No, Ron DeSantis Does Not Have a ‘Secret Chinese Backer’
According to the Miami Herald, Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has accepted compromising campaign donations from the Chinese, undermining his “tough stance” vis-à-vis the United States’ chief geopolitical rival.
“DeSantis’ Secret Chinese Backer” read the sensationalist front cover of the Herald on Monday.
In its body, the piece assails DeSantis for accepting campaign donations from Ben Meng, the CEO of an American refrigerant company called iGas, and other employees at the same firm because a Chinese company has a 1/3 stake in it.
From the article:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made his tough stance on China a signature issue in his presidential campaign.
DeSantis has gone on the offensive against Chinese influence in recent months, signing a bill restricting what land Chinese companies and citizens can buy in Florida and suspending state scholarships to several Florida schools over alleged links to China.
But this August he took a check for more than $11,000 from the CEO of a Tampa refrigerant company with direct backing from China. It was just the latest in years of financial support that the company, iGas USA, has given DeSantis.
Last year DeSantis even held a rally at the Chinese-backed refrigerant company’s Tampa complex.
The rally and contributions are part of a recent wave of political giving by iGas and entities associated with its CEO, Xianbin (Ben) Meng. All told, the companies and employees have made more than $1.1 million in federal and state political contributions in the past five years, with 98% of the money going to Republican candidates and committees. The lion’s share of that money, $340,000, went to DeSantis and committees affiliated with him.
While Meng donated to former President Donald Trump in 2016, DeSantis is the only Republican presidential contender who has gotten a check from the company or its employees this cycle.
Its authors went on to explain that Meng and other executives have been on a political spending spree over the last several years, spurred on by former President Trump’s signing of the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act into law in 2020, which “phases out the types of refrigerants that iGas imports from China.”
The Herald‘s charges are especially notable because they come in the context of a spat between DeSantis and Nikki Haley — the only two viable challengers to Trump in the Republican presidential primary — over each of their records on China. Haley’s campaign even promoted the Herald article on X.
A picture is worth a thousand words. pic.twitter.com/6j2s2wwkL0
— Team Haley (@TeamHaley) November 20, 2023
But the claim that the contributions of Meng and his colleagues to DeSantis render the governor’s rhetoric hypocritical seems a stretch. And its incendiary allegation that DeSantis has a “secret Chinese backer” is a wild overstatement.
Meng himself is a Chinese immigrant and American citizen who has spoken openly about his family’s suffering during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, his contributions to DeSantis and other politicians are public record.
There is no evidence cited by the Herald t0 suggest that DeSantis has attempted to conceal the donations made to him by iGas executives or taken action favorable to it as a result of those donations.
The Herald did find that three Republican members of Congress have lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to get it to adopt rules favorable to iGas. But the Herald made DeSantis, rather than those backbenchers, the focus of its article in an effort to draw more attention to it and do harm to his campaign.
Perhaps there is some modest critique to be made of DeSantis on this front, but without any evidence of policymaking favorable to iGas, much less the Chinese government, his name hardly merited mention in this story.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
