By Kyle Smith
Sunday, April 05, 2020
The Chinese Communist Party’s Long March through the
Institutions has been proceeding right under our noses, and it’s high time we
applied serious and penetrating scrutiny to the Party’s practices as they
relate to our own institutions. A case in point is the piles of money the
ChiComs have been pouring into U.S. colleges and universities without anyone
seeming to care. As Peter Wood, president of the National Association of
Scholars, points out, “The dark money in politics is a fraction of the dark
money in education.” Though federal law mandates that gifts of $250,000 or more
by foreign entities to American universities must be disclosed, this rule is
easily circumvented, and for many years there has been little attempt at
enforcement anyway. In the past year the U.S. Department of Education has
identified $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funding. Wood
believes that Harvard and Yale have, by themselves, raked in billions of
unreported foreign gifts and contracts in recent years. China isn’t doing this
as a warm gesture of friendship. It wants something in return. It need hardly
be noted that the interests of the Chinese Communists diverge significantly
from the interests of a liberal democracy.
China’s innocent-sounding Confucius Institute, which
markets itself as a benign means of encouraging the study of Chinese culture
and language in the U.S., is, of course, a tool of the Party via the government
agency Hanban. The idea is to get U.S. universities dependent on ChiCom money
and then slowly exert influence. Having a university department on your payroll
is an excellent way to make it do your bidding. A few senators, notably Josh
Hawley and Ted Cruz, have been raising the alarm about what’s happening, but,
as Wood notes in the Spectator U.S., the extent to which China’s rulers
have been infiltrating our most prestigious institutions is disturbing.
Our friends on the left say unabashedly that a crisis
should not be allowed to go to waste. The Wuhan virus should inspire all of us
in the West to rethink the degree to which we want the Chinese Communists
steering our culture, our politics and our economy. Our friends on the left
will complain that applying scrutiny to what the Chinese Communists are doing
to our country is racist. Let them.
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