Secretary of State Mike Pompeo escalated his anti-China hysteria on Dec. 9, telling Georgia Tech University that every Chinese student, teacher and scientist is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party – the “yellow peril” revisited – and declared that universities which have refused to invite him to rant against China are “un-American.” We have not yet been told if he and his many supporters in the U.S. Congress, from both parties, have also re-established the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“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. We must assume he is also concerned about the threat to our “precious bodily fluids.” That he is a racist is quite openly acknowledged: “Just think about it. Chinese Communist Party scientists aren’t pioneering cancer cures. We are…. It is the free world and free peoples that produce these superior results. And we should be very proud of that fact…. The Chinese Communist Party knows it can never match our innovation. It has state-owned enterprises; it’s an authoritarian regime; it is a government-centric focus. That’s why it sends 400,000 students a year to the United States of America to study.”
Then he started naming the un-American universities on his target list: “They know that left-leaning college campuses are rife with anti-Americanism, and present easy targets for their anti-American messaging. That’s why they planted Confucius Institutes on our campuses. And under President Trump, our State Department has made very clear these Confucius Institutes are literally up to no good…. Right here in Georgia, Wesleyan College still has one in Macon…. It’s why there are groups on campuses called Chinese Students and Scholars Associations here, too. They’re directed and almost always funded by the Chinese Embassy or a local Chinese consulate. Its purpose: to keep tabs on students and to press pro-Beijing causes.
“Now, you would think at freedom-loving places like Georgia Tech and institutions and scholars all across the world, administrators, school faculty would be more up in arms about the Chinese Communist Party’s outright theft and flagrant violation of freedoms that I’ve described, but we see it too seldom…. 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…. So many of our colleges are bought by Beijing.”
His conclusion was a virtual threat that people must join in the witch-hunt or be suspect themselves: “We need administrators to close Confucius Institutes and investigate what so-called student groups backed by the CCP money are actually up to on their campuses. The government will help, but we need people to assist us.”
