dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 26, 1953, and immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old.[4] She is the eldest of six daughters of Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, a historian, and James S. C. Chao, who began his career as a merchant mariner and in 1964 founded the shipping company Foremost Maritime Corporation in New York City which developed into the Foremost Group. In 1961, Elaine, along with her mother and two younger sisters, came to the United States on a 37-day freight ship journey. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship.[5][6]

Chao attended Tsai Hsing Elementary School in Taiwan for kindergarten and first grade.[4][7] She attended Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, in Nassau County on Long Island[8] and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of

Chao received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1975. In the second semester of her junior year, she studied money and banking at Dartmouth College. She received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School in 1979.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation (2017–2021)

As Secretary of Transportation, Chao appeared in at least a dozen interviews with her father, James, a shipping magnate with extensive business interests in China.[65] The Transportation Department's inspector general cited numerous instances where Chao's office helped promote her family's shipping business.[66] The inspector general asked the Trump administration's Justice Department in December 2020 to consider a criminal investigation into Chao, but the DOJ refused.[66] Ethics experts said the appearances raised ethical concerns, as public officials are prohibited from using their office to profit others or themselves.[65] Federal disclosures cited by The New York Times revealed a gift to Chao and her husband Mitch McConnell from Chao's businessman father James, valued between $5 million and $25 million.

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The company her father founded (and which her sister, Angela, currently runs), The Foremost Group, has extensive ties to the Chinese state and Chinese elites.[67] It obtained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans from a bank owned by the Chinese state, has substantial interests tied to a major shipyard funded by and long-term contracts with a steel producer owned by the Chinese state. In what The Times described as "a rarity for foreigners", Angela and James Chao have served on the boards of a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder, and Angela has been on the board of the Bank of China, as well as the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (which was created by the government of China).[67]

From January 2018 to April 2019, 72% of the total tonnage shipped by Foremost was shipped to and from China. The Foremost Group has almost no footprint in the United States other than its headquarters in New York.[67] During the period when Chao appeared with her father at promotional events for the family company, the US Department of Transportation repeatedly sought to cut funding and loan guarantees for domestic American shipping companies, shipyards, and shipbuilders. These proposed budget cuts were rejected by Congress in a bipartisan fashion.[67] Chao's Department also sought for three years to prevent funding for a program that supports the viability of small domestic US shipyards, and a separate program that issues loan guarantees for the construction or reconstruction of ships with American registration.[67]

Chao pledged in 2017 to sell the stock she had earned while she was on the board of directors of Vulcan Materials, one of the largest suppliers of road-paving materials in the United States,[68][69] by April 2018.[68][70] After the Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets reported in late May 2019 that she was still holding the stock, worth $250,000 to $500,000, she sold it on June 3, 2019,[70][69] for a gain of $50,000 since April 2018.[70]

and as always… plenty of "conflicts of interest".