Gordon Chang: US universities are shutting down China-funded Confucius institutes

Confucius institutes and Chinese students are being used as instruments of influence operations, says Gordon Chang, author of Losing South Korea (2019) and contributor at the Daily Beast.

Chang explains the significance of The Thousand Talents Initiative and how it operates in America.

“At Harvard university, we had a senior professor in charge of a department who actually was investigated and indeed has been arrested. With China, what the Thousand Talents Program is trying to do is secretly buy information from American professors and scientists and they’ve been extremely successful at it. The FBI says it has about a thousand investigations, active open investigations of espionage in commercial secrets and technological secrets that China has been operating. So, we have got to understand the breadth of Beijing’s effort to take US technology.”

“This really goes into what we’ve been talking about before, each year china steals hundreds of billions of dollars of US IP. On the Confucius Institutes, the US has been successful in getting universities to close them down, but I have to note that the City University of New York has just signed a multi-year Confucius institute deal with China and so this is going in the wrong direction opening up a new CI in the US.”

“What is happening here is that you have university administrators and professors self-censure themselves because we know they are receiving substantial funds from China through the Confucius institutes. This changes the whole atmosphere on campuses. So, this goes to the core of academic freedom, the core of free speech on campus, and there have been real problems in a number of places where the Chinese students and the Chinese government and security agencies have been able to influence discourse in very bad ways.”

Listen to the full show here