Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech at the Georgia Institute of Technology on December 9 on the topic of “The Chinese Communist Party on U.S. Campuses. In his speech, he focused on the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party to U.S. national security and academic freedom, and called on U.S. colleges and universities to cooperate to address those challenges. During the question-and-answer session, he said that the turn toward China brought about by the Trump administration will become a long-term policy for the U.S. government as well as Western democracies.
In his speech, Pompeo revealed that he had hoped to deliver this speech at the prestigious academic institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But the MIT administration was not interested in bringing him to campus to give a speech on China, and MIT President Rafael Reif insinuated that Pompeo’s advocacy might offend Chinese students and professors on campus. Pompeo, for his part, stressed, “But that is by no means the case, and it is these people that (my) speech is intended to protect, it is intended to protect their freedom.” He added, “I must say that caving in to opposition that hurts feelings plays right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. They are watching the United States closely. This is something the CCP keeps repeating in response to legitimate criticism from around the world. You can see it.” Pompeo talked about, “And how does the party know how the Chinese people feel? Because no one can vote.” He said, “Look, we can’t let the Chinese Communist Party use political correctness as a weapon against American freedoms. We have to protect and preserve them.”
Pompeo said that in the past, both Democrats and Republicans have believed that a policy of engagement with China would allow the Communist Party to reform and embrace economic and political freedom, but instead the Communist Party has used the wealth it has earned to tighten its grip on the Chinese people and build a “high-tech repressive state” the world has never seen. He said the Chinese Communist Party’s goal, as stated by its General Secretary Xi Jinping, is to achieve complete control at home and become the number one power abroad – and that U.S. colleges and universities have become a major target for the Communist Party’s ambitions. In his speech, he focused on the challenges the CCP poses for U.S. colleges and universities in terms of stealing technology, suppressing free speech, exerting political influence on U.S. citizens, and monetary bribery. He said, “Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning our higher education for its own purposes, and how these actions infringe on our democracy and national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, we will be educated by Beijing.”
Pompeo said it is the free world and free people who create advanced technology, and the Chinese Communist Party knows it will never catch up to the United States on the innovation level with its authoritarian regime and its model centered on government and state-owned enterprises, so it sends nearly 400,000 students to the United States each year to study. China does not want these Chinese researchers to stay in the United States after receiving an American education, he said, but rather to recruit them to return “to serve the socialist motherland. Many of China’s industries are built on “stolen and purchased technology” from other countries, rather than being home-grown. Pompeo also noted that the Chinese Communist Party uses its talent program to recruit “American scholars who do research on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime” and use their findings to strengthen its own military.
In his speech, Pompeo cited several examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to suppress free speech on U.S. campuses. He noted that the CCP will harass and even torture a student and his or her family in China for what they say in a U.S. classroom. He said, “The CCP’s propaganda apparatus cannot tolerate troubled Americans or Chinese exposing its bankrupt system or exposing the fact that the Chinese people can truly prosper when they are in a free society.” He noted that the biggest victims of the Chinese Communist Party on American campuses are innocent Chinese students. Pompeo said the CCP is not only targeting Chinese citizens, but also trying to influence American students, professors and school administrators. He said, “They know that anti-American thinking prevails on left-leaning college campuses, providing them with an audience to propagate anti-American messages.” He specifically addressed the role played in this by the Confucius Institute and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association.
Pompeo also said that some U.S. colleges and universities are censoring themselves not out of idealism, but because they have been “bought” by the Chinese Communist Party. These colleges and universities receive large amounts of funding from China or do business with China and choose to remain silent about Communist violations, silence professors, or turn a blind eye to intellectual property theft and espionage. He said the U.S. Department of Education estimates that U.S. universities have received about $1.3 billion in Chinese funds since 2013, and that there are even many schools that do not report the correct amount, such as Columbia University in New York, which was recently exposed. He stressed that action should be taken against the Chinese Communist Party for these actions as soon as possible, and called for cooperation and help from U.S. colleges and universities, calling on U.S. institutions and the academic community to reject the lure of money and encouraging students to stand up for their freedom of expression and speak out when school administrations exert censorship pressure to defend their deals with Beijing.
Pompeo concluded, “Let’s raise the banner of freedom to defend our schools and our security against the main threat of our time – the Chinese Communist Party.” Earlier in his speech, he made a point of emphasizing that by “China” he meant “the Chinese Communist Party. Pompeo said he loves and values the Chinese-American community and the people living in China, and welcomes those Chinese students who “genuinely” want to come to the United States to study. After the speech, in a conversation with moderator Georgia Tech President Angel Cabrera, Brera asked whether the policy toward China advocated during the Trump administration would undergo a 180-degree shift, especially since many of the messages were not necessarily partisan. To that, Pompeo replied, “I don’t think any of the things I said today reflect a partisan view, but rather rely on a data set. So I don’t think frankly what I said today is particularly controversial to those who are concerned about the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party. And in fact, I’ve seen it on Capitol Hill in Washington and even in other think tanks around the world. I think there’s a growing awareness of that challenge.”
Pompeo concluded by saying, “So let me give you an example. Earlier last week, I attended a meeting of NATO foreign ministers with my foreign minister colleagues. NATO grew out of the challenges of the Soviet Union, and it was very much focused on confronting the Soviet Union, and then Russia. The challenges that NATO faces today are the cyber threat, the base threat, the disinformation threat from the Chinese Communist Party. So we in the United States have worked long and hard to convince NATO that it needs to focus on that. And we spent about four hours in NATO, we spent an hour and a half talking about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party.” He said, “I said this is an example of a challenge that I think is now so widely recognized that I think whoever has the burden and the opportunity to be president of the United States, not just in February of 2021, but in February of 2025, ’29 and ’33, I think every one of those leaders is going to feel the challenge and recognize that they have an obligation and responsibility to confront this issue in a very real way.”
Pompeo said, “I think our administration and President Trump should be recognized for having confronted this issue. It would be the first administration to really identify this.” He said, “We did that in 2017 in what’s called — it’s an obscure document called the National Security Strategy, but we identified this challenge very clearly. And then we’ve begun to do what every agency does when there’s a challenge or an opportunity to shift our resources and our focus to address that primary challenge. I think that’s going to be the policy of the United States and indeed of Western democracies for a long time.”
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