Beijing's Outposts: Chinese Propaganda Centers Alive and Well at American Universities

PJ Media ^ | 05/12/2020 | Jeff Reynolds

[SeekAndFind]

As the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic continues to cause misery across the globe, it’s important to know how China spreads its propaganda. American universities have continued to ignore warnings by U.S. intelligence officials about Confucius Institutes. These centers, funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), continue to operate on dozens of campuses across the United States, despite Congressional actions to block domestic funding to them. Intelligence officials say they are little more than propaganda centers operating to produce positive news about the CCP.

Campus Reform published a report and interactive map showing where the Confucius Institutes still operate:

CIA reports obtained by The Washington Free Beacon further revealed, “The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light. It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

While legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018 resulted in about a dozen U.S. colleges shuttering Confucius Institutes on campus, those closures were largely the result of their loss of funding, rather than concerns for the country’s national security.

And now, nearly two years after that legislation became law, more than 75 Confucius Institutes are still in operation in the U.S., most of them on college campuses. From Maine to Florida to Kansas to California, these centers claim to educate American students about Chinese language and culture, and administrators who run the campuses on which they operate appear to believe the same country that claims to have fewer coronavirus deaths than the U.S,

[Paladin2]

[fuente]

We are NOT serious about taking it to the ChiCom Party propaganda.

[Savage Beast]

Read the very good and marvellously entertaining Kevin Kwon trilogy: Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems, and reflect on the anti-American behaviour of US Democrat politicians and their fellow travellers, some of whom are heavily invested in China!

Their behaviour takes on an entirely new dimension! New, dangerous, and frightening!

Their determination to destroy President Trump and prevent him from exposing the truth also become far more clear! And far more alarming!

The USA, the American People, and the American Dream are in GRAVE DANGER!

President Trump recognised it. He is aware of it. He is determined to save the USA and reveal the truth. This is why they hate him and must stop him at all costs!

Millions in American cannot imagine the threat, cannot believe it, and refuse to acknowledge it. They will, sooner or later, one way or another.

The threat is real!

Americans MUST rally behind President Trump and give him their full support.

[Savage Beast]

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Millions of Americans--including journalists, politicians, professors, and intelligentsia--who love the USA are asleep at the wheel!
WAKE UP!

[Rurudyne]

Communists propagandists have been a thing on the Left since the first Useful Idiots praised the USSR and tried to roll back any effort to restrict communist associations in this country.

The modern Left is the people HUAC was trying to prevent.

Bill Ayers may as well be their poster child for how they love, love, love domestic terrorist who were radical Left wingers back in the day.

[deadrock]

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

[MarkL]

At SUNY Stony Brook in 1988, I took a 300 level digital logic class, taught by a Chinese vising professor.

His accent made his lectures almost unintelligible. There were times where his lectures would lapse into Chinese, and it would take a few seconds before we realized it, and had to ask him to repeat what he said in English. Chinese students realized that his English language skills were so bad that they would ask questions in Chinese, and he would answer their questions in Chinese as well.

This was a required class for both the EE and CS degree programs, and every native English speaker (including a number of Indian students) wound up dropping the class. Because Stony Brook is a research institution (particularly in Physics and Medicine, there was a Nobel Prize winner in physics on staff at the time) the university administration really didn’t care.

Mark

[rlmorel]

I am just finishing up "Stealth War" by General Robert Spaulding (Ret.) who was the Cyber Warfare specialist for the JCS, and while the book is depressing, it is educational, extremely informative, and anger inducing.

He spends a chapter or so talking about the "Confucius Institutes" and it is disturbing.

Just an excerpt:
"...Since 2004, the Chinese government has been funding Confucius Institutes (CIs) at American universities. The vast majority of these centers provide Mandarin language instruction for these schools and are staffed with teachers from China. While the institutes also frequently offer cultural programming and other services, including outreach classes for K–12 students in local schools, the big win for most colleges is a robust language program that administrators can effectively outsource with minimal expense.

Officially, China insists that the CIs are nonprofit public institutions devoted to promoting Chinese language and culture in foreign countries. And that party line has been effective. The lure of low-cost quality language instruction has been a strong selling point. There were more than ninety CIs in place at American colleges and universities by 2017 and more than five hundred around the globe.

But the party line is a bunch of b.s.

While every center is administered by codirectors, one appointed by China and one by the school, frequent reports of censorship and a lack of academic freedom emanate from CIs. No such report was more disturbing, perhaps, than a decision by North Carolina State University to cancel a scheduled visit by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled religious and political leader, after the school’s Confucius Institute director warned the event might harm “strong relationships we were developing with China"..."

[rlmorel]

Another excerpt:
"...The University of California at Berkeley has the second-largest population of students from China.

A professor there told me he once spotted the Chinese consul general on campus and asked what he was doing there. “Oh, nothing,” came the reply. The professor was curious. He followed the official, who then walked into a meeting of Chinese students.

The professor watched as the visitor warned the students not to forget where they came from: “We are watching you, and you need to be good. You need to be faithful to China.”

It might seem that welcoming Chinese students to the United States—and letting them experience a liberal culture where freedom of speech, religion, and politics is celebrated rather than persecuted—would be the first step toward creating opposition to the CCP at home. Obviously, warnings like this from political operatives are one reason why US universities are not churning out democracy-loving Chinese dissidents. In fact, Chinese students are advised not to fraternize extensively with American students and to maintain close contact with other Chinese foreign students.

Given the Chinese government’s thirst for monitoring individual behavior, there is little doubt that these students are asked to report on one another. So instead of enjoying freedom of assembly and freedom of speech—fundamental American rights—these students are haunted by the authoritarian rules of their homeland. With the advent of social credit scores—the newly implemented data collection system that monitors, punishes, and rewards citizen behavior—in China and the long reach of digital surveillance, it is quite possible that a Chinese student’s liberal actions abroad could be used to penalize family members back home—or even result in having their funding cut..."