China Runs the US Universities By James Reed
The US election has unleashed interest in the extent to which China interferes in the running of most important aspects of society. The debate has been quiet in Australia, with few mainstream politicians taking hold of this hot potato, but in the US there have been major figures grasping it, especially on the China role in the universities. Here in Australia, Chinese students are a sacred cash cow, so we are not seeing the needed debate. Yet, in the cities, near the evil universities, the student residential buildings still go up.
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday accused U.S. universities of caving to Chinese pressure to blunt or bar criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. The attack, which included identifying two university administrators by name, comes as the Trump administration seeks to cement its anti-China policies before leaving office in January.
Pompeo took aim at universities across the U.S., claiming they refused to address the Trump administration’s concerns about China’s attempts to influence students and academics. He specifically called out the president of MIT, alleging he refused to host Pompeo’s speech, and a senior official at the University of Washington over a case involving a Chinese student.
Both universities swiftly and emphatically denied the charges.
Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s tough stance on China in remarks at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The speech came less than a month before Georgia’s two critical run-off races that will determine control of the Senate.
“Americans must know how the CCP is poisoning the well of our higher education for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and our national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, we’ll get schooled by Beijing,” he said. “They know that left-leaning college campuses are rife with anti-Americanism, and present easy target audiences for their anti-American messaging.”
Pompeo has been a champion of the administration’s hardline stance on Chinese policies in Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, the western region of Xinjiang and the South China Sea, and he has made similar pronouncements before. He has imposed multiple layers of sanctions on Chinese officials; restricted visas for Chinese diplomats, journalists and academics; and lobbied other countries to reject Chinese high-tech communications.
But his comments on Wednesday were striking in that he named the two American university officials as complicit in alleged Chinese malfeasance.
Pompeo said he had initially wanted to give his Georgia Tech speech at MIT, but the president of the renowned scientific institution, Rafael Reif, had turned him down for fear of offending Beijing.”
One related aspect of this is that Chinese communism, has implicitly embedded itself in Western environmentalism:
“Western environmentalists are the useful idiots of the Chinese Communist Party, says a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
China’s green credentials are often praised by Western environmental groups who apparently believe that China is serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions.
But according to a report by long-time China watcher Patricia Adams these groups are merely the dupes of communist propaganda:
“Like all western NGOs, green groups are only allowed to operate in China so long as they bite their tongues and toe the party line. But Beijing is also able to influence their behaviour through funding bodies like Energy Foundation China, a US-based body that distributes money from American billionaire foundations.”
Western green groups have effectively become mouthpieces for President Xi, says Adams, an economist and the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based NGO that has been involved in the Chinese environmental movement since its beginnings in the mid-1980s:
“They praise the scale of Chinese ambition on climate change, while paying lipservice in criticizing China’s massive coal expansion. Meanwhile, the greens turn a blind eye to the obvious; China does not honour its international agreements and has no intention of reducing fossil fuel consumption, quite the opposite. While the world has awakened to China’s abuses, western environmentalists are silent,” says Adams. “China plays them as useful idiots.”
This page from the Environmental Defense Fund embodies this naivety. It’s titled ‘Why China is at the centre of our climate strategy’.
I have always noted the irony of people like princess Greta Thunberg always going on about an environmental apocalypse, but she never mentions the world’s major carbon polluter, China. Go figure.
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