Chinese influence has entangled itself among American elites. Don’t be surprised if the
American elites themselves get entangled with deadly political shadow wars.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
Something very sus has happened in the US, and the trail leads straight to China.
Early last month, the Chinese American CEO of the shipping company the Foremost Group,
Angela Chao was pronounced dead at the age of 50 after her car went into a pond in Texas.
Which sounds like the beginning of an episode of CSI…or, y’know,
every other procedural crime drama out there.
This isn’t just any ordinary woman.
Beyond her role as CEO of a powerful shipping company,
Chao is the sister-in-law of US Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Her older sister, Elaine Chao , is McConnell’s wife,
although she’s a political figure in her own right. She has served as US Secretary of Labor
under George W. Bush and US Secretary of Transportation under Donald Trump .
McConnell mentioned his sister-in-law’s death when he announced last week
that he was stepping down as the Republican Senate leader in November.
And, totally unrelated, the circumstances surrounding Angela’s death are pretty suspicious.
According to a fire department incident report, authorities were alerted a little
after midnight on February 11th. Emergency personnel pulled Angela
out of a car that had gone into a pond on a private ranch in Johnson City, Texas.
According to the Austin American-Statesman,
“the property is owned by a trust that shares the same Chicago address as an investment
and public equity firm owned by Chao's husband, [venture capitalist] Jim Breyer.”
So she was found in a submerged car in a pond on
property that was owned by her husband. But here’s where it gets even weirder.
The chief investment officer at the Texas-based asset management
firm Hayman Capital Management and independent researcher Kyle
Bass claims that Chao was in her Tesla and backed into a pond when she died.
If true, it would be strange if she rolled backwards,
since Teslas don’t roll when they’re parked.
Also, people don’t usually die by drowning in Teslas.
It’s usually by burning.
But here’s where things get even more fishy. And no, that wasn’t a drowning pun.
The Blanco County Sheriff’s Office initially released a very short statement saying that
its preliminary investigation determined Chao’s death to be an “unfortunate accident”.
Which is already suspicious, because they’re describing it like the mafia would describe
someone being found with concrete shoes in the Hudson River. “Clearly…
this is just an unfortunate accident.” But things soon took a very dark turn.
The Blanco County Sheriff’s Office later said in a letter to the Texas Attorney
General that “This incident was not a typical accident”.
“Although the preliminary investigation indicated this was an unfortunate accident,
the Sheriff’s Office is still investigating this accident as a
criminal matter until they have sufficient evidence to rule out criminal activity”.
In other words, the authorities are investigating if there was foul play behind Chao’s death.
Okay, so maybe don’t call something an accident until the investigation’s
complete. That’s like finding a body with 90 bullet holes and saying,
“Our preliminary investigation has determined this to be a severe whoopsie daisy.”
A criminal investigation makes sense, though, especially since it
might involve a Tesla . Have you seen what hackers are capable of doing with those?
As big news as Chao’s death was, there’s a lot of secrecy surrounding it.
According to CNBC, “Since Chao’s death remains the subject of a criminal probe,
the Blanco County Sheriff’s public information officer told the attorney general that reports,
911 logs, audio and video evidence as well as other material should not yet
be released to media outlets that requested them.”
But if they don’t release it, then how will a teenage detective get to the
bottom of this case and solve the mystery the so-called experts couldn’t crack?...
I’ve been reading a lot of young-adult novels. Shut up, they’re delightful.
But according to an Austin attorney who specializes in Texas open records
law , it’s concerning that Blanco County didn’t promptly make basic information
like the identity of the victim, time, and place of death available to media outlets
without any assertion that its release would actually interfere with any investigation.
Even basic information was kept under wraps while the public statement called
it an accident. Then, later, it suddenly became the subject
of a criminal investigation. What exactly is going on here?
Chao’s family kept their comments about her to a minimum, saying things like how she
acted as a bridge between the East and West and how the family was devastated
with grief. Not much about how exactly Chao died. There are allegations that the family
even blocked an autopsy. I have a lot of questions.
Is it a coincidence that Chao died mere weeks after her husband decided
to suspend his investments in China for 18 months?
Is it a coincidence that she died just one week after IDG Capital , which her
husband’s venture capital firm heavily invested in, was listed for having Chinese military ties?
Maybe. But if all my time on this channel taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to the CCP,
there are rarely coincidences. Usually, they’re severe whoopsie daisies .
Now, of course, Mitch McConnell has announced that he will step down as Republican Senate leader.
McConnell gave no specific reason for the timing of his decision.
He… doesn’t say much of anything these days.
But according to AP News, McConnell did cite his sister-in-law’s death as a moment that
prompted introspection, adding, “The end of my contributions are closer than I’d prefer”.
That’s…enigmatic.
McConnell also said, “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”
And the thing about politics is that coincidences are rarely just that,
especially given all the shady ties the Chao family has.
If it looks like murder, smells like murder,
and tastes like murder… then quit smelling and licking that corpse! This is a crime scene!
Something about Angela Chao’s death is not right. I’ll tell you more after the break.
Welcome back.
Angela Chao’s death has raised a lot of speculation that something sinister was behind it.
Given her ties to China, it’s easy to see why.
Her father, James Chao fled from the mainland to Taiwan in the late 1940s after the Chinese
Civil War and later to the US in 1958. He helped found the New York-headquartered Foremost Group ,
a shipping company that hauls cargo such as iron ore and coal, primarily to China.
The same company owned a vessel that was caught carrying cocaine…
…which, in turn, led to McConnell earning the title “Cocaine Mitch”
because of his ties to the Chao family. Strangely enough, McConnell’s reelection
campaign totally embraced the title. I guess Cocaine Mitch is a fitting nickname, since
turtles often have straws up their noses.
Much of the company’s success was thanks to Chao
senior maintaining a lot of close ties with the Chinese mainland.
He was particularly close with former Chinese leader Jiang
Zemin , the same Jiang Zemin who launched a genocide on Falun Gong practitioners,
and was the the head of a political faction locked in constant power struggle
against the current Chinese leader Xi Jinping,even after Jiang’s death.
According to the New York Times, “[James Chao]… has for decades cultivated a close
relationship with Jiang Zemin, a schoolmate from Shanghai who rose to become China’s president.”
The relationship with Jiang certainly seems to have paid off for the Chaos.
Over the years, Foremost Group was able to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese loans,
business with Chinese shipyards, and charters with Chinese state-owned steel makers.
In turn, some of that money – and by some I mean millions of dollars – found its way into
the bank accounts of McConnell and his wife via family donations from James Chao to his daughter,
which is not at all a tit-for-tat for McConnell’s political influence.
But don’t worry. I’m sure China has had no influence whatsoever over the Chaos.
Even after flattering them with state propaganda…
Giving out nice portraits of them…
…and printing biographies of them.
Why, I bet the CCP does that with all their friends. Even the poor ones, like-
Even if China was trying to sway the Chaos politically, I have faith that Elaine Chao was
careful not to let China influence her, even when she mixed family business with government duties.
Relax! It’s totally normal to bring family to meetings with Chinese government officials!
You’ve heard of take your daughter to work day. Why can’t you also take your uncle,
third cousins, and guy you’re not related to?
I also have faith that Mitch McConnell is holding Chinese leaders accountable
despite family financial ties. Yup. Definitely!
Angela Chao herself was especially well connected with China.
She took the mantle of CEO of Foremost Group in 2018,
but she has also held a number of other roles, including member of the board of
the Bank of China and vice chairman of the Council of China’s Foreign Trade.
She was even a director at the state-run China State Shipbuilding Corporation —the
same corporation that builds ships for the Chinese navy.
Now what kind of state-run corporation would allow
a US citizen to work anywhere close to a military-industrial enterprise
like that? Not even most ordinary CCP members could even dream of being in that position.
China State Shipbuilding Corporation would either have to be very stupid,
or it must be pretty confident in Angela to not screw them over.
So Angela Chao’s got some pretty shady ties to China,
but everything gets ten times weirder when it comes to her death.
The influential Chinese site Caixin Global put out this article about Angela’s death.
An earlier version of the article claimed that Angela was allegedly
hit and killed by a drunk truck driver at an intersection and that the driver was arrested.
This drunk driver story isn’t what mainstream Western media reported,
but for some reason, a whole bunch of Chinese articles repeated these claims.
Why would Caixin dedicate an entire article to Angela Chao with shoddy details that
sound like celebrity gossip? That type of thing isn’t normally Caixin’s cup of tea,
since it normally focuses on things like Chinese macroeconomics.
This would be like Forbes or the Wall Street Journal covering Sydney
Sweeney’s favorite cookie recipes. That type of useless drivel is usually found
in less respected news organizations. Like CNN .
Also, if you look at the date of Caixin’s publication on Angela,
you’ll notice that it was originally published at around 5:53 pm local time on February 13th.
That’s a lot earlier than when the story hit mainstream American news outlets,
which are around half a day behind China’s time zone.
How would Caixin get a scoop like that from America sooner
than mainstream American media outlets?
There were some more obscure English-speaking
sites that reported on Angela Chao’s death before the mainstream media.
The earliest report that I could find comes from this suspicious Vietnamese
salon site. It’s dated on February 10th, a day before Angela’s death.
This article is the earliest I could find that claimed that Angela’s death resulted from a
speeding truck driver running a red light at an intersection. You’ll notice that it,
too, reports her death as having happened a day earlier than the initial fire report.
I couldn’t tell you who the author “Mai Dinh” is, since the bio only links to this site.
And the only thing I found when I searched his face was this. Yep,
this is apparently Mai Dinh. I don’t mean to judge a book by its cover,
but I’ve never seen someone look more like a “Jeff” in my entire life.
It’s pretty strange if I do say so myself.
A columnist at the Epoch Times suggests that Caixin’s coverage of Chao’s death
may have been a message to certain people in the Jiang faction and many wealthy elites.
According to him, “The Hong Kong head of the [Bank of China], the founder of the Lenovo Group,
and members of the now-defunct Taishan Club, a chamber of commerce-type group that dominated
certain sectors of the Chinese economy and represented the wealthiest people in China,
could have been some of the intended recipients of such a message.”
We don’t know for sure, but given the Chao family’s connections to the Jiang faction,
it makes sense that there’s some sort of political game at play.
Stay tuned when more information comes out about it. Perhaps you’ll see it in
the People’s favorite soap opera, General Hostilities . I’m sure something will develop,
because this is even more suspicious than every death on CSI. Seriously,
procedural crime dramas are where it’s at! And now I’ve got a video I’d like to show you.
But first, China Uncensored wouldn’t be possible without viewers like you.
We rely on what I call our 50 cent army to keep the lights on and the show going.You
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And as a thank you, I’ll answer your questions at the end of these episodes.
Today’s question comes from MeatyGuy Question: how are you able to
keep CCP trolls out of the comment sections in your videos on YouTube?
Ohhh, an excellent question. I remember back in the day I used to get some pretty colorful
CCP trolls on the channel. I still do but overall, much less than I used.
Part of that I think is the audience of China Uncensored
is so amazing and robust that you guys just drown them out with your comments.
But a few years back, there was widespread coverage of Chinese trolls flooding social media.
And pretty much all the social media companies responded by deleting these
spam accounts. I think that went a long way in cleaning things up.
I also think in general, the Communist Party has moved away from the tactic. They have much
more sophisticated means of influencing Americans, like buying off politicians
and business leaders. Huh, not sure why I thought of that during this episode.
Anyway, thank you for your question and your longtime support MeatyGuy.
And now for that video I want to show you. It’s about why Nationalism is a good thing according
to the hit new game Helldivers 2. I’ve been hiding conversations like that that Youtube would
consider too controversial in gaming content on my new show Deep Thoughts while Gaming. Check it out.
And click on that orange button to support China Uncensored on Patreon. We can’t afford
to make the show without you. All it takes is a couple of bucks a month.
Once again, I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.