China-hawk GOP senator making thousands of dollars from business deal with Chinese state firm: report

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) talks a tough game in standing up to China, and was known for his hawkish anti-China speeches in his former office as governor of Nebraska. But according to The Daily Beast, he is making thousands of dollars off the sale of a business to a company controlled by the Chinese government.

"The new filings by the son of billionaire Cubs owner Joe Ricketts reveal that he had received payouts in the amount of $2,501 to $5,000 last year from his holdings in the National Cement Share Company. The submissions note these are mere 'holdbacks' from the 2021 sale of the stake in the complex to West China Cement held by a private equity firm in which Ricketts served as limited partner—a $23.4 million transaction which The Daily Beast reported on last year," reported William Bredderman. "The recently appointed Republican senator’s office told The Daily Beast he would get a further payment of between $1,001 and $15,000 at an as-yet unknown date in the future. His team further asserted he had no decision-making role in the sale. Ricketts’ press staff in the governor’s office had previously failed to return calls and emails from The Daily Beast regarding the deal."

Ricketts was appointed to the Senate by Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, shortly after leaving the governor's mansion himself. He succeeded Ben Sasse, a Republican who left to take over the University of Florida system, a move that was controversial for faculty and students of that institution.

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"As evidence of his anti-China record, [a] spokesperson pointed to Ricketts’ 2020 ban on the use of the app TikTok on Nebraska-owned devices, and highlighted the closure of the Beijing-linked Confucius Institute at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that same year," said the report. "However, the state school at the time attributed the shutdown of the controversial Chinese cultural center to budget cuts. And while Ricketts adopted an extremely hostile posture toward the totalitarian regime at the end of his tenure as governor, even declaring a 'Victims of Communism Remembrance Month' to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding in 2021, he praised the Confucius Institute in an exclusive interview he granted in 2018 to China Daily — the official mouthpiece of President Xi Jinping’s political apparatus."

As China has stepped up its support of the Russian invasion and genocide in Ukraine, and as military experts have prepared for the possibility China could launch a similar military conflict of its own in Taiwan, there has been a bipartisan demand to take a hard line against China's provocations, and to prevent entities tied to the Chinese government from segments of the U.S. economy critical to national security.

One of the largest national moves against China has been President Joe Biden's sanctions cutting China off from the U.S. semiconductor industry, which massively disrupted the nation's technology industry and took many industry experts by surprise.