© Provided by Washington Examiner An official at the University of Washington refused to seek the release of a Chinese national sent to a "reeducation camp" after studying at the university "because of a multimillion-dollar deal with China," according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
"Now, thank God, Vera was eventually released and returned to the U.S. - but no thanks to the University of Washington and no thanks to the deal that it had made with the Chinese Communist Party," Pompeo said Wednesday at Georgia Tech, referring to the once-detained student named Vera Zhou.
Pompeo identified by name schools and university officials he regards as wary of crossing Beijing while making the case that Chinese Communist authorities are exploiting the latent "anti-Americanism" and greed of U.S. schools at the expense of national security.
"Americans must know how the CCP is poisoning the well of our higher education for its own ends and how those actions degrade our freedoms and our national security," Pompeo said. "If we don't educate ourselves, we'll get schooled by Beijing."
Federal officials have moved to cut allegedly nefarious links between the Chinese government and U.S. institutions over the past year, including through prosecutions of high-profile scholars charged with lying about their links to the Chinese government, as well visa fraud cases targeting Chinese military researchers studying in the United States under false pretenses.
"What more bad decisions will schools make because they're hooked on Chinese Communist Party cash?" Pompeo said during the address. "What professors will they be able to co-opt or to silence? What theft and espionage will they simply overlook? What business deals will get done as a result of that?
Those relationships already induce U.S. university administrations to "censor themselves," he added. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology "wasn't interested" in hosting his speech, Pompeo said, due to President Rafael Reif's implicit misgiving that he "might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors" by warning about China's targeting of higher education.
Pompeo rejected that idea, observing that he seeks in part to end the Chinese Communist Party's blatant operations to harass students overseas.
"Look, we can't let the CCP weaponize political correctness against American liberties," he said. "But American colleges' silence and censorship on the CCP usually boils down to something far less idealistic: So many of our colleges are basically bought by Beijing."
The warning raised the question about how university administrators should balance their desire to welcome the hundreds of thousands of talented Chinese students against the likelihood that Beijing is using at least some of those students for nontraditional intelligence gathering.
"We want these students here, but there has to be a process," Pompeo said. "There has to be a rigorous evaluation. And some of that is the responsibility of the United States government to undertake, and we have to do a better job of doing that. But we need institutions, too, that are transparent."
The address in Georgia brought Pompeo to one of the key states targeted by allies of President Trump in their effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And it puts him among a number of potential GOP 2024 presidential candidates who have somehow found their way to Georgia.
Yet, Pompeo skirted the domestic political drama, while forecasting that the Trump administration's focus on threats emanating from Beijing would continue to guide U.S. foreign policy.
"I think this challenge is now widely recognized," he said. "And so, I think whoever has the burden, and the opportunity of being president of United States - not just in February of 2021, but February of 2025 and '29 and '33 - I think every one of those leaders will feel the challenge and recognize that they have a duty and a responsibility to confront this."
Tags: News, Foreign Policy, National Security, Mike Pompeo, China, Higher Education, Education, Washington, Georgia
Original Author: Joel Gehrke
Original Location: Pompeo accuses US university of abandoning student in reeducation camp