Chinese Communist Party stealing secrets, harassing students on US campuses
The United States is quite literally funding its own potential destruction
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}This week, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will be in Boston to discuss a difficult truth: for decades, the CCP has exploited the openness of our academic institutions to fuel the PRC’s military modernization and obtain American technology to enhance its repressive surveillance state.
The Chinese government is not shy about this. They even have a phrase for it: "picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China."
These are not empty words. Here is what we have seen the CCP do:
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Universities need to rethink how they collaborate with CCP and PLA-affiliated researchers and institutions. (Getty)
The Chinese Communist Party operates nearly 500 foreign talent programs. Its members are contractually obligated to return to China with secrets and expertise, gained in foreign universities and labs, in order to drive military modernization and other technological development.
According to the Australian Policy Institute, over the past 15 years, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) "has sponsored over 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad" in order to acquire technology and technological know-how to modernize the PRC’s military.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Research conducted by Strider Technologies has uncovered over 160 researchers that, after conducting sensitive military research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, returned to China and drove key breakthroughs in the PLA’s military modernization, including in hypersonics, deep-earth penetration and unmanned autonomous vehicles.
Other examples were found in a 2020 unclassified analysis of resumes and research papers, conducted at the Department of Defense, which revealed more than 100 Chinese students associated with blacklisted entities (military, intelligence, etc.) conducting research at four universities in the Washington, D.C., area, each with dozens of DOD research grants.
This needs to stop. Universities need to rethink how they collaborate with CCP and PLA-affiliated researchers and institutions – and Congress should restrict DOD-funded research collaborations, including in fundamental research, with institutions that we know are affiliated with the PLA.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}THE NEXT BATTLEFIELD WITH CHINA IS THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
No American university should help the CCP develop or acquire technologies that strengthen the CCP’s techno-totalitarian surveillance state or the PRC’s military or intelligence capabilities. Nor should their endowments continue to invest in Chinese companies that participate in the Uyghur genocide, as well as those that produce the CCP’s military aircraft, its aircraft carriers, its aerospace technology, its artillery shells and even its advanced nuclear technology.
We are quite literally funding our own potential destruction – and it needs to stop.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}If you’re an endowment manager, I would think very hard about your fiduciary obligations - if you’re thinking about entering these problematic Chinese investments now, how are you going to exit them? During the lifespan of those investments, I promise you Congress is going to act.
We are also concerned about money coming in from China and what it buys. We need to ensure that Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires universities to disclose foreign money, is enforced.
American universities have reported receiving more than $1 billion in donations from China since 2013, but that figure is likely a vast understatement as universities routinely fail to report foreign money, and the PRC increasingly uses American 501c(3)s to avoid detection.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}CHINESE OFFICIAL WHO PRAISED CCP, DENIED UYGHUR GENOCIDE VISITS WITH THREE MORE TOP UNIVERSITIES
And as a Uyghur scholar named Rayhan Asat told ProPublica, at American universities, "It is easier to take a stance against the United States than against China… They are self-censoring themselves in order to recruit Chinese students for economic benefit."
American universities must step up when it comes to protecting their students, especially those who herald from China. The Chinese Communist Party cannot be allowed to compromise academic freedom, undermine our values, or expand their Orwellian police state to U.S. soil. But that’s exactly what the CCP is doing.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}I have met dozens of Chinese students studying in America who have shared story after story of being harassed, followed and physically attacked for simple offenses like hanging posters or organizing panels – anything at all that strays from the CCP party line.
For a comment about Taiwan or a rally for Hong Kong, their relatives in China are terrorized by police. Many students never return home, afraid of what awaits. Among those who do, some are detained. They are surveilled on U.S. campuses, electronically tracked, reported back to Chinese Security Services, often at the hands of the roughly 150 Chinese Students and Scholars Associations on American campuses.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}While these groups ostensibly exist to support the unique needs and communities of Chinese students studying abroad, in practice, they double as a mechanism for the CCP to restrain the free speech and liberty of the same students they are supposed to serve.
Many CSSAs "officially describe themselves as under the ‘guidance’ or ‘leadership’ of the (Chinese) embassy" and a 2018 report found that the Georgetown CSSA received roughly half its total budget from the Chinese government. The University of Tennessee’s CSSA mandated that members "protect the motherland’s honor and image" and required students from Taiwan to support "national reunification."
Tellingly, as more attention has focused on the state-supported nature of CSSAs, many chapters have taken to deleting, obfuscating or otherwise concealing their financial connections to the CCP.
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Policymakers should set a clear standard: organizations designed to support the unique needs of foreign students are good. Organizations that act under the control, influence or direction of adversarial governments are not. Policymakers should prohibit the operation of any student group that receives funding or direction from governments like China’s that we know seek to repress students on American campuses.
We must decide: Will America remain a haven from persecution or become a hunting ground for authoritarians? We cannot allow foreign students to be attacked, on American soil, for believing in – and exercising – fundamentally American values.
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