Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out at officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday for allegedly refusing to host him so as not to offend Communist China, which Pompeo has heavily criticized, and thus keep their Chinese interests intact.
While speaking at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Pompeo accused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of “poisoning” the nation’s university system and said U.S. schools were censoring anti-Beijing dissent because they’re “hooked on Chinese Communist Party cash.”
“MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks. President Raphael Reif implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors,” Pompeo told the crowd at Georgia Tech.
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“But of course nothing could be further from the truth. These are the very people that this set of remarks is intended to protect, to protect their freedoms,” he said.
MIT is presently being investigated by the Department of Education for not fully declaring its donations from China.
But a spokeswoman for the school denied Pompeo’s claims, saying that it declined to host an event with him in order to follow COVID-19 social distancing rules. “MIT was contacted by a member of the Secretary’s staff in August 2020, seeking a venue for Secretary Pompeo to speak later in the fall. The Institute was honored to be considered,” said Kimberly Allen, MIT’s director of media relations.
“After thorough consideration with his senior team, President Reif concluded that to preserve public health on campus in the fall we must abide fully by our policies of no guests and no gatherings greater than 10 people,” she said.
Since 2013, Communist China has given over $1.3 billion to American universities, sparking a major probe by the Department of Education, which determined that Ivy League colleges are trying to conceal their ties to Beijing.
“Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security,” Pompeo said Wednesday.
A report this week revealed that Columbia University accepted $1 million in CCP cash for the underwriting of an on-campus Confucius Institute — an educational program the State Department has called a “global influence and propaganda apparatus” for China.
Pompeo accused China of stealing American technology by means of covert espionage campaigns and asserted that Confucius Institutes were up to “no good.” “They want to influence American students as well. Professors and administrators too,” Pompeo said, adding that “They know that left-leaning college campuses are rife with anti-Americanism and present easy targets for the anti-American messaging.”
Harvard and Yale are under investigation for Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which prohibits an “Institution of Higher Learning” from failing to properly report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more. State Department officials found that American universities have failed to declare $6.5 billion in funding from foreign countries like China and Saudi Arabia.
Additionally, the chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department was charged in January with lying about working with Chinese research agencies.
Pompeo made clear that he has no issue with he Chinese people, but with the nation’s communist government. “Some of the CCP’s biggest victims on campuses are innocent Chinese nationals themselves, and this is a tragedy. We have a responsibility to police this,” he said.
The Trump administration has taken a strong stance against China’s growing influence in America and around the world. Back in July, the federal government ordered the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston on the grounds that Chinese diplomats there had turned the facility into an illegal spying hub.
The State Department has also revealed that Chinese consulates in over two dozen cities are aiding undercover Communist Party soldiers who are posing as students in order to engage in espionage. “The individuals charged there are a microcosm, we believe, of a broader network of individuals in more than 25 cities,” a senior Department of Justice official said.
“That network is supported through the consulates here. Consulates have been giving individuals in that network guidance on how to evade and obstruct our investigation,” he said.
While the administration is making headway in detecting and dismantling China’s subversion of America, all of that may come to a halt if Joe Biden, whose supposed election victory was celebrated in the communist nation, becomes president.
