Above all, the company that Chao ran until 2018 and is now run by Chao’s sister, Angela, received hundreds of millions of dollars in loan commitments from a bank administered by the Chinese government to build new bulk cargo ships at Shipyards owned by the Chinese government. In January 2017, Angela Chao became director of the Bank of China, one of the country’s four largest creditors.
Planning for the trip to China included discussions about a meeting with Chao and a “former senior Chinese official” who had been one of his schoolmates and now lived in Shanghai, said the inspector general’s report. The report does not mention the name of the former government official, but Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president, attended the same university as Chao in the late 1940s in Shanghai. That school – Shanghai Jiao Tong University – was on the planned itinerary.
Mr. Chao met regularly with Mr. Jiang on his travels to China. During Jiang’s tenure at the helm of the Communist Party from 1989 to 2002, the two met at least six times, The Times reported in 2019. Notably, Jiang received Chao and his wife in a villa within the Communist Party leadership in Beijing in late August 1989, near the site of the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, which took place less than three months earlier.
Ms. Chao’s trip was canceled just a few weeks before the scheduled time – and after the airline tickets were purchased – when State Department officials raised their own ethical concerns.
Four days before Rosen took part in the discussion on ethical issues, Ms. Chao was present with her father and sister at the Harvard Club in New York to sign a contract with a Japanese shipbuilder to deliver two freighters to Foremost, according to with a report by a Chinese news media company.
In 2018, members of the Chao office staff helped edit chapters of a Chao biography, although an “official acknowledged that the publication had no specific link to the DOT,” said the inspector general’s report. After helping to edit the book, Ms. Chao’s team built a marketing strategy targeting journalists to “build the profile of Dr. Chao” and other organizations like Columbia University and the shipping industry’s Lloyd’s List to promote their family.
Steven G. Bradbury, who was the general counsel for the Department of Transportation at the time, told investigators he was “aware of the matter”, reported on the family book the agency’s employees had worked on, “but it would not be appropriate for the secretary to direct subordinates to work on these publications. “