The Chinese Communist Party is Setting up Cells at Universities Across America

Kelleigh Nelson

I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. —Whittaker Chambers

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed. —Whittaker Chambers

God is on your side? Is he a conservative? The Devil is on my side, he’s a good communist. —Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader, to Winston Churchill at Tehran, November 1943

Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and China over a trade war, Covid-19, and threats of Chinese espionage and political turmoil in Hong Kong, critics worry that China uses their Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda on American college campuses. They are right to worry!

The University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana is not the only cell. Party cells have appeared in California, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The cells appear to be part of a strategy, now expanded under Chinese President Xi Jinping, to extend direct party control globally and to insulate students and scholars abroad from the influence of “harmful ideology,” (i.e. America’s constitutional freedoms) sometimes by asking members to report on each other’s behaviors and beliefs.

Two years ago, in the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress voted to strip colleges and universities of certain Pentagon grants unless they closed their Confucius Institutes which promote Chinese cells. Yet they are still flourishing on American campuses. Why? Because American universities have been looking to global sources to fill seats and find cash in the face of government cuts.

Chinese Gifts to American Universities

About 115 colleges received monetary gifts, contracts or both from sources in mainland China in recent years according to a Bloomberg analysis of U.S. government data. The leader was Harvard University, which pulled in $93.7 million, the majority as gifts. The University of Southern California and University of Pennsylvania were second and third. At the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, $27 million of the $35 million in contracts with Chinese sources is directed to a partnership between the engineering school and Zhejiang University to develop a program in Haining. Many small universities are also affected; Middle Tennessee State received $1.1 million. Link

In a recent WSJ article, U.S. Presses Universities on China Assets, a letter came from Keith Krach of the State Department urging university endowments to divest themselves of Chinese stocks and disclose Chinese assets held in their index funds.

China’s growing prominence in emerging-markets indexes has steered more money from U.S. institutions into China, putting many endowments at odds with the Trump administration’s increasingly confrontational stance toward Beijing. A growing chorus from DC has linked Chinese stocks to human-rights violations, such as the treatment of the Muslim Uighurs and slave trade, not to mention organ “harvesting” from inmates, and the building of China’s military via US dollars.

“China is a threat to the world in a sense, because they’re building a military faster than anybody and, frankly, they’re using U.S. money,” Trump told reporters at a news conference last September as he discussed global trade with Australia’s prime minister.

Higher education’s alarming willingness to accept money at the expense of principles that universities are ostensibly devoted to upholding clearly paves the way for socialist and communist indoctrination into America’s young minds. At a time when universities are as willing as ever to shield their charges from controversial viewpoints, i.e. conservatism, some nonetheless welcome foreign, communist propaganda—if the price is right, resulting in American universities becoming a soft target for China’s spies.

Confucius Institutes

The first Confucius Institute opened in South Korea in 2004. They quickly spread to Japan, Australia, Canada and Europe. The United States, China’s biggest geopolitical rival, has been a particular focus, fully 40 percent of Confucius Institutes are stateside. In addition to the Institutes at universities, Hanban also operates hundreds of so-called Confucius Classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The public-school system of Chicago, for example, has outsourced its Chinese program to Confucius Classrooms.

In 2017, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement to great fanfare. The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history.

More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually, and they have only been bolstered by growing interest in China among American college students. Hanban is an entity funded and run by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education. They also pay and screen who teaches the institute’s courses.

Confucius Institutes teach a very particular, Beijing-approved version of Chinese culture and history, one that ignores concerns over human rights, for example, and teaches that Taiwan and Tibet indisputably belong to Mainland China. Tiananmen Square is never mentioned, neither is the Hong Kong desire for freedom as espoused by America’s President Donald Trump.

The UK reports that on balance, given the evidence they’ve received, and while the teaching of Chinese language and culture should be welcomed and encouraged, Confucius Institutes as they are currently constituted threaten academic freedom and freedom of expression in universities around the world and represent an endeavor by the Chinese Communist Party to spread its propaganda and suppress its critics beyond its borders. America agrees with this assessment.

National Review reported that Alabama’s legislature is seeking to ban the Confucius schools in their state. The other 49 states need to follow suit.

China’s National Security Law

The number of Chinese students at U.S. colleges has almost tripled over a decade. China accounts for one-third of the 1.1 million foreign students, according to data from 2018-19 compiled by the Institute of International Education. Schools have been looking to global sources to fill seats and find cash in the face of government cuts.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) passed a national security law for Hong Kong that aims to quell anti-government protests following a year of unrest in Taiwan’s global financial hub. The effect of the new national security law is extending far beyond the territory to American college campuses.

The new national security law stemmed from the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and allows China to find and prosecute people for “sedition, subversion, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.” Under the national security law, suspects could be removed to mainland China, handled within the mainland’s criminal justice system and tried under mainland law. … Being charged with a national security crime on the mainland can lead to arbitrary or even secret detention.

Elite universities, Harvard and Princeton, are trying to protect students from China’s National Security Law. Professors are turning to code names, warning labels to protect students.

Classes at some elite universities will carry a warning label this fall: This course may cover material considered politically sensitive by China. And schools are weighing measures to try to shield students and faculty from prosecution by Chinese authorities.

Remember Professor Charles Lieber of Harvard who was working at Wuhan? It was shocking news that a faculty member and researcher was arrested for how he was helping out communist China. It’s not bad enough that we have millions of dollars flooding into America to set up propaganda institutes, now education is kowtowing to a communist regime. What next when it comes to a history class? Are we going to see professors delete parts of communist Chinese history that the regime in Beijing might find embarrassing, and the tens of millions killed in the name of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong?

Radical Indoctrination

The sad truth is universities are no longer institutions of higher learning. Conservatives have allowed them to become indoctrination mills for at least two generations. Remember what happened in 1968-1969 with the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow imperialism. It was led by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were trying to affect a Marxist revolution in America with their Chicago Days of Rage and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They failed then, but they are still at it. They became tenured professors in Chicago, they became high school teachers, and what did we do when these communist anarchists gained so much control? Nothing! In fact, America voted not once, but twice for Bill Ayers’ close friend.

The delayed reaction of home schooling was a band-aid on a heart attack. And now we’ve awakened to the fact that the latest survey from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 72 percent of American millennials would prefer to live in a socialist or communist America! This happened in our high schools and universities and now the same propaganda is taught to kindergarten children. It is indoctrination, not education.

Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by three avowed Marxist women, is in over 20 major city school districts in America. And we wonder where all the Antifa and BLM anarchists have come from…they were trained in America’s schools.

Seventy-five of the communist indoctrinating Confucius Centers are still on university campuses and even in kindergarten through twelve schools. Why are we not removing them right now? They are nothing more than propaganda operations and bases of communist operations for surveillance and most likely espionage.

The fact that we’ve seen communist propaganda worm its way throughout our universities has to be stopped, but first they’d have to fire 98 percent of their tenured professors. Yes, professors just like Bill Ayers…there are thousands of them, and now the high schools and grammar schools are inundated with them. Teachers have said they don’t want the children being taught via virtual learning because the parents might find out what their children are being fed. It’s not academic education, but communist propaganda.

China’s Authoritarian Regime

The communist regime of China is the largest in the world today. It has slave labor camps, it has forced organ harvesting for transplants; look at the video of the Uighurs being blindfolded and handcuffed and put on cattle trucks.

The relationship with China started in the Nixon administration with Mao Zedong, and now we have dictator Xi Jinping ruling the Chinese people and determined to take over Taiwan and make Chang Kai-Shek’s former freedom loving country a part of the People’s Republic of China.

At the rate of amalgamation with foreign nations, China’s hundred-year plan to become the world’s super power, started in 1949 by Mao Zedong, will reach its desired completion in 2049.

China declared war on America years ago by destroying our manufacturing. Oh, how the neo-cons promoted and loved it and told us the cost of products would be so much lower. Well, I can tell them my experience and it certainly isn’t good. I remember Walter Williams subbing for Rush Limbaugh and espousing the trade deals and how a $750 dollar recliner would now cost us $350. What he didn’t tell us is that it would last less than half the time. American made products from the late forties and fifties lasted for decades. Freezers and refrigerators lasted 45 to 50 years. Electric and gas stoves lasted forever, all you replaced were the coils. Not today. Everything today has a computer module in it that lasts only eight to ten years and you have to buy another at a cost that is more than triple what we used to pay for an item that lasted 35 to 55 years. In many cases, this ensures continued slave labor from China.

Conclusion

America shouldn’t be doing business with China at all. All manufacturing needs to be brought back to America and China needs to be cut off. It will take time, but it can be done and it will help our economy recover from the Wuhan virus. Clinton granted China “most favored nation” in 1994 and in 2002, President George W. Bush granted permanent trade status to Communist Red China. We lived happily without them before they became the “most favored nation” and we can live without them now. Dealing with evil will only beget evil.

China has not removed Xi Jinping from office, they have not apologized to the world for Covid-19, and they have not sought a new direction for their nation. They are a nation bent by their leaders on the control of the entire world and the domination of every state by their Marxist totalitarian leaders.

As for their infiltration into education, the only way we can get rid of China’s dominance in America’s higher education is to keep Donald Trump as our president.

E-Mail Kelleigh Nelson: proverbs133@bellsouth.net