Lawmakers and academics in the Lone Star State are on edge after the mass-murdering Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was exposed trying to buy influence and shape the narrative at the University of Texas and other American educational institutions. Indeed, operating through front groups, the regime in Beijing is now making its influence felt in education worldwide. Critics say it must be exposed and stopped.
The latest shoe to drop in the controversy over Communist Chinese infiltration of U.S. schools came last week. Under pressure from lawmakers and pro-liberty voices, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it would not be accepting funding from the CCP-linked “China-United States Exchange Foundation,” a registered foreign agent known for trying to spread the murderous regime’s propaganda.
In a letter to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), UT-Austin President Greg Fenves vowed that the school would “ensure that the receipt of outside funding does not create potential conflicts of interest or place limits on academic freedom and the robust exchange of ideas.” Fenves expressed concerns that accepting funds from the CUSEF would, indeed, limit academic freedom and ideas.
In fact, even before lawmakers got involved, the CUSEF was already under fire by university faculty for its role in promoting Communist Chinese propaganda on campus at an event in November. And the outfit is funded by “a high-ranking Chinese government official with close ties to a sprawling Chinese Communist Party apparatus that handles influence operations abroad,” according to media reports. It is led by another ChiCom operative.
“The party’s united front activities are intended — still described in Maoist terms — to mobilize the party’s friends to strike at the party’s enemies,” explained Jamestown Foundation China Fellow Peter Mattis, a former U.S. intelligence analyst. “That has no place on a university campus in America.”
But while UT-Austin may have dodged a bullet, the Communist dictatorship enslaving China, which has murdered more people than any government in human history, remains highly active in seeking to influence American education. Indeed, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which feeds graduates into the federal bureaucracy, has already partnered with CUSEF, as have numerous other globalist institutions.
Beyond CUSEF, the Chinese regime has created and funded dozens of “Confucius Institutes” at universities across America, all staffed with loyal apparatchiks for Beijing. And at the University of California, Davis, Communist Chinese operatives even established a Party cell before it was disbanded over legal concerns. Whistleblowers say there are tens of thousands of Chinese spies throughout the country.
It’s bad enough to have homegrown communists brainwashing young Americans with their anti-freedom, anti-Christian, anti-Western propaganda. But to partner with known fronts for the most murderous government in human history is simply outrageous. U.S. universities should sever all ties with the butchers in Beijing or lose taxpayer funding.
