns her husband’s career, where her ethical bankruptcy has lately been on full display. In June, Politico revealed that in 2017 Chao had specifically directed one of her departmental aides to steer $78 million in federal grants to politically sensitive transportation projects in Kentucky where Mitch McConnell is up for reelection.

Take it from Mitch, it’s handy to have an amoral China doll on call.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019

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