On December 9 at 10:00 a.m. EST, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology on “The Chinese Communist Party’s Challenges to U.S. National Security and Academic Freedom.
Pompeo opened his remarks with an example of the secret detention of Chinese professor Fei-Ling Wang by the Chinese Communist Party in China several years ago. Fei-Ling Wang was also present at the speech.
The following is the full text of the speech.
Several years ago, Professor Wang traveled to China and was arrested by security personnel inside the country. He was held in an undisclosed location for two weeks. Professor Wang was interrogated and threatened. They (the Chinese Communist Party, below) wanted to know about his research on China and his experiences teaching at my alma mater, West Point. He could tell those stories better than I could. But they think they can intimidate him or recruit him because he is Chinese.
Thank goodness he (Fei-Ling Wang) is with us today. Thankfully, after pressure from many local leaders, including this university and the Carter Center, he was released.
Pompeo on Xi Jinping’s ambitions
I think the lesson we can take away from this is clear. And that is that the Chinese Communist Party wants what we have, and they will do whatever it takes to get it. They will steal from us. They will pressure the CCP’s critics to keep quiet. They will do whatever it takes.
This issue that I came here to discuss with the American people is important because Americans must know how the CCP is poisoning our institutions of higher education for its own purposes and how these actions are weakening our freedoms and American national security. If we do not educate ourselves, if we are not honest about what is happening, we will be defeated by Beijing.
Now, it has taken a long time for us as a nation, and the entire free world, to understand the course that China (the Chinese Communist Party) is on today. In fact, we don’t fully understand it yet, and neither does the rest of the world.
No one is responsible for it, but that’s not the most important part, because for a long time Republicans, Democrats, leaders in academia, in research institutions, in business have thought that by trading and engaging with China, the Chinese Communist Party would reform itself, it would relax, it would embrace economic freedom and political freedom, and it would pose less risk to freedom around the world.
But that’s not what we got. Instead, the CCP has used the wealth thus created to strengthen its grip on power, to strengthen its grip on the Chinese people, to build a state that uses high technology for oppression like the world has never seen before.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has made his intentions clear. All you have to do is listen to what he has to say. He says he wants to take full control of the domestic situation and make China the number one power in the world, and he’s already working on that project.
He’s building the People’s Liberation Army team (the Communist army) and he’s manipulating international organizations to serve Beijing’s interests. As we’ve seen on TV, just in the last two days, he’s been waging a huge battle of exerting influence around the world.
For some of you sitting at home today, this may seem like a long shot, but for Xi Jinping, it’s an ambitious operation. I must say, he has been watching each and every one of us.
The Communist strategy is “rob, copy, replace.”
Over the past year, I’ve talked to governors in Washington, DC, state legislators in Wisconsin, tech leaders in Silicon Valley, and many other groups about this. I’ve talked to them about this challenge. Today, I want to talk about what’s happening in schools across the United States, particularly in research institutions, and in places like where I’m standing here today.
Think about it, Communist scientists are not the pioneers in the field of cancer treatment, we are. It’s not North Korean biochemists who are producing safe vaccines for the new coronavirus (CCP virus), it’s us. The Iranians are not the leaders in supercomputers, no, in fact, we are, and it is the free world and free people who have created these superior results. We should be very proud of this.
But we have an obligation to protect it, to maintain it, to make sure that in 10, 50, and 100 years this will still be the case.
Because in places like this campus, scientists have pioneered quantum computing, artificial intelligence, pediatric technology, even robots that can operate autonomously without human control – and I must say that scares me a little bit.
You see, the Chinese Communist Party knows it will never match our innovations. It has state-owned enterprises, but that’s a dictatorship, with the government at the center. That’s why it sends 400,000 students a year to study in the United States and 400,000 students a year to study in our universities, all from one country. This is no accident.
Much of China’s domestic high-end industrial base is based on stolen technology, or technology purchased from other countries, none of which is domestically produced.
Beijing does not want Chinese researchers to stay in the United States. In fact, after they have been trained, they want them to return home. They want to lure them back to their country for one purpose, to serve the socialist motherland.
You see, the CCP propaganda machine cannot tolerate Americans or Chinese they hate exposing their broken system or revealing the fact that the Chinese can indeed prosper in a free society.
It doesn’t want you to know what I’m about to tell you.
Now, let’s understand that I want to make sure that my language today is precise. When I talk about China, I mean the Chinese Communist Party. Like all of us, I love and value our Chinese-American community and the Chinese people who live in the United States and in China. We want good things for them.
I want to say this “in good faith” because there have been cases like Xin Wang, a researcher at UCSF who allegedly concealed his identity as an officer in the People’s Liberation Army and had been collecting information from the UCSF lab. The good news is that the FBI arrested him.
Also, Ji Chaoqun studied electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Army and allegedly concealed his ties to Chinese Communist intelligence, which put him in charge of recruiting engineers and scientists where he worked.
These are just two examples, but more importantly: the CCP is as willing to use money to obtain valuable intelligence as they are to use cloak and dagger.
There are many U.S. academics who regularly conduct research with U.S. taxpayer funding, but are drawn into the CCP’s talent acquisition program. The CCP pays them large sums of money for them to do research related to their current field for the CCP, or in China, and then often uses the fruits of their intellect to build up the Chinese (CCP) military.
A researcher from my home state of Kansas and the head of the chemistry department at Harvard University both fell into this trap. Think about it, people.
John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence, recently described the CCP strategy as “rob, copy, replace.
Pompeo on the CCP’s “suppression” strategy
But I’d like to add one more R to the list of national intelligence directors, and that’s “repress.
Yang Shuping, a student from China who, just a few years ago in 2017, gave a commencement address at the University of Maryland praising the “fresh air of free speech” in the United States, was quickly demonized and harassed by the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus. I assure you, while I can’t tell you everything, it’s not a coincidence.
A student at the University of Georgia in 2018 said of the CCP secret police, “They constantly harassed me for information about the activities of overseas pro-democracy activists and dissidents, and they were particularly interested in the activities of Uighurs and Tibetans.”
Some of the biggest victims of the CCP on campus are the innocent Chinese themselves. This is a tragedy. We have a responsibility to monitor this.
In another example, at Princeton University, just this year, students in a Chinese politics class were forced to use code names in assignments so that the CCP would not discover their identities and prosecute them for freely expressing their views on Hong Kong and the CCP under a draconian new version of the National Security Law. And here it is, happening right here in the United States, to American students.
American students talk about “safe spaces” to hide from ideas they don’t like. Chinese students need safe spaces to learn about ideas they like. What a stark contrast!
Chinese students attending American universities also live in fear that their families back home will be arrested, interrogated, tortured, or worse, for what they say in American classrooms.
But the Chinese Communists are not just targeting the Chinese; they want to influence American students, professors and administrators as well.
You see, they know that left-leaning college campuses are filled with anti-American ideas, and their anti-American messages are easy targets (for the CCP).
That’s why they have established Confucius Institutes on our campuses. Under President Trump (Trump), our State Department has made it clear that these Confucius Institutes are of no benefit. Many have been removed, and many campuses have seen this and they have chosen to close these institutes. But right here, in Georgia, Wesleyan still has one in Macon.
You see, that’s why there are also organizations on campus called the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. They are directed by the Chinese Communist Embassy or the local Chinese Communist Consulate and are almost always funded from there. Their purpose: to closely monitor students and to promote support for Beijing’s cause.
Pompeo: Many U.S. Universities Bribed by Beijing
Now, you might think that in freedom-loving places like institutions like Georgia Tech, academics, school administrators, school faculty around the world would be more outraged to protest the naked theft and the blatant violation of the freedoms that I’ve described by the Chinese Communist Party, yet we rarely see that.
Well, why? Why do schools censor themselves? They usually do so out of fear of offending China.
In fact, I have to tell you that MIT is not interested in having me come to their campus to make these comments. President Raphael Reif implied that my views might be insulting to their Chinese students and professors. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. My remarks are precisely to protect these people and their freedom.
I must say that giving in to the “hurt feelings” objection plays right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. They are watching the United States closely. This is what the CCP often says in response to legitimate criticism from around the world, as you can see.
How can this party possibly know how the Chinese people feel? No one ever votes.
We cannot allow the CCP to use political correctness to fight American freedom. We must protect and preserve it.
False cries of so-called racism or Sinophobia should never be allowed to block complete exposure of the CCP’s activities.
Yet we often see American campuses under quiet scrutiny. This is driven by the Chinese Communist Party, and the result is often far from idealism, with so many of our universities being bought by Beijing.
Let me tell you about what happened to Vera Zhou (周月明).
She is a permanent resident of the United States, from China, and a senior at the University of Washington.
In October 2017, three years ago, she went to China to visit her father. Local authorities put her in a re-education camp where she was re-educated for five months and placed under house arrest for 18 months because she used a virtual private network to access her school’s website, which is what many of you are doing as I speak.
Looking at our side, we see a situation where our State Department team, Bob Fu, the mother of Vera Zhou and a good friend of the Chinese people, is desperately pleading with the University of Washington to step in and appeal for her return to school.
But the director of the University of Washington’s Office of Federal Relations, a woman named Sarah Castro, said the university would not help because it had a multi-million dollar deal with China.
Now, thank God, Vera was eventually released and returned to the United States, but not because of the University of Washington and not because of the deal it made with the Chinese Communist Party.
The U.S. Department of Education has found in the past few years that U.S. schools have received about $1.3 billion in funding from China since 2013. And that’s just what we know. Many, like Columbia University, many schools don’t report the real numbers.
What more bad decisions will these schools make? Now that they’ve taken the hook for Chinese Communist funding.
Which professors will they force to cooperate or shut them up?
What other theft and espionage will they turn a deaf ear to? As a result, what deals will they strike?
Pompeo: China’s Communist Party cannot be allowed to destroy American academic freedom
You see, we have a lot to do. I’ve laid out some patterns and practices that every American needs to understand.
We need to respond to this, and the sooner the better. Our government has already begun to do so, but there is still a great deal of work to be done.
We cannot allow this brutal regime to steal from us, build up their military and brainwash our people, or buy our institutions to help them cover up these activities.
We cannot, we cannot allow the Chinese Communist Party to destroy academic freedom, which has blessed our country and blessed us with great institutions of learning such as the one I stand here today.
But we need your help.
We need the help of our students, we need the help of our faculty, we need the help of all levels of government across America. We need trustees to oversee their endowments, to oversee the deals that their universities make with the Chinese Communist Party and the groups that the Chinese Communist Party supports.
We need administrators to shut down the Confucius Institutes and investigate what the so-called student groups backed by CCP funds are really doing on their campuses. The government will help, but we need people to assist us.
We need researchers to be wary of fraud and theft, and academics to resist the temptation of Communist money.
We need students who will actually defend freedom of speech, defend their own freedom of speech, including the freedom of speech of those who grew up in the United States, especially Chinese students on our campuses who came here to learn, to improve their rights and their lives, and to enjoy the fruits of freedom that we offer them in the United States of America.
We need you to stand together and tell the truth to the powers that be and resist the pressure from the university to impose censorship in order to make a deal with Beijing, something that has happened many times before.
Let’s take action. Let’s raise the banner of freedom and defend our schools and the foundations of these institutions. This will help our national security and help resist the main threat of our time – the Chinese Communist Party.
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