On December 9, Pompeo spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology on “Chinese Communist Challenges to U.S. National Security and Academic Freedom.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology on “The Chinese Communist Party’s Challenge to U.S. National Security and Academic Freedom,” naming the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a place where self-censorship is practiced and the president of MIT declined to speak in order to avoid upsetting Beijing.
In a speech at Georgia Tech on December 9, Pompeo talked about the challenges to U.S. national security and academic freedom posed by China’s Communist Party and called on U.S. colleges and universities to act cooperatively to meet these challenges.
He revealed that many U.S. colleges and universities have been bought by the Chinese Communist Party and have received at least $1.3 billion since 2013. He said the schools have practiced self-censorship to avoid upsetting Beijing, naming the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Pompeo said he had hoped to deliver the speech at MIT, a prestigious academic institution. But MIT President Rafael Reif hinted that his claim to speak might offend Chinese students and professors on campus.
He said, “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 stressed that giving in to claims of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” is simply falling into the Chinese Communist Party’s trap, which is Beijing’s usual response to legitimate criticism from countries.
Pompeo argued that the outside world should not allow the Chinese Communist Party to use “political correctness” as a weapon to attack American freedoms, nor should it allow false accusations of racial discrimination or “China-phobia” to drown out efforts to expose the practices of the Chinese Communist Party.
He questioned, “How many more bad decisions will these schools make because of their obsession with Chinese Communist funding? Which other professors will they co-opt or silence? What theft and espionage operations will they ignore? What kind of business deals do these actions lead to?”
Pompeo cautioned, “Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning our higher education for its own purposes and how these actions undermine our freedom and national security, and if we don’t educate ourselves, we will be educated by Beijing.”
Pictured is U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.
In his speech, Pompeo emphasized that action should be taken against these CCP actions as soon as possible, and called for cooperation and help from U.S. colleges and universities. He suggested that colleges and universities should establish trustees to oversee their endowments and their dealings with the CCP and CCP-backed groups, and that they should shut down the Confucius Institute.
He also stressed the importance of investigating student groups that are supported by CCP funds. He also called on researchers to be vigilant about fraud and theft, to reject the lure of CCP funding, and encouraged students to stand up for free speech and speak out when school administrations exert censorship pressure to defend deals with Beijing.
“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,” he said.
Pompeo made a point of emphasizing that by “China” he meant “the Chinese Communist Party,” and that 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.
He also said that the biggest victims on American campuses are innocent Chinese students. Chinese Communist Party spy students and spies have also been monitoring and endangering liberal and democratic-minded Chinese students.
Pompeo also cited the failure of past U.S. engagement with China, where 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 Xi Jinping put it, 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.
For sending nearly 400,000 students to study in the United States each year. He said China does not want these Chinese researchers to stay in the United States after receiving an American education, but rather to recruit them to return “to serve the socialist motherland. Many of the Communist Party’s industries are based on “stolen and purchased technology” from other countries, rather than being home-grown.
Pompeo also said 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 said the Chinese Communist Party will do so because of what a student says in a U.S. classroom. And harass and even torture them and their families in China.
He said, “The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus cannot tolerate troublesome Americans, or Chinese people exposing their bankrupt system, or exposing the fact that the Chinese people can truly prosper when they are in a free society.”
On Trump’s policy toward China. He said, “I think President Trump has exposed the risks that the Chinese Communist Party poses, and we’ve been talking about this for 50 years. We’ve tried cooperation. We tried appeasement. That posed a risk. President Trump flipped the script and said we’re not going to do that again.”
Pompeo is the third top administration official to travel to Joe State to deliver a heavyweight speech, following President Trump and Vice President Pence.
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