Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology on December 9 about the challenges posed by the Communist Party of China to U.S. national security and academic freedom, and called for cooperative action by U.S. colleges and universities to address those challenges. He also said that the shift toward China brought about by the Trump administration will be a long-term policy for the U.S. government and for Western democratic societies.
Pompeo noted that in the past, both Democrats and Republicans believed that a policy of engagement with China would allow the Chinese Communist Party to reform and embrace economic and political freedom, but instead the Chinese Communist Party has used its earned wealth to tighten its grip on the Chinese people and create a “high-tech repressive state” the world has never seen before. The Communist Party’s goal, he said, is clear, as its general secretary Xi Jinping has said, to achieve total control at home and to become the number one power abroad — and U.S. colleges and universities have become a major target for the Communist Party’s ambitions.
In his speech, he focused on the challenges that the Chinese Communist Party poses to American colleges and universities in terms of stealing technology, suppressing freedom of speech, exerting political influence over American citizens, and buying off money.
He said, “Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning our higher education for its own purposes, and how it is undermining our democracy and our national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, we will be educated by Beijing.”
Pompeo pointed out that it was the free world and free people who created advanced technology, while the Chinese Communist Party sends nearly 400,000 students to the U.S. each year to study in the U.S., knowing that it will never be able to catch up with the U.S. on the level of innovation with its authoritarian regime and its government and state-owned enterprise model. China does not want these Chinese researchers to stay in the United States after their American education, he said, but to return to “serve the socialist motherland. Many of China’s industries are based on “stolen and purchased technology” rather than being indigenous. Pompeo also pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party uses its talent program to heavily recruit “American scholars who do research with U.S. taxpayer money” and use their findings to strengthen its military.
In his speech, Pompeo also cited several examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to suppress free speech on American campuses. He noted that the Chinese Communist Party would harass and even torture a student and his family in China for what he said in an American classroom. He said, “The propaganda apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party cannot tolerate troubled Americans or Chinese exposing their bankrupt system, or exposing the fact that the Chinese people can only truly prosper when they are in a free society. He stressed that the biggest victims of the Chinese Communist Party on American campuses are innocent Chinese students.
In addition, Pompeo pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party not only targets Chinese citizens, but also tries to influence American students, professors, and school administrators. He said, “They know that left-leaning college campuses are rife with anti-American ideology, and that provides them with an audience to promote anti-American messages.” He singled out the role of the Confucius Institutes and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association in this effort.
Pompeo also criticized the problem of “self-censorship” in U.S. colleges and universities. He said that some U.S. colleges and universities engage in self-censorship in order “not to hurt the feelings of Chinese students and professors,” which is exactly what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants, “a phrase it often uses in response to legitimate criticism from around the world. Pompeo asked rhetorically, “How can the Chinese Communist Party know how the Chinese people feel? They can’t vote.” He stressed that honest exposés of the CCP should not be discredited by false claims of “racism” and “China-phobia. “The Chinese government’s policy on self-censorship is not a matter of idealism.
Pompeo also pointed out 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 universities receive large sums of money from China or do business with China and choose to remain silent about Chinese aggression, silence professors, or turn a blind eye to intellectual property theft and espionage.
In his speech, Pompeo emphasized the need to act quickly against these actions by the CCP and called for the cooperation and assistance of U.S. universities. He proposed that colleges and universities establish trustees to oversee their endowments and their dealings with the CCP and CCP-supported groups, that they close down Confucius Institutes, and that they investigate student groups that receive financial support from the CCP. He also called on researchers to remain vigilant against fraud and theft, to reject the lure of CCP funding, and to encourage students to uphold their freedom of speech and to speak out when the school’s administration exerts censorship pressure to defend its dealings with Beijing.
He said, “Let us raise the banner of freedom and defend our schools and our safety against the main threat of our time, the Chinese Communist Party.”
In his speech, Pompeo made it a point to emphasize that by “China” he meant “the Chinese Communist Party”. He said he loves and cherishes the Chinese-American community and the people living in China, and welcomed those Chinese students who “truly” want to come to the United States to study.
In a conversation with Georgia Tech President Angel Cabrera after the speech, Pompeo was asked how to attract talented Chinese students, maintain the comparative advantage the U.S. gains from talent attraction, and prevent acts of national security such as technology theft. Pompeo replied that this is a difficult question and that the U.S. has gotten the “balance” completely wrong over the past few decades, and that the U.S. needs to welcome Chinese students, but also needs a good “vetting process” and more protection for intellectual property rights.
When talking about how to balance international competitiveness and cooperation in technology, Pompeo said that the United States should defend its own prosperity, which will benefit the world. He also argued that the advancement of civilization should take place in a “Western ecosystem” that practices the rule of law, respects intellectual property rights, and upholds the spirit of contract and the rules of commerce, and that the challenge to the Western ecosystem is the authoritarian model that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to instill in the world.
He said that the Trump administration should be commended for being the first U.S. administration to clearly identify the challenges posed by China and to shift its focus and resources to it. The Trump administration’s approach to China has been to “identify the problem and solve it,” which is the model the United States should continue to follow, rather than identifying the problem and ignoring it as it has in the past. He argued that the challenge posed by China is being widely shared, and that every subsequent president will feel the challenge and recognize their responsibility to address it in a substantive way.
He said, “I think this is going to be a long-term policy for the United States and for Western democracies.”
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