Dear Editor: China Funds Universities

Dear Editor,

As Vladimir Lenin said: control education, control the future. Well, it was something to that effect.

Other nations understand this and use it to some extent in the United States. But no one has influenced education in the U.S. as China has. And yet most parents in America are unaware. A 2021 Lawfare Project poll notes that almost 60% do not know that China and other countries are major contributors to colleges.

In 2021, the University of Houston received $32 million dollars from the Dalian Maritime University, which is run by the Ministry of Transport of the People’s Republic of China.

The University of Illinois at Urbana received $26 million dollars directly from the Chinese Communist Government.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) received $14 million dollars from unknown Chinese entities. Between 2015 and 2020, Harvard received $101,177,826 and Yale received $22,049,302 in anonymous funding from China, Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Duke University runs a “joint campus” with China’s Wuhan University (there’s that name again). To show their appreciation for working with an American University, Wuhan University has repeatedly carried out cyber attacks against us for the Chinese Military.

Northwestern and California Irvine received more than $4 million dollars in 2020 from entities controlled by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Chinese defense contractor that uses stolen designs to build Chinese fighter aircraft.

Ian Easton, senior director for the Project 2049 think tank, told the Free Beacon, “The CCP’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army, has access to any and all information collected by Chinese entities at American universities, Xi Jingpin’s military-civil fusion strategy has removed even the thin cloak of plausible deniability Chinese companies and other civilian organizations previously could hide behind.”

FBI Director Wray stated, “The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China, If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data. We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. The Chinese government is engaged in a broad, diverse campaign of theft and malignant influence, and it can execute that campaign with authoritarian efficiency. They’re calculating. They’re persistent. They’re patient. And they’re not subject to the righteous constraints of an open, democratic society or the rule of law.”

Wray feels that China has been exploiting the American system’s openness, making everyone from top government politicians to upcoming staff and students susceptible to Chinese influence.

To know the exact amount Universities have received from adversarial nations is impossible since the reporting system did not go online until 2020. But much like our southern border, the Biden administration is ignoring it.

The Chinese Communist Party also tracks its citizens at American universities. Especially pesky troublemakers. Dissenters on U.S. campuses live under threat from the Chinese government. In one instance, a graduate student at Purdue University posted a message on a dissident website applauding the bravery of the students killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. His parents called from China, crying, and said China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its civilian spy agency, had warned them of his actions. “They told us to make you stop or we are all in trouble,” his parents told him. Other students at Purdue started harassing him, calling him a CIA agent and saying they would report him to the embassy and MSS. The student had also planned to speak at an event for the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Despite his hesitancy, he participated in rehearsals for it. The MSS revisited his parents, and he decided not to speak at the event.

“I think that the Zoom rehearsals were known by the Chinese Communist Party,” he told ProPublica. “I think some of the Chinese students in my school are CCP members. I can tell they are not simply students. They could be spies or informants.”

The Chinese Communist Party also has several programs in our schools. The Confucius Institute, the Thousand Talents program, and Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) form part of Beijing’s sprawling overseas influence activities run under the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD). The Party unit coordinates thousands of groups to carry out foreign political influence operations, suppress dissident movements, gather intelligence, and facilitate the transfer of technology to China.

No problems there, right?

So... There is a ton more to put in here. When you google China/ American education, the amount of information is overwhelming and comes off like a novella. This is all for today, more next time.

I hope you find this informative and that it will spur you to find out more.

Jim Buterbaugh

Whitehall, Montana