The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | The Chinese Communist Party's Alleged Influence on College Campuses, Explained

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

As students head to college each semester, the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on their campus is an unlikely point of discussion.  However, John Metz, the president of the Athenai Institute, said his group is "committed to removing the influence of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party from U.S. college campuses." Metz discussed some of the potential downsides to accepting money from the Chinese Communist Party. "So, we estimate that between 2018 and 2021, U.S. universities received more than a billion dollars in gifts and contracts from mainland China, and that includes everything from funding for Confucius Institutes, which we talked about a moment ago, to research partnerships and joint degree programs and so on," Metz said.  "All of these, in our view, create a dangerous financial incentive for U.S. universities to turn the other way while the CCP censors our students, steals advanced technology, and engages in the high tech repression of its own people," said Metz, He added:  All of these financial entanglements really are a danger to national security because they prevent universities from really doing their due diligence to make sure that the research they support is not putting that technology in the wrong hands.Metz joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss more about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party at college and universities, what he hopes the U.S. Congress will address policy-wise next year, and the dangers of TikTok.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, December 12th. I'm Samantha Escheris. Every semester, when students head off to college, the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on their campus is an unlikely point of discussion. However, John Metz, the president of the Athenae Institute, said his group is committed to removing the influence of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party from U.S. college campuses. John Metz joins the podcast today to discuss more about the influence of the CCP at colleges and universities, what he hopes the next Congress will accomplish, policy-wise, and the dangers of TikTok. We'll get to my conversation with John right after this.

The Heritage Foundation takes the field on offense with their young leaders program. I'm Evelyn Homily from Hillsdale College. I'm Harrison Stewart from the University of Virginia. I'm a journalism intern with the Daily Signal. I'm a digital productions intern and communications. For spring, summer, and fall semesters, the Heritage Foundation hosts undergraduate and postgraduate interns right here in the nation's capital to train our country's future conservative leaders.

As a Daily Signal intern, I've had the opportunity to cover exciting events here in D.C. and work in a fast-paced environment with some of the conservative movement's best journalists. In YLP, interns are on the cutting edge of the conservative movement, attending exclusive briefings from heritage experts, members of Congress, and movement leaders fighting for the fate of our country. It's been exciting connecting with big names in the political world

and better understanding our nation's greatest threats. If you want to go on offense with other passionate, dedicated conservatives, go to heritage.org slash intern to learn more about the Young Leaders Program. Joining the podcast today is John Metz. He's the president of the Athenai Institute. John, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here. So first and foremost, can you tell us a little bit about your institute and its mission?

Well, Athenae, to put it very simply, is a nonpartisan student-founded and student-driven movement committing to removing the influence of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party from U.S. college campuses. We started back in 2020, and at the time, our core focus as a group of young Democrats and young Republicans who shared this concern about what we saw as the growing influence of the Chinese government on our campuses, and our focus then was primarily on Confucius institutes, which are essentially a way for U.S. universities to outsource their Chinese language curriculum, and that includes everything from textbooks to hiring practices and, you know, even basic principles of what faculty and staff can and can't discuss to the Chinese government, often receiving Chinese government funding in the process. At the time, there were more than 80 Confucius Institutes in the U.S.

Since then, those numbers have really fallen dramatically, and we've broadened our focus to this more, you know, we believe, you know, general goals. of financial disentanglement of U.S. universities from the CCP and from the Chinese government. And that includes everything from the funds that U.S. universities have invested in companies in China, many of which are actively complicit in human rights abuses like the genocide and mass interment of Uyghurs or in China's military buildup, to funding that U.S. universities received from China for things like research partnerships that often don't have the right guardrails in place to, you know, prevent the transfer of technology to bad actors in China, to gifts that actually influence the way universities discuss China. So all of those things, in our view,

fall under this broad category of financial entanglements that are dangerous to universities. They're bad for the spirit of free inquiry. They're bad for students, including Chinese students operating on U.S. college campuses who kind of face this effort from their own government to export it's an authoritarian system to the U.S. And it's bad for national security. And as we'll talk about today, you know, it's bad because it allows the Chinese military and Chinese companies that really do not value and, in fact, are directly opposed to U.S. national security to gain leverage over our institutions.

Yeah, if you could talk a little bit more about, you know, the downside in accepting these funds from, you know, the Chinese Communist Party and specifically relating to the national security threat for the United States? So we estimate that between 2018 and 2021, U.S. universities received more than a billion dollars in gifts and contracts from mainland China. And that includes everything from funding for Confucius Institutes, which we talked about a moment ago, to research partnerships and joint degree programs and so on. All of these, in our view, create a dangerous financial incentive for U.S. universities to turn the other way while the CCP sensors our students,

steals advanced technology, and engages in the high-tech repression of its own people. All of these financial entangments really are a danger to national security because they prevent universities from really doing their due diligence to make sure that the research they support is not sort of putting that technology in the wrong hands. So to give you a really recent example, it was recently revealed that the University of Maryland had accepted over $150,000 in funding for research in surveillance technology from Alibaba, which is one of the companies that's most closely tied to the Chinese military. It's contracted with the Chinese military on the development of AI and surveillance technology

and other military technology. and this sort of financial link, you know, when universities turn the other way, when they're not actually making sure that, you know, their faculty and researchers aren't being, aren't essentially double dipping and accepting funding from Alibaba, other Chinese companies, or even Chinese state entities from universities to, you know, to other research entities. it really prevents universities from protecting national security or their own staff. In many cases, faculty and staff are approached by representatives of the Chinese government or the CCP who tell them, we've got this really interesting research opportunity for you. And as long as you don't ask too many questions, it'll be lucrative. And it'll be easy. And all you need to do is sign on the dotted line.

And that really is how so many staff, including some of the most brilliant, you know, academic researchers in the country, have been caught up in this. Yeah, that is super interesting. Just regarding, you know, where these funds are going to, like what departments or areas in these colleges and universities are these funds commonly seen going to? So a lot of it is in a variety of high-tech research areas. You know, semiconductors have been in the news a lot lately. They're a strategic industry where the Chinese government believes that if it can become the world leader, it will be a lot easier for it to avoid the impact of U.S. sanctions and potentially down the road, easier to put supply chains out of Taiwan, which is the largest producer of semiconductors,

at risk. So there's really a direct relationship there between, you know, the Chinese. Chinese government's desire to become a world leader in large part through espionage and through, you know, tech transfer from the U.S. and other advanced economies to its desire to establish itself as sort of a geopolitical hegemon. And there are actually U.S. researchers at universities like Stanford right now who are working with, you know, Chinese entities and Chinese universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University, you know, two of the leading, sources of espionage coming out of China on semiconductor research. So that's one example.

I mentioned surveillance technology before, and that's another area where we've seen U.S. universities establish particularly worrying ties with entities in China. And surveillance broadly is really one of the things we're most worried about. Because if you look at things like TikTok, which is one of the most widely used apps among people my age and younger, particularly college students who are a major target of the Chinese government. TikTok is essentially spyware. And that's not just coming from us. That's coming from, you know, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who's basically said that, you know, if your child has TikTok on their phone, that data is going directly to Beijing.

We don't know exactly how it's being used, but we know they have it. I think people my age have a tendency to get kind of jaded about big tech and about this concern that, you know, whatever they download onto their phone might be watching them. But in this case, we really can say with confidence that your data is not safe if you have TikTok. And for young people in particular, that's concerned because the CCP, as, you know, the U.S. State Department has made very clear and as Athena has really seen on campuses, is extremely intent on influencing the next generation of leaders and on convincing them that, you know, they should turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses in China, to its military buildup, and to its efforts to build influence

here in the U.S. I do want to talk more about TikTok and recent comments by the FBI director Christopher Wright. But before we do that, I want to keep talking about your institute and also this recent article by the College Fix about UVA, their student government, actually calling for the divestment from companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party abuses. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and the potential impact of a divestment like this? So UVA has become the latest university where the student government voted in favor of comprehensive divestment from the CCP and from entities tied to it. Basically what that means is not just that we're asking universities to eliminate any investments they have in companies that are complicit in the CCP's human

rights abuses, but also that they ensure that they're not partnering with entities, you know, research on research partnerships that expose them to espionage. or that endanger their faculty and staff, that they not operate Confucius institutes, which give the Chinese government leverage over their curriculum, and that they not have business contracts or other financial relationships with entities in China that create that same kind of financial leverage.

So for us, the concern really is that universities financial ties to China and to the Chinese government have become chains. they endanger the basic functions of universities, but we want to actually turn that around and make universities leaders on this issue. And students have been doing that not just at UVA, which was the latest instance of this, but at the University of Maryland,

at the Catholic University of America, which actually was the first university that in response to our student pressure actually committed to divest at Georgetown University. And over the coming months and going into the spring, see that movement really spread around the country. So when students are the ones who are leading this, it allows us to emphasize that this really is grassroots. You know, this is not about,

you know, a matter of conservatism or liberalism or any otherism. It's a unifier. There aren't a lot of things that Americans can overwhelmingly agree on, but one thing we can agree on is that the Chinese government is dangerous, that it's a threat to our democracy, and that it shouldn't have financial leverage over our leading institutions. Students have been leaders on that, but it's not just students. In a, I think, a Pew poll this spring, we saw that more than 80% of Americans do not trust Chinese leader Xi Jinping to do the right thing on world affairs. A similar poll last year found that 70% of Americans thought that the U.S. should support human rights in China, even if it was at the expensive economic ties. So this is an overwhelming consensus. But by ensuring that students

are really in the driver's seat here, we can make universities leaders on this issue and we can make that movement start to spread to other institutions and eventually to big businesses and to Wall Street and really keep up the pressure on Congress to do the right thing. Yeah, I want to talk now about TikTok. I know we talked about it or you talked about it a little bit earlier and how it's so popular among people aged, you know, 18 to 24, which is obviously, you know, the typical age for college students. When we hear comments that it's a national security threat or it's spyware for the Chinese Communist Party, how do we relay this information to college age students who might not care or understand what's at risk with using TikTok?

I think what people, my age and younger and particularly college students need to understand is that TikTok and other sort of means of high-tech surveillance coming out of China, this is not some kind of unbiased platform. For one thing, there have been reports of censorship, of speech that was critical of the Chinese government. You know, that the algorithms that TikTok uses were preventing young people from learning about things like the abuses against Uighurs or the Chinese government's military buildup. So that's something that's very concerning is the fact that TikTok is very clearly being used to shape their views. And that's part of this broader trend where the Chinese government is using, you know, social media influencers and using. AI and bots on social media sites to try to create this false and very skewed narrative about

itself and about the U.S. and other countries to convince young people that the Chinese government is not committing these human rights abuses and that they have nothing to fear. Athena's core goal is not just to unwind the Chinese government's influence over our universities, but to ensure that, you know, this next generation of leaders who in 10, 15, 20 years are going to be leaders in business, in media, in politics, you know, you name it, to ensure that they aren't sort of swept up in this false view of China. And so that's what we really want to, you know, communicate to young people is that the narrative there being fed on TikTok is false. and that not just that, but TikTok is actually putting their personal information at risk. John, just one last question before we go. As we prepare for the new Congress, what are you hoping to see legislation-wise regarding China's influence on college campuses?

I think we're definitely going to see Congress start to turn its attention in a much bigger way toward the issue of university financial links. to China. I think particularly for us, a major goal is to ensure that Congress starts to act on university financial investments in Chinese companies and in entities in China that are directly complicit in the mass surveillance of ethnic minorities in China and in the use of Uigh or fourth labor. I think that's an area where we'll likely start to see some progress. But beyond that we do want to see Congress start to protect universities from the Chinese government's influence, going beyond endowments and looking at things like research partnerships, many of which really aren't meaningfully vetted, and a reform of the way universities accept money from foreign entities.

Between 2012 and 2018, U.S. universities reported a little over $15 million in donations from Hanban, which is the Chinese state entity that oversees Confucius Institutes. But a subsequent investigation by the Department of Education found that actually the real figure was closer to 113 million. So universities have massively underreported their financial links to China. And that's an area where Congress could absolutely provide some clarity and put pressure on universities to, you know, be open about the fact that they are in many cases accepting tens of millions of dollars from China. I actually just thought of.

One last question. Do you happen to know what schools accept the most money from the CCP? Between 2015 and 2019, the university that accepted the most funding from entities in China was MIT, at I believe over 125 million. We're collecting data in the present, and universities like a, Harvard have also taken over $100 million in the last three, four years. So this is a problem that's both incredibly broad in the number of universities that are implicated, but also incredibly deep in the level of influence that the Chinese government and Chinese entities can buy

over some of the universities that are really key research institutions like MIT and Harvard. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today. We'll definitely have to have you back on. If you have any more updates or you can provide any more information on such an interesting and important topic, John Metz, the president of the Athenae Institute, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Great to talk to you today. And that'll do it for my interview with John Metz. Thank you all so much for listening. If you haven't gotten a chance, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review.

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