A co-chair for President Joe Biden’s newly announced reelection campaign has connections to the Chinese government.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Disney and DreamWorks, will be one of the national co-chairs for the president’s 2024 campaign, Biden announced Tuesday. In his years as a corporate CEO, Katzenberg inked deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Chinese companies. Katzenberg visited the country every month for years while working out the deals.
Katzenberg took several meetings with then-vice president of China Xi Jinping, Fox News reported:
Perhaps most infamously, when Katzenberg was at DreamWorks in 2012, the company announced a multi-billion-dollar deal with the Chinese government to build a production studio in Shanghai.
The deal, which effectively increased the number of U.S. films that could be released in the Chinese market each year, came just days after then-Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping met with then-President Barack Obama in Washington.
Xi, now the head of China's ruling Communist Party, traveled after the Obama meeting to Los Angeles, where he met with Katzenberg and both men were featured at a ceremony inking the deal.
Biden also played a central role in pushing Hollywood's entry into Chinese markets during the Obama administration, meeting with Xi multiple times during the Chinese leader's trip to the U.S. in 2012 — with Katzenberg often showing up.
Biden's elevation of Katzenberg to the role comes a month after the administration moved to allow schools with Chinese-funded Confucius Institute chapters to circumvent a ban on receiving federal funds.