Comes now the tale of the Chinese government’s Confucius Institutes. The United States has designated the seventy-five US-based Confucius Institutes as “foreign missions.”
This designation requires the Confucius Institutes to register with the US government, to identify and register their staffs, and to follow the restrictions normally placed on a diplomatic embassy.
Haha, you stupid Americans.
The United States recently did the same thing with Chinese media outlets who the US contends are Chinese state organs advancing China’s global propaganda and exerting a malign influence on America. <<< Remember this phrase.
It is long overdue.
What is a Confucius Institute, Big Red Car?
The Chinese will tell you that their 550 worldwide Confucius Institutes are a peaceful, benign attempt to spread appreciation for Chinese culture, to support education, to teach the Chinese language, and to build healthy relations. Ahh, doesn’t that make you feel like holding a kitten and stroking its fur?
The Chinese will tell you a lot of things that will make your bullshit meter klang like a fire drill.
The United States government, the Central Intelligence Agency, will tell you a slightly different story:
1. The US believes that Confucius Institutes are an “entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on US campuses and K-12 classrooms.”
2. Pressed harder, the US will say they are soft porn influence and espionage operations and potential hotbeds for infiltrating the American academic world that are run right out of China intel, same guys who are stealing our secrets as fast as we make them.
3. There have been as many as 100 Confucius Institutes in the US, but some universities are shutting them down. Today there are 75 with four more on the chopping block.
4. A CI is a joint venture between an American host university and a Chinese partner university with that joint venture being supervised by the Hanban (Confucius Institutes Headquarters) — the Hanban is an agency of the Chinese government’s Education Ministry, part of their central government just like our own Department of Education.
5. Every aspect of the Confucius Institute is controlled from Beijing — meaning the government, meaning the Chinese Communist Party — including the teaching staff, the lesson plans, the events, the speakers, and the funding. It is being run by and from China.
This approach, of course, is anathema to the notion of “academic freedom” which is a core value in American education.
6. The Chinese admit to spending more than $150,000,000 on their US-based Confucius Institutes in the last decade, but the US government thinks they have spent a lot more. There is no transparency. Where does this money come from? China.
So what, Big Red Car?
Here are the issues, dear reader:
1. China is at war with the US on a number of different battlegrounds — cyber, space, trade, free passage through the South China Sea, and on America’s campuses.
American research on US campuses is a target of Chinese espionage and they have been apprehended stealing research at many universities at which they have Confucius Institutes — no coincidence.
2. We have allowed the fox to take up residence in the hen house.
Countries like Sweden in Europe have closed down all the Confucius Institutes in their country over their lack of academic freedom, the Chinese insistence on running things from Beijing, their lack of transparency, and their espionage operations run out of the same space. Hello, America!
3. I cannot quite find the high water mark on Confucius Institutes in the USA, but I do know there are currently 75 getting ready to be 71.
I also find that as many as 45 American universities have had a Confucius Institute and closed it down for reasons similar to what happened in Sweden.
Sweden had a CI for 10 years before wising up.
4. What is abundantly clear is that the Confucius Institutes advance the Chinese “story” whilst undermining American values and governing philosophy.
They do this to our impressionable college students and their forming brains.
Again, 45 US universities — not enormous bastions of American values in many instances — were grossed out enough to send their Confucius Institute packing.
5. University presidents are aghast at their inability to control staffing, subject matter, teaching, speakers, events on their own university grounds.
Bottom line it, Big Red Car
Sure, dear reader, let’s do that.
In the “How stupid do you think we are?” sweepstakes, the answer comes back — pretty damn stupid.
We have allowed a Beijing Communist Party sponsored and controlled entity to take root on our campuses and to spew Chinese propaganda whilst undermining American values. That is pretty damn stupid.
We have finally woken up and designated these soft porn espionage operations, Fifth Column ops, as foreign missions. The better course of action would be to throw them out, but that is not the American way.
Academia is, unfortunately, quite comfortable with Communism.
This is another lesson in how aggressive the Chinese are in spreading their toxic message to the world and we are drinking it like a bunch of winos.
But, hey, maybe this will wake us up, no?
Confucius say, “Keep an eye on those Communists, America. They are infiltrating you at every opportunity.”
