Before the November election, Republicans were trying to warn voters that electing Joe Biden was akin to putting Communist China in the White House.
That was a big deal, considering that President Donald Trump spent his entire term cracking down on and pushing back against the rising Asian power, be in the South China Sea or with global trade policies aimed at putting America first for a change.
Well, by hook and by crook, Biden has made it into the White House, and just as conservatives warned, ‘China’ Joe is turning out to be Beijing’s best friend and ally.
One of the ways former President Trump pushed back against China’s encroachment was to limit the reach of Beijing’s propaganda, and he did that in part through attempts to force American colleges and universities to make public their financial and cultural ties to China.
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Biden has already undone the effort, and of course through executive fiat.
Campus Reform has more:
The Trump administration attempted to enact a policy that would force American universities to reveal cooperation with chapters of the Confucius Institute. President Joe Biden quietly revoked the policy a few days after his inauguration.
Axios reported that in the final days of his presidency, Trump enacted a policy that would compel primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions to disclose all contracts and transactions with the Confucius Institute. Under the policy, schools that do not report information would lose certification for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.
Records from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs revealed that Biden nixed the policy on January 26. A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to Campus Reform that the policy was rescinded.
Seth Cropsey, the director of the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute, told the outlet perhaps the move was just Biden recalibrating U.S. policy while expressing hope the president isn’t trying to “placate China.”
He said he doesn’t want the Biden administration to “make overtures… that make it sound as though the United States is unaware or uninterested in their military buildup, their aggression against neighbors, their militarization of the South China Sea, and their successful efforts to steal intellectual property.”
And yet, that’s exactly what Biden is doing; his collective policymaking regarding China as well as his choice of senior staff make it clear he’s a Sinophile.
As for China’s growing ties with America’s left-wing universities, Cropsey said it’s “not normal practice, and for good reason — namely, academic independence and freedom — to allow an outside organization… to say nothing of a country that is a strategic competitor to the United States, to be able to choose professors in a program… within a university.
But it is really all that bad? Yes.
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In August, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially declared the Confucius Institutes a “foreign mission” China. He explained that the institutes are “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms.”
He added that the programs are “funded by the PRC and part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus.”
