Discovering The Financial Ties

The Epoch Times is reporting today that Senators have introduced a bill that would force American colleges to disclose their financial ties with the Chinese regime, including its Confucius Institutes, in order to qualify to receive international students. In view of recent arrests of college professors who were working for the Communist Chinese government, I think this is probably a good idea.

The article reports:

The bill comes amid heightened scrutiny on the Chinese regime’s influence on American campuses. A 2020 investigation by the Department of Education found that universities received almost $1.5 billion in contracts and gifts from China from 2014 to 2020.

“The communist regime poses a serious threat to U.S. research as well as undue influence on our college campuses,” Grassley said in a May 5 statement.

One of the vehicles of Beijing’s influence is Confucius Institutes. Billed as Chinese language and culture centers, the institutes have been sharply criticized for promoting Beijing’s propaganda and suppressing academic freedom in universities across the country.

From 2006 to 2019, the Chinese regime poured more than $158 million to about 100 U.S. universities through Confucius Institutes, according to a 2019 U.S. Senate subcommittee on investigations report (pdf). There are currently 47 Confucius Institutes in the country, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

“This legislation will shine a light on any funny business that the Chinese government is trying to play on our campuses under the guise of Confucius Institutes and any financial ties between our educational institutions and the communist regime,” Grassley said in the statement.

The proposed legislation would effectively codify a Trump-era policy proposal that was automatically rescinded when President Joe Biden took office because the proposed rule not been formalized through regulatory processes before the end of former President Donald Trump’s term.

The article concludes:

The Senate in March passed a bill that would force host universities to take full control of Confucius Institutes or lose their federal funding.

In the past few years, dozens of Confucius Institutes have closed down around the country. But in their place, many universities have simply entered into new rebranded partnerships with the Chinese regime under a different name, according to the NAS.

This bill is definitely needed.

Don’t Pay Attention To The Battleships

On Friday The Center for Security Policy posted an article about the Biden administration’s relationship with China. Things are not always what they appear to be.

The article reports:

Anyone who has seen a magic show understands the principle of sleight of hand. While the audience is looking one way, the real action is happening elsewhere. There is no real magic involved. It is all a trick.

You can see this technique on display in the actions of the Biden administration right now vis a vis China. Two U.S. carrier battle groups are in the vicinity of the contested South China Sea. Every day their presence is appropriately trumpeted through the mass media outlets that function as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. The implication is clear. Joe is no Communist lackey. He can get tough with Xi if he has to.

Meanwhile, back home, something very different is happening.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses propaganda and influence operations as a means of projecting its power and weakening its enemies. Chief amongst the targets for these kinds of operations is the United States. These operations are not run on some kind of ad hoc basis. They are coordinated and directed at a national level by the CCP’s United Front Work Department.

The article reminds us that the goals of the United Front system are undermining social cohesion, exacerbating racial tension, and influencing politics. It is designed to destroy China’s enemies from within. Sound familiar?

The article continues:

Chinese “Confucius Institutes” on dozens of U.S. campuses are part of the United Front Work Department. These institutes are present today in some 500 K-12 schools and 65 colleges in the United States. The institutes are staffed by Chinese nationals. They exist to feed students and faculty positive images of Communism and the Chinese Communist Party.

Confucius Institutes are run by the government of China. They are propaganda arms of the CCP operating on our soil and shaping the minds of our young people who then go on to careers in business, academia, and the government. Criticism of the Confucius Institutes in the United States has been appropriately intense in recent years. Many colleges have forced them off-campus.

In its last days, the Trump administration proposed a rule that would have required American schools and universities to disclose their partnerships with Confucius Institutes. China is in the process of rebranding its Confucius Institutes and looking for ways to continue pumping propaganda into the minds of our young people without being detected by American authorities. The rule proposed under President Trump would have gone a long way toward blocking those efforts and illuminating what the CCP was up to.

No more. The Trump proposal was withdrawn from consideration on January 26, 2021. No explanation by the Biden administration was given, but then none was really necessary.

The article cites the relationship between Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement that Joe Biden established in 2018 at the University of Pennsylvania. The Center is largely funded by the Chinese Communist Party and is part of the United Front.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. This does not look good for America.

Perspective Matters

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about President Biden’s recent call to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

The article notes:

Chinese media outlets praised President Joe Biden on Wednesday for what they characterized as a respectful, “positive” call between the head of state and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

The Xinhua news agency and the Global Times state propaganda newspaper both highlighted the timing – on the eve of the Lunar New Year – as a gesture of goodwill from the new presidential administration. The former expressed hope that, after President Donald Trump’s tenure featured policies designed to contain the influence of the Chinese Communist Party abroad and frequent condemnations of its human rights atrocities, America under Biden would return to the “right track” of policy favorable to Beijing.

I am all in favor of diplomacy and getting along with everyone, but let’s take a look at what the “right track” might be in the eyes of China. On February 9th, The Washington Examiner posted an article with the following headline, “Biden withdraws Trump rule on schools disclosing ties to Chinese state-run Confucius Institutes.” The Biden administration has put the sale of TikTok on hold. The Trump administration was working to sell the company to a majority-owned American company due to national security concerns.

The article at Breitbart notes:

Chinese media coverage of the phone call, the first between the two since Biden became president, contrasted considerably with American mainstream media claims that Biden had “pressured” Xi on issues such as the genocide of the Uyghur people in western Xinjiang or the repression of political dissidents in Hong Kong.

“The Spring Festival is a very important holiday for the Chinese,” Xinhua’s coverage noted. “The telephone conversation between the two heads of state on the eve of the Lunar New Year marks a new starting point for direct communication, symbolizes goodwill, and conforms to the expectations of the Chinese and Americans, as well as those of the wider global community.”

The article concludes:

Mainstream American outlets did not convey in their coverage of the call a sense that Biden had been overly effusive in sharing goodwill or “respect,” as their Chinese counterparts did. The New York Times painted the call as aggressive, leading with the claim that Biden raised “concerns about Beijing’s aggressive policies abroad and human rights abuses at home,” which Chinese outlets largely disregarded. The newspaper nonetheless noted that Biden has “said that he believed he had spent more time with Mr. Xi than he has with any other world leader.”

CNN similarly claimed that Biden “call[ed] China out on a range of issues related to its nefarious use of technology, unfair trade and human rights abuses,” citing unidentified sources within the Biden administration.

NBC News, citing the White House, also led its coverage with an emphasis on Biden mentioning the existence of human rights problems in China.

Somehow I think the media has sold us out.

Allowing The Trojan Horse Inside The Gates

Yesterday The Daily Caller reported the following:

The Biden administration quietly withdrew a rule proposed by the Trump administration that would have required American schools and universities to disclose their partnerships with Confucius Institutes, which some U.S. officials allege are front groups for Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

The Trump administration submitted a proposed rule to the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 31, 2020, entitled “Establishing Requirement for Student and Exchange Visitor Program Certified Schools to Disclose Agreements with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms.”

Around 500 K-12 schools and 65 colleges in the U.S. have partnerships with the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, a U.S.-based affiliate of the Beijing-based Confucius Institute Headquarters. The institute, also known as Hanban, is affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.

The rule was withdrawn on January 26th.

The article concludes:

In August, the Trump administration labeled the Confucius Institutes U.S. Center a “foreign mission” of the Chinese Communist Party, a designation typically used for foreign embassies and consulates.

The Foreign Missions Act applies to entities that are “substantially owned or effectively controlled by a foreign government.”

Trump administration officials said that the Chinese government used the Confucius Institutes as part of its propaganda and influence efforts in the U.S.

Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, who spearheaded many of the Trump administration’s China initiatives, said on Aug. 13 that the Confucius Institute was “an entity controlled by the PRC that advances Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms.”

The Confucius Institute U.S. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One Congressman recently stated that it was going to take 20 years to purge
America of domestic terrorists (such as Trump supporters). Isn’t it an incredible coincidence that it will take about 20 years to brainwash the younger generation into ideas compatible with the values of Chinese communism?

Who Is Paying Our Colleges?

On Friday, The National Review posted an article titled, “U.S. Colleges Have Accepted $6 Billion in Undisclosed Donations from Foreign Governments, DOE Probe Finds.” Great. No wonder we are sending children to college respecting America and getting them backl home hating America.

The article reports:

The Department of Education has discovered at least $6 billion in unreported donations to American universities from adversarial foreign nations, Townhall reported on Friday.

The DoE revealed its updates in a May 19 letter to Congress and a subsequent briefing to several ranking House Republicans who are conducting an investigation into the foreign funding of U.S. educational institutions.

The investigation was spurred by increasing reports of Chinese funding at U.S. educational institutions, including the prevalence of Confucius institutes on U.S. campuses. Confucius institutes are Chinese-government funded centers which ostensibly promote Chinese language and culture, but which U.S. agencies have warned spread propaganda for China’s government.

“Some [Institutions of Higher Education] leaders are starting to acknowledge the threat of foreign academic espionage and have been working with federal law enforcement to address gaps in reporting and transparency,” the letter from the DoE’s Office of the General Counsel reads. “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision-making, mission, and values of too many institutions.”

The letter also states, “Certain institutions have yet to produce requested emails, metadata, and other information regarding business relationships with, and faculty funding from, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Russian foreign sources.”

The DoE had already announced its own investigation into foreign funding of U.S. universities in February. Besides China, officials are looking into funding from Qatar, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

America is a unique experiment. We have survived past the normal 200 years that a democracy can exist without self-destructing. The main reason for that is that we are a representative republic–not a democracy. But we need to remember that our freedom is always one generation away from being lost. If we continue to mis-educate our children from kindergarten through college, we will lose our freedom. We definitely need to remove foreign money from all of our education–from kindergarten through college. America is quite capable of teaching its own children and educating them on the value of their freedom and the great gift this country is.