How Far Does China’s Influence at U.S. Universities Go? One Student Tried to Find Out.

Mattox, whose job as program director included inviting speakers to the CI, realized he could run an experiment — a kind of stress test of academic freedom at the institutes — to see how much influence Beijing really had over their programs. To do so, he invited James Millward, a respected historian of Central Asian history, to give a lecture at NMSU sponsored by the CI. (NMSU didn’t respond to requests for comment about most of the details in this story.) Over the past decade, Millward had become academia’s most outspoken critic of the CCP’s treatment of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority facing a brutal campaign of cultural annihilation, oppression and forced indoctrination in concentration camps in Xinjiang province. Before Mattox’s invitiation, he had lectured on the issue around the world, but never at a Confucius Institute. Mattox wondered what would happen if he did. Would someone from the CI — or above it — stop Millward from speaking?

In the weeks preceding the talk, Mattox and others posted the flyers around campus. They also distributed them digitally, including to the faculty adviser of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a group funded by the Chinese government with chapters at universities around the world. In the past decade, an increasingly political edge has taken hold of CSSAs, which tend to select for nationalist students, similar to the way College Democrats and College Republicans select for the most politically engaged — and often partisan — students in America. Many CSSAs have featured prominently in protesting invited campus speakers like the Dalai Lama, and a few universities have banned them, an approach that some foreign policy commentators have also endorsed. The NMSU CSSA’s increased nationalism has even turned off some students from China, Masson told me.

During Mattox’s first year working as the CI program director, in 2018, another incident unnerved him. At one point, Hanban sent the CI a thumb drive with budget forms to fill out and send back to Beijing. Inserting a flash drive from the Chinese government into NMSU’s computer system unnerved Mattox for cybersecurity reasons, and he wondered why Hanban couldn’t handle budget forms via email instead. He wasn’t sure whether he was being paranoid; the procedure, he thought, could also have been a harmless case of antiquated Chinese bureaucracy. For guidance, Mattox reached out to NMSU’s tech support, but it responded with a shrug and little else, he told me. Ultimately, he and other staff inserted the thumb drive in the NMSU computers and worked on filling out the forms.

Masson and the CSSA adviser told me they both talked to the CSSA students, stressing they should listen to different points of view. “This was 2020. Donald Trump was president. Visas are drying up. Chinese students are accused of being spies,” Masson said. She worried the CSSA students, whom she viewed as kids, might lose their visas if a protest became violent or disruptive. The dean of NMSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, also called her, Masson told me, concerned about public safety.

Soon, Mattox began to have awkward encounters. One day, at the office printer, he found piles of documents with CCP talking points on Xinjiang lying in the printer tray. So many had printed that the machine had run out of paper. Mattox refilled the machine, and then handed the full stack to Xue, who had made a rare appearance at the office that day. Later, Mattox returned to find three CSSA students and two Chinese language teachers huddling over the papers with Xue. The encounter seemed to embarrass them, Mattox said, and they soon retreated to another room without explaining what they intended to do with the pamphlets. Meanwhile, someone was tearing down flyers for the event around campus. Mattox and Masson decided to warn campus police about the potential for a disturbance at the talk.

In one sense, Millward’s talk passed the stress test; his lecture hadn’t been interrupted or censored. Chinese students and teachers had caused the fuss, not higher-ups from Hanban in Beijing, or even the Chinese Consulate. Given the siloed nature of China’s bureacucracy, though, it’s unclear whether a different consulate or official would have approved the talk. In a fragmented system, who picks up the phone can change things dramatically.

Given the divergence in behavior found among different CIs, directors, consular officials and university administrations, it’s almost impossible to draw large conclusions amid such murkinesss. At North Carolina State, in 2009, the university had canceled an invited talk from the Dalai Lama after objections from a CI director. But essentially, the opposite had happened at NMSU. How do you make sense of those different experiences? This makes it hard for federal legislation to manage effectively. If you’re a foreign policy adviser to the White House — or anyone thinking about Sino-U.S. relations, really — fragmentation and incoherence make it challenging to create broad recommendations. It’s tempting to throw up your hands.

In some ways, that’s what Mattox had done. After the pandemic began, he moved back to rural Maine, where he grew up — perhaps, he admitted to me, to retreat from all that murkiness. “It’s been interesting to me personally,” he told me, nearly a year after we’d first spoken, “to have been really invested in ‘What is this?’ ‘Let’s invite Millward!’ ‘Why can’t I see the MOU?’ and there’s all this emotional raising of stakes. And then it’s like, ‘You know what? I’m never going to understand China.’ … So you move to Maine, live next door to your sister. Call it good. Raise some kids. Grow your own vegetables.”

Long read, but worth it for FR scholars. In a way, 'they' have certainly thrown up their hands.

Notable in the wake of 2 years of virus distraction:

"Around 2018, at their American peak, the U.S. hosted roughly 100, out of 550 total [Confucious Institutes, aka CIs] around the world. According to a recent Senate investigation, the Chinese government spent over $150 million on CIs in America from 2006 to 2019."

and

"According to the National Association of Scholars, as of late February [2022], only 19 CIs were left in the United States, a more than 70 percent reduction from their peak just a few years ago."

Personally, I doubt these CCP efforts have just melted away.

The contrast between the ease with which a speaker like Millward can present in a university environment and the challenges a Conservative speaker faces (to state nothing of the efforts to impede such presentations, coupled with all variety of actions) is obviously notable. I fully expected resistance to Mattox's 'experiment', and did NOT expect that the number of Confucious Institutes had dropped so precipitously.

There is still no federal law which compels universities to make their contracts/MOUs with the Chinese government public.

The sidebar observation of the Chinese students printing off CCP propaganda in the copy center was never thoroughly analyzed by this biased author.

There was little analysis of the influence of the CSSA.

The use of USB drives to distribute CI documentation is a particularly troubling aspect revealed in this piece - coupled with the university IT department's cited indifference - which merits further investigation.

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The US should start prosecuting US citizens on the staffs of US colleges who act a agents of the PRC, for treason. China is no friend of the US at this time. Chinese students who act on behalf of the PRC should have their visas cancelled and be promptly deported.

Mattox had also invited everyone at the CI to a welcome dinner for Millward at his house the night before his lecture. As the day drew closer, Chinese staff began bowing out, telling Mattox they had other obligations. Not a single one ended up coming. “It was kinda hilarious,” Mattox told me. “Me, this white guy, ending up throwing a dinner party of Chinese food for almost no one from China at my house.”

When Millward went inside, the Chinese teachers from the CI left, along with all but one of the CSSA students and his faculty adviser. Of the over 60 people who attended the talk, they were the only two Chinese nationals in the audience.

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