By Peter Schweizer
In the book Red Handed, we meet a remarkable young man named Nathan Law, the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-raised leader of a pro-democracy effort called the “Umbrella Movement,” which protested Beijing’s crackdowns on freedom in Hong Kong. His efforts were brutally crushed by the Chinese government and Nathan Law went to prison for eight months. TIME Magazine named him one of “the 100 Most Influential People of 2020.”
Once freed from Chinese prison, he decided to attend graduate school at Yale University, an institution whose history of educating Chinese students goes back to 1850, when the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university took his degree from there.
Times are different now. Nathan Law’s welcome at Yale was anything but warm. Most Chinese students there today owe their education to the Beijing regime, but when Nathan Law tried to speak out on campus, they subjected him to sustained harassment based on his firsthand experience against China’s repression of democracy and freedom in Hong Kong. Even Yale’s administration remained deaf to the harassment he endured. Why? Because Chinese government money spoke too loudly.
Nathan Law’s story highlights a decades-long effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to co-opt America’s most gleaming ivory towers by funding “Confucius Institutes” at leading US colleges and universities. It has been going on since about 2005. By 2020, more than 118 such “Institutes” had sprung up, offering innocent-sounding language and cultural education, directly funded by Hanban, an arm of the Communist Chinese government’s ministry of education.
The Trump administration and Congress recognized the perniciousness of the influence campaign. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo flagged Confucius Institutes as “part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus” in a 2020 statement that officially designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center as a foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China. The State Department warned college and university governing boards that Confucius Institutes “exert malign influence on U.S. campuses and disseminate CCP propaganda.”
Read the entire article here: The Gatestone Institute
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