Colleges must sever ties with Chinese propaganda institutes

Relations between the U.S. and China have broken down in recent months over the coronavirus, rising trade tensions and China’s ramped-up aggression in the South China Sea. It’s time to admit a new Cold War is upon us, and that we need to take seriously China’s attempts to infiltrate American college campuses in order to propagandize, steal intellectual property and monitor what is going on in the United States.

Events that took place Jan. 28 in Boston serve as a both an example and warning.

On that day, the FBI arrested Dr. Charles Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department, for concealing funding from China that was paid in exchange for enticing other scientists to share their expertise with the Communist nation. U.S. prosecutors also announced the indictment of Yanqing Ye, a student in Boston University’s physics department, actually a lieutenant in China’s People’s Liberation Army, for carrying out numerous spying assignments on BU’s campus.

It would be naïve to think that only the most blatant attempts at foreign spying are the ones we need to be on guard against.

The most determined attempt by the Chinese to establish a presence on American campuses is the most obvious: Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, which pose as centers for language and cultural exchange. There are about 80 active Confucius Institutes in the U.S., including at such prestigious campuses as Stanford, Tufts and Columbia, according to the National Association of Scholars.

Last week, dozens of leading members of the College Republican National Committee, which I chair, joined with College Democrats to call for the permanent closure of Confucius Institutes on all U.S. campuses. While we may not agree on much politically, young Republicans and Democrats recognize the immense threat to academic freedom posed by these Trojan horses of the Chinese Communist Party .

Confucius Institutes function as a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Their main purpose is to promote the Chinese state agenda. Through their activities on campus, they intimidate Chinese students, engage in disinformation campaigns and censor issues sensitive to the Chinese government.

In November 2011, Li Changchun, then the Chinese government’s top official for propaganda, explained at a speech in Beijing that Confucius Institutes make “an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in 2018 that the FBI was “watching warily” and that Confucius Institutes are “just one of many tools that (the Chinese) take advantage of.”

While some colleges have distanced themselves from these propaganda outlets, many others remain financially conflicted because of the large sums they receive for hosting Confucius Institutes. A 2019 staff report from the U.S Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations stated the Chinese government spent $158 million on Confucius Institutes in the United States alone.

Awareness is growing. Last week, House Republicans sent a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos decrying this effort by the Chinese to engage in “foreign academic espionage” through the funding of Confucius Institutes on college campuses in the U.S. and around the world. So far in 2020 alone, flagship public universities in Delaware, Kansas, Missouri, Maryland and Arizona have cut ties.

The Chinese government’s flagrant attempt to coerce and control discussion at universities in the U.S. and abroad is a real threat to the free exchange of ideas, particularly now, as China tries to deflect blame over its botched handling of the coronavirus and its origins in Wuhan.

Now is the time for colleges to take a stand for academic freedom by terminating their agreements to host Confucius Institutes.