While Joe Biden dismisses the economic and national security threat posed by China, his son has profited from financial ties to the communist regime, the New York Post editorial board argues in a Monday op-ed.

The Post’s editors highlight comments the former vice president and 2020 Democratic contender made at a campaign rally in Iowa last week dismissing the notion that “China is going to eat out lunch.”

“Come on, man,” Biden scoffed, adding that “they’re not bad people” and “they’re not competition for us.”

The Post op-ed counters Biden’s assertion with the fact that China is the world’s second-largest economy, and its mercantilist state-run economic system seeks to “dominate global markets” by “stealing intellectual property wherever it can and bribing and bullying other nations with its Belt and Road program to lock up markets across the globe, among other cheats.”

As for Biden’s “not bad people” claim, the Post points to the Beijing regime’s flagrant and ruthless oppression of its own people, including the forced internment of one million Uighur Muslims into re-education camps.

The Post then notes the close financial ties that the private equity firm of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has with China’s regime, as documented in Peter Schweizer’s bestselling book, Secret Empires.

Beijing is also busy making Big Brother a 21st century reality. Biden should know that, since his son Hunter is an investor in a firm, Bohai Harvest RST, that’s deeply involved in Face++ — a mobile phone app that Beijing built to spy on its own public. Indeed, the younger Biden has long been in deep with China’s “not bad” elite, as Peter Schweizer revealed in his book “Secret Empires.” Notably, Hunter’s private equity firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, swung a $1.5 billion investment deal with the state-owned Bank of China even as his then-vice president dad was engaged in high-end diplomacy with Beijing. Hmm. Maybe Joe Biden just doesn’t dare think about just what “bad folks” China’s rulers really are.

Hunter Biden’s Chinese investment firm, Bohai Harvest RST, obtains its financing from a subsidiary of the Communist government-owned Bank of China. As Breitbart’s John Hayward reported, Face++, the tech company Bohai Harvest RST invested in, “provided the facial-recognition software integrated into the smartphone app used by Chinese security forces to monitor the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang province. The app plugs into a massive central database that collects an incredible amount of information about Xinjiang citizens, ranging from how much electricity they use to their DNA.”

In a March interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham, Schweizer explained the troubling circumstances surrounding Hunter Biden’s lucrative bank deal with the Chinese government at a time when his father was negotiating U.S. policy with the regime.

“In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father,” Schweizer said. “His father meets with Chinese officials, he’s very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens [is] ten days after they return. And that’s when Hunter Biden’s small, private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with the Chinese corporation, with the government. And what people need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China. He has no background in private equity. The deal he got in the Shanghai free-trade zone, nobody else had — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Blackstone, nobody had this deal.”

“There’s no question when you chart what Joe Biden is doing with China — the meetings he’s having and the deals that his son is procuring at the same time — that they are buying off Biden through his son. I think it’s crystal clear,” Schweizer added.

In an interview last year with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Schweizer explained China’s foreign influence peddling tactic to get favorable treatment from American politicians.

“The Chinese government has figured out that the way to get favorable treatment from policymakers in Washington, DC, is by, basically, signing sweetheart deals with the children of politicians because they think by doing so, they’ll get better policy positions from our government,” Schweizer said. “And the history indicates in the Obama administration that that’s exactly what happens.”

Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute and a senior contributor-at-large for Breitbart News, wrote the bestselling 2015 exposé Clinton Cash, which is widely credited for its instrumental impact on Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign due to Schweizer’s copious documentation of the former secretary of state’s history of amassing wealth from donors seeking favorable actions from her State Department.

Schweizer’s research on Hunter Biden has already triggered Democratic strategists worried that Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign could suffer the same fate as Clinton’s. The similarities between the two candidates are hard to dismiss: both are establishment favorites, both are Obama administration alums, and both are tainted by accusations that they used their authority as government officials to benefit their family to the potential detriment of U.S. foreign policy.

Biden currently leads in the polls among the Democratic 2020 contenders. A Hill-HarrisX poll released Monday shows Biden with a commanding 32-point lead over his closest competitor, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The former vice president led the poll at 46 percent, followed by Sanders at 17 percent; South Bend, Indiana, mayor Peter Buttigieg at 8 percent; and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 7 percent.

Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125, which broadcasts live weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6-9:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.