The activists were stunned. "[Salisachs] was talking to me as if he knows so much better than we do," Frances Hui, a Hong Kong activist who attended the meeting, told the Free Beacon. "We were all in shock—they were so disrespectful to us."

The October meeting was far from the first time an Olympics official dismissed Chinese human rights concerns. Salisachs's comments echoed those made by his father—Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former president of the International Olympics Committee—in the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The senior Samaranch, remembered today in China as a "dream-maker," for years turned a blind eye to Chinese state repression, telling reporters in 2008, "If we are talking about human rights, many countries that attack China should look at themselves." When pressed, the senior Samaranch often switched up his arguments, saying that the IOC can leverage its international prestige to nudge China to improve its human rights record.

The IOC has abandoned even the pretense of using its influence to reform the Chinese regime. Salisachs refused to consider discussions about Chinese human rights abuses, telling activists the Olympics is not the place to deliberate "political agendas," according to the meeting minutes.

"To try to leverage on the Olympic Games to obtain a number of political agendas is very dangerous," Salisachs said during the October meeting.

Since the 2008 Olympics, the authoritarian country has only strengthened its grip over society, inflicting genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and violent repression in Hong Kong and Tibet. While the IOC failed to influence China, the communist regime has managed to co-opt the IOC. In the last decade or so, the Chinese state fostered corporate sponsorships, personal ties, and institutional connections with Olympics executives, making it difficult for any games to be held without Chinese support.

"The IOC benefits a lot from Chinese business and Chinese government," Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer who attended the October meeting, told the Free Beacon. "And some senior officials have conflicts of interests."

China's multi-year effort to influence the IOC—ranging from a Samaranch memorial park the size of five football fields to lucrative deals with Chinese tech company Alibaba—provides a cautionary tale of how China uses its global influence to co-opt international organizations. China has used similar tactics to sway a wide range of international institutions, from the WHO to the U.N. Human Rights Council. The influence peddling operations have proven effective: The WHO refuses to give membership to Taiwan; meanwhile, Chinese diplomats in the UNHRC threaten experts who testify about China’s genocide of Muslim Uyghurs.

The Chinese state used a multi-pronged strategy to influence the IOC. One of the most important pillars of this strategy was the cultivation of personal ties to the Samaranch family. The senior Samaranch helped China whip the votes necessary to secure the right to host the 2008 Olympics. When he died in 2010, China built a 144,000-square-meter memorial park in Tianjin, China. The memorial opened in 2013 and displays 16,000 items from the former IOC president's "personal collection—books, stamps, souvenirs, paintings, letters, photographs, and personal items." Chinese leader Xi Jinping posthumously awarded Samaranch the "China Reform Friendship Medal" in 2018, recognizing him as one of 10 foreigners who contributed to China in the post-Mao era.

As the Chinese state showered Samaranch with honors, his son, Salisachs, climbed up through the ranks of the IOC. The younger Salisachs became a vice president on the IOC executive board in 2016, and soon after was named the chairman of the coordination commission for the 2022 games. He is considered a likely contender for the IOC presidency in 2025. Salisachs, like his father, is now one of the regime's public boosters, appearing on Chinese propaganda outlets to praise the authoritarian regime. In February 2020, Salisachs downplayed the coronavirus threat during an interview with Xinhua News, a Chinese state-owned outlet. He praised China's "transparent, efficient, and strong" pandemic response.

"The population and the administrators of the Chinese government are giving the world an example of how to cope with a very serious thing," he said.

Teng, the human rights lawyer, said that Salisachs is an example of how senior IOC officials are willing to stay silent on Chinese human rights abuses to pursue their own interests. "The IOC's top officials have very good connections to the Chinese government," Teng said. "They may have said they are in favor of human rights, but that's only lip service."

The Chinese government has increased its reach into the IOC in recent years. Yu Zaiqing, a senior Chinese Communist Party official, has sat alongside Salisachs on the IOC executive board since 2014. China is one of six countries—and the only non-Western state—to have three active-duty IOC members. China's representation in the IOC gives it outsized influence on IOC decisions, including where to host the next Olympics.

While the Chinese state built ties to the Samaranch family, Chinese corporate entities established lucrative sponsorship deals with the IOC. None has played a greater role than Chinese tech giant Alibaba. As part of a 12-year deal—which was discussed in a meeting between Xi and IOC president Thomas Bach—Alibaba will play an "active role" in providing essential tech services for all Olympic Games, including the 2022 Beijing Games. The company has pledged to use its cloud computing infrastructure to help international broadcasters stream the games across the world. That assistance is essential for the bottomline of the IOC, which makes nearly three quarters of its $5 billion revenue by selling broadcasting rights. Alibaba will also run the Olympics' official online store in China, playing a mediator role between the IOC and Chinese consumers.

"This is much more than a traditional sponsorship," a senior Alibaba executive said in 2017. "We are committed to supporting the IOC to transform the Olympic Games for the digital era."

While Alibaba is ostensibly independent, the Chinese government has for years threatened to bring the tech company under its heel. After founder Jack Ma criticized the country's financial policy in 2020, the Chinese state slapped a massive fine on the company and imposed regulations that allow Beijing greater oversight of its operations. The Chinese government is also considering ousting Ma from his own company.

The IOC counts other Chinese companies as major sponsors as well. Mengniu Dairy, a Chinese beverage company, signed a $3 billion deal with the IOC and Coca-Cola, one of the biggest deals of its kind in sports history. The IOC also works with the Chinese company ANTA to manufacture Olympics uniforms—an arrangement that came under fire in April after ANTA confirmed it used cotton made in Xinjiang for its products. The IOC has yet to announce any changes to the partnership, despite concerns that Xinjiang-made cotton relies on forced labor for its production.

And the pandemic will likely further strengthen the Chinese government's influence over the IOC—China will sell its vaccine to all contestants in the 2022 Beijing Olympics as well as the postponed 2021 Tokyo Olympics. "We are grateful for this offer, which is in the true Olympic spirit of solidarity," Bach, the current IOC president, said in a March online meeting announcing the vaccine purchases.

Since the October meeting, activists have shifted their efforts to calling on countries and corporations to boycott the Olympics—a measure supported by some U.S. politicians. They say they changed their strategy when the IOC ignored them after the meeting, despite a pledge to continue the dialogue.

"Their strategy after the meeting was to ignore us, pretend that they don’t know anything about the human rights abuses," Hui, the Hong Kong activist, said. "All of us got out of the meeting with a huge disappointment."

The post How China Co-Opted the Olympics appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The American Mask Manufacturers Association said that the Chinese government provides state subsidies to Chinese manufacturers, allowing them to sell personal protective equipment abroad for a "fraction of the cost." The association said that the World Trade Organization must act quickly to prevent a "dangerous reliance" on Chinese manufacturers, which they said makes less reliable equipment compared with American producers.

"We are urging, pleading, the WTO to take action against China's behavior," association chairman Brent Dillie said. "The flood of cheap, inferior face masks on the market threaten global efforts to curb community spread of the virus."

China's persistent effort to put American mask manufacturers out of business is a sign that the authoritarian government seeks to maintain its stranglehold over the global PPE market in the post-pandemic world. Policymakers worry that a Chinese monopoly over the life-saving supplies will weaken America's ability to withstand the next pandemic.

"Chinese capture of supply chains that produce equipment like face-masks and respirators has directly resulted in lives lost across all our countries," Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said in May 2020.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced legislation to boost domestic medical equipment production and reduce dependency on China. "We need to better secure our supply chain and ensure that Americans have uninterrupted access to life-saving drugs and medical devices," he said in 2020.

Both Democrats and Republicans support strengthening domestic manufacturing of PPE goods. In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at finding ways to boost domestic production of PPE and other essential goods for the American economy.

The post China Accused of Dumping 'Ultra-Cheap Masks' Into U.S. Market appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Former visiting lecturer J. Khadijah Abdurahman accused Cornell associate professor Tapan Parikh of firing her "for calling out South Asian anti-Blackness with a GIF and speaking out against ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia" in a March Medium post. Abdurahman reupped the GIF in question—a meme of the vice president sipping tea, intended to mock an endorsement of a syllabus for one of Parikh’s courses that included critical race theory. Parikh sent angry private messages to her about the professional slight and terminated her employment at Cornell Tech, the university’s New York City-based tech campus, according to Abdurahman's post.

pic.twitter.com/iCPW4G4AjT

— Khadijah *Receipt Custodian* (@UpFromTheCracks) March 24, 2021

The spat between the two academics metastasized into a university-wide scandal after Abdurahman published a Medium post arguing that her experience at Cornell Tech was symptomatic of an anti-black culture. Cornell Tech agreed to a seven-point program to repair a campus culture that it said "falls short of our desire to be welcoming, inclusive, and supportive for women, people of color, non-binary people, or people with disabilities," according to internal emails reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

In those emails, Cornell Tech promised several different policies to reform the university. The university will require anti-racism training for all faculty and students, work to "hire more people from underrepresented communities," and bring on a new "director to focus on cultural issues, especially diversity, equality, and inclusion."

Those commitments are the latest steps taken by the university to embrace critical race theory. The university's faculty Senate will soon officially recommend the creation of an anti-racism center, which will promote change through the "undoing of settler colonialism, white privilege, and other forces that perpetuate systemic racism and bias."

Cornell's reforms, however, will benefit neither of the two aggrieved academics: Abdurahman did not get her job back and Parikh was forced out of an undergraduate program he helped lead. (The university declined to clarify if Parikh lost his associate professor post as well.) Neither Abdurahman nor Parikh responded to requests for comment.

The episode began in late March after a University of Washington scholar, Sucheta Ghoshal, tweeted her "critical technology" syllabus focused on black voices. When some South Asian scholars suggested Ghoshal should include readings from the global south, Abdurahman saw the pushback as another attempt to muscle out black voices in academia. So, when one of the scholars recommended Parikh's syllabus on "anti-colonialism and liberation" to Ghoshal, Abdurahman had to act. "In lieu of an essay length response a layered critique requires, I posted a GIF of Kamala Harris sipping tea sans text," she wrote.

According to Abdurahman, Parikh started sending her "egregious, racist direct messages" soon after she posted the GIF. In those messages, Parikh allegedly accused Abdurahman of cementing an "asians vs. black narrative" at Cornell and mocked her activism for the Oromo people, an oppressed group in Ethiopia. "Anyway u and no name can go start your black liberation oromo front and make podcasts, remixes, of whatever," Parikh wrote, according to a screenshot posted by Abdurahman.

The next morning, Parikh fired Abdurahman. Soon after, Abdurahman wrote the Medium post, taking the matter public. Nearly 250 people, including critical race and computer science researchers from across the country, signed onto a petition demanding Cornell reinstate Abdurahman and hire more black faculty members.

At first sight, it was unclear whether Abdurahman's pressure campaign was effective. Cornell University said both sides share some blame. A "comprehensive review of the recent issues at Cornell Tech" found that "both parties involved in this matter did not act appropriately," according to a university statement.

But internal emails showed that Abdurahman's petition had forced concessions from the university. Despite stating otherwise, administrators internally blamed Parikh alone. "The tone, content, and actions of one of our faculty members to another person were unacceptable," Cornell Tech dean Greg Morrissett wrote to his colleagues in an April 24 email. "I have taken action to address this."

Morrissett billed Cornell Tech's renewed commitment to critical race theory as the necessary antidote to prevent similar incidents in the future. But the ascendance of critical race theory is eliciting pushback from some members of the faculty. Cornell law professor William Jacobson said in a RealClearPolitics editorial that woke rhetoric will only lead to "self-imposed racial conflict" rather than true equity.

"Rather than lessening racism, these approaches adopt discriminatory racial practices and verbiage that in any other context would be rightfully deemed racist," he wrote. "Instead of focusing on inherent human worth without regard to skin color, race becomes the obsessive focus and measure."

The post Kamala GIF Tiff Sparks Mandatory 'Anti-Racism' Training at Cornell appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Biden said in a Wednesday congressional address that China is "closing in fast" on the United States. He proposed universal pre-K, free college, and green infrastructure as remedies to the threat posed by the communist regime, adding that "there’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing." One solution that went unmentioned was increasing the defense budget, which is slated to shrink under the Democratic administration.

The Biden speech drew criticism from Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who said the president did not adequately explain China's threat to Americans.

"President Biden’s remarks on China did not meet the moment," Cotton said. "He missed an important opportunity to rally our nation against the greatest foreign threat to the United States."

The president's speech elicited renewed Republican concerns about his budget priorities. Just as the president was reading his speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R., Ky.) press office noted Biden’s budget proposal expands spending in "every corner of government with one big exception: national defense." The Biden defense budget first introduced in March comes in at $715 billion, which marks a slight decrease from the Trump administration’s last defense plan when accounting for inflation. The budget proposal fell far short of the proposed 3 to 5 percent increase in defense dollars demanded by congressional defense hawks.

And while the president pledged to never "back away ... from our commitment to human rights" abroad, he stopped short of directly raising Chinese human rights issues. Biden made no mention of China's genocide in Xinjiang, brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, or interference in Taiwanese democracy.

Biden mentioned more conventional methods for competing with China at the end of his speech. The president pledged to enforce fair trade and maintain a NATO-level military commitment to the Asia-Pacific—policies that came from the Trump administration's playbook.

Responding to Biden’s address, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said winning the China competition will require toughness, not "kowtowing to China."

"President Biden says that he wants to 'position us to win the competition of the 21st century,'" Pompeo said. "Kowtowing to China will ensure we lose that competition. We must be tough, not weak."

The post Biden: Universal Pre-K Needed To Compete With China appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Chinese tech giants such as Huawei and Tiktok have spent millions of dollars hiring lobbyists to push their agenda in Congress in the last 10 years. But the companies—all of which are either owned or closely linked to the Chinese government—have avoided registering the vast majority of their lobbyists as foreign agents through a loophole. 

Lobbyists for foreign entities must register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disclose detailed information about their influence-peddling operations. Huawei, a telecommunications company facing multiple indictments, has spent more than $8 million to hire more than 20 lobbyists to work the Hill in the last decade; none of these lobbyists have registered as foreign agents connected to Huawei. Tiktok's parent, Bytedance, has also never filed FARA disclosures concerning its multimillion-dollar attempt to influence the federal government.

This unseen group of Chinese tech lobbyists has scored key victories. Tiktok lobbyists fought off Republican attempts to remove the popular short-video app from the app store in 2020. Without FARA registration, government watchdogs will struggle to track how these foreign corporations were able to extract concessions from a Beltway elite that is increasingly hostile to China. 

"We've been quite concerned about the loophole for a long time," Mandy Smithberger, a director at the Project on Government Oversight, told the Washington Free Beacon. 

Federal law exempts lobbyists from foreign agent registration "as long as the representation is not on behalf of a foreign government or foreign political party." Because they are only advocating on behalf of regime-linked companies, these foreign lobbyists only have to comply with federal Lobbying Disclosure Act requirements, which have far fewer transparency standards. Subjecting foreign tech lobbyists to FARA would force them to disclose a wide swath of information—every single pamphlet, email, and document that they send to members of Congress—and comply with stricter rules regarding campaign donations. Domestic lobbyists are able to keep most of that information secret, so long as they reveal their compensation and the issues they lobbied for.

The lobbying exemption was carved out in the 1990s to reduce red tape for the many foreign companies active in the United States, according to Smithberger. Companies such as Toyota and Rolex, the thinking went, were independent corporations rather than agents of a foreign government.

But while Huawei and Tiktok are nominally independent companies, the Chinese Communist Party exercises significant control over them through internal party committees and regulations. Those state ties raise the question of whether these tech companies are truly advocating for their own corporate interest or are lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

"FARA certainly has a very Western interpretation of the lines between corporations and governments. It doesn't reflect how in some countries, those two are pretty synonymous," Smithberger said.

Klon Kitchen, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Huawei is a prime example of how the interests of the Chinese government and Chinese companies are closely intertwined. The Chinese state showers Huawei with state subsidies and stolen intellectual property to help it expand into foreign markets. Chinese hackers have used Huawei's overseas telecommunications infrastructure to infiltrate foreign web spaces. 

"The Chinese government requires that these companies deliberately pursue government interests," Kitchen said.

The use of the loophole is widespread among Chinese companies. ZTE, another Chinese telecom firm that pled guilty to illegally trading with Iran in 2017, has not registered more than two dozen Capitol Hill lobbyists as foreign agents. Hikvision—a state-controlled company that made surveillance equipment for Xinjiang, a region where the Chinese state is inflicting genocide on the Muslim Uyghur minority—has also failed to register lobbyists with FARA.

Ethics and transparency watchdogs say the disclosure system must be reformed. Smithberger said legislators should not only close loopholes but also give the Department of Justice stronger powers to investigate and levy fines on foreign actors that defy FARA provisions. Kitchen went a step further. He said the ubiquitous China lobby is a sign that the United States has become too closely intertwined with China. 

"A limited decoupling," Kitchen said, might be the only solution. "So long as the Chinese Communist Party insists on manipulating global free trade and creating massive economic and geopolitical distortions, the United States will be left with no choice."

None of the Chinese tech companies mentioned in this article responded to requests for comment.

The post China Exploits Lobbying Loophole to Dodge Disclosure appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in March reversed a 2020 executive order that directed federal agencies to "prioritize international religious freedom in the planning and implementation of United States foreign policy." The order also allocated $50 million in foreign assistance funding and expanded religious freedom training to federal employees. He vowed to "repudiate" the Trump administration's focus on religious freedom in foreign policy, which he said came at the cost of other human rights issues such as gay rights and abortion.

The Biden White House is backing away from advocacy for religious freedom abroad at a time when unscrupulous regimes are cracking down on religious minorities in China, Ethiopia, and across the Middle East. Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at Heritage Foundation, said America's drawdown in the face of persecution would hamper its broader foreign policy interests and human rights commitments.

"I think it would be a huge mistake for the Biden administration not to build momentum from the work done by the Trump administration to promote religious freedom," she said.

The Biden administration has not yet filled several key positions at the State Department and the National Security Council dedicated to religious freedom. The staffing shortage prompted the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to urge Biden to promptly fill the positions in its annual report published in April.

The State Department declined to comment on any potential nominations. A spokeswoman said the administration "is deeply committed to advancing universal respect for freedom of religion or belief for all people around the world" but didn't answer questions about criticisms of the department's reorientation under Biden. The White House declined to comment.

Religious liberty advocates in the Trump administration played a key role in shaping America's strong stand against China's human rights abuses according to experts, crafting sanction regimes for religious freedom violators and pushing for the designation of the Uyghur genocide. If Biden weakens the emphasis on religious liberty, then that might weaken America's ability to hold China accountable.

"There are several instances where Chinese Communist Party members were sanctioned in no small part due to the people throughout the administration who worked on religious freedom pushing for it," Enos said. While the abuses in China have dominated headlines, religious freedom plays a role in other international crises around the world.

The Biden administration and Democratic lawmakers have come under fire from activists for soft-pedaling the U.S. government’s response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Tigray, a northern region of Ethiopia. Footage from the region shows pro-government forces shelling churches in the region and witnesses reported the massacre of hundreds of people who sought refuge inside an Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The State Department has issued statements concerning the presence of foreign troops in the region, and lawmakers have condemned the violence.

Additionally, a growing number of Christian activists have raised alarm about the targeting of Christian believers in Nigeria. The International Committee on Nigeria praised President Trump’s executive order on religious freedom as "a continued commitment to promoting and protecting religious freedoms abroad by stopping crimes against people of faith." The continued killings suggest a crisis that will outlast transitions of presidential power.

Chris Seiple, senior fellow for comparative religion at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, said the Biden administration is still young and the administration’s appointments have not been made yet, making it difficult to draw conclusions about Biden’s approach to religious freedom. But he said there will be a "natural pushback" on the Trump administration’s priorities.

"If you want to play politics, religious freedom for people on the left of center is a tainted word that only means Trump and that only means bad," he said. "Don’t disabuse America of one of its founding narratives because you think religious freedom is tainted by the previous administration."

Despite signs that the Biden administration might be switching gears, Nury Turkel, a USCIRF commissioner and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, remains "cautiously optimistic." He said both Democratic and Republican administrations should care about religious liberty because it is "inseparable from core American values."

"Religious freedom is the first human right for us as Americans," Turkel, a Uyghur activist, said. "It is included in the Declaration of Independence, which is a much older document than the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights."

Yuichiro Kakutani contributed to this report. 

The post Persecution Fears Rise as Biden Backs Away From Religious Freedom Abroad appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Cornell chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) is circulating a petition calling on Cornell to launch a controversial dual degree program bankrolled by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The group dismisses allegations of Chinese human-rights abuses as an attempt to "deliberately discredit and attack China."

"We sincerely hope that Cornell can carry out mutually beneficial cooperation with China," the petition says, "and avoid ideological conflicts, political disagreements and other factors affecting pure academic exchanges."

Students frequently launch petition campaigns—but unlike most student groups, the CSSA has the official backing of a foreign government. CSSA is the "ONLY Chinese student organization officially supported by [the] Embassy of People's Republic of China at Cornell University," according to its website. There are more than 150 CSSA branches on American universities across the country. It is unclear what role the Chinese embassy played in this petition, but Beijing has a history of using CSSA branches to influence campus discourse. Chinese consulate officials have ordered CSSA chapters to disseminate Chinese Communist Party propaganda on social media and have encouraged the groups to denounce anti-China views on campus, according to Foreign Policy. The group's Australian chapter allegedly spied on students on behalf of the Chinese government.

The embassy's involvement in upstate New York is a testament to the global reach of the Chinese propaganda apparatus, which hopes to minimize the repercussions of the Chinese government's human-rights violations. Engaging with Cornell is a key part of achieving that goal—by influencing Cornell, the Chinese state can influence the next generation of American elites.

"If they can shape in some way the way that Cornell students think about the CCP, then they can shape the future of America," Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Free Beacon.

The CSSA launched its petition after the Cornell student assembly and faculty senate passed resolutions in March demanding the university reconsider its plans for a dual degree program with Peking University. The students and the professors said a partnership with a government that is inflicting genocide and a university that jails its students violates Cornell's values.

CSSA's petition claims to speak on behalf of Cornell's Chinese students who are outraged by the resolution and "angry at the prejudice and attack China has suffered." The petition calls on Cornell to launch an "independent investigation" into China's human-rights abuses in Xinjiang. 

"As we all know, these media often deliberately discredit and attack China for political reasons. Recently, The human rights issue in Xinjiang deliberately created by the Western government and the media is the most typical example," the letter read. 

Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while CSSA's petition might represent the views of some members of Cornell's community, it ignores many Chinese students who "are not voicing their opinions publicly due to fear of possible repercussions." 

"The fact that we hear mostly just one voice coming from the Chinese students is because other voices are in effect being silenced, even though the students are in the U.S.," Wang said.

The links between CSSA and the Chinese embassy—which often, though not always, provides funding for the student group—has alarmed policymakers. In 2018, then-vice president Mike Pence said the CSSA is fostering a "culture of censorship" on American campuses by alerting the Chinese embassy and consulates when Chinese international students "stray from the Communist Party line."

Magnus Fiskesjö, a Cornell anthropologist studying Uyghur issues, said Cornell must stand against an embassy-backed group that intimidates Chinese nationals and prevents free discourse.

"We should oppose Chinese government interference in our academic affairs—and we must protect the right also of Chinese students who come here, to not be forced and coerced into repeating the regime's party line," Fiskesjö said.

The post China-Backed Student Group Pressures Cornell on Educational Partnership appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Epoch Times, a paper founded by Chinese dissidents in 2000, said four intruders forced their way into the paper's Hong Kong printing plant during the early hours of April 12. The intrusion marks the fifth time vandals attacked the printing facility since it was established in 2006.

Surveillance footage shows masked attackers, one of them armed with a knife, wielding sledge hammers to destroy printing equipment. The intruders scuttled away after two minutes, stealing a computer in the process.

4 masked intruders armed with sledge hammers barged into the @EpochTimesHK printing plant in the early hours of April 12, damaging computers and printing equipment.

The printing press has been attacked 4 previous times.

Read full article: https://t.co/B7IxnquMOd pic.twitter.com/esNgaDpvXJ

— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) April 12, 2021

The attackers are still at large, but the Epoch Times laid the blame squarely on the Chinese Communist Party. Cheryl Ng, a spokeswoman for the Epoch Times's Hong Kong edition, said the "intrusion was characteristic of the CCP" and aimed to silence "reporting on topics that are taboo to the communist regime."

The Epoch Times is not the only newspaper suffering from the Chinese state's growing repression in Hong Kong, which has worsened since it passed a national security law in June 2020. In August, authorities arrested Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, the owner of the pro-democracy Apple Daily, ostensibly for colluding with foreign powers. Police raided the Apple Daily's office on the same day, carting off boxes of evidence.

The post Men Armed With Sledgehammers, Knife Attack Chinese Dissident Paper appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

When Friedman, a longtime columnist for the Times, participated in a March 29 "fireside chat" with the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank with close ties to the regime, the state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN) broadcast the entire 90-minute interview. Once the interview was over, the network disseminated the interview as an example of a Western intellectual calling for improved relations between the two superpowers. 

"Friedman said 1979-2019 was a golden era of global prosperity and peace with the US and China at the core, and the two countries need to find ways to work together for the sake of the world’s development," a writeup of the interview by the state-owned China Daily read.

Chinese propagandists touted the Friedman interview across the world, including in the United States. China Daily paid to run advertorials highlighting the interview on the website of Foreign Policy, a global affairs magazine read by American foreign policy elites. Foreign Policy did not respond to a request for comment. 

The March 29 interview is only the most recent example of Friedman appearing on Chinese propaganda outlets. CGTN has interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winner on at least four separate occasions, one dating back to 2015. Friedman repeated pro-China talking points in these media appearances, such as criticizing the Trump administration's confrontational approach to China, which he said would do irreparable damage to the global order.

"I believe America and China are one country, two system," Friedman told CGTN in 2019. "We are one country in a sense that our fates are tied together. America cannot rise, I don't believe, without a healthy relationship with China."

Friedman's interview is the latest example of the links between the Times and the Chinese propaganda apparatus. During the 2010s, the Times sold hundreds of advertising spaces to China Daily, which in turn used the ad space to publish propaganda articles touting China's Tibet policies and economic development. While the paper quietly ended the ad sales in 2020, Friedman's participation in the panel discussion is a sign that the paper still allows its writers to support Chinese propaganda efforts. The Times did not respond to a request for comment.

Friedman has a history of writing columns that lavish praise on China, often at the expense of the United States. In March, Friedman wrote a column titled "China Doesn’t Respect Us Anymore—for Good Reason." In October 2020, he wrote another article criticizing the U.S. pandemic response titled "China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump." 

While Friedman is happy to write polemics against the U.S. political system, he is much more hesitant to criticize the shortfalls of the Chinese state. During the March 29 interview, Friedman acknowledged the Chinese government's oppression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang but said that "Americans need to understand that a country of 1.4 billion people needs to maintain stability" before condemning Chinese human-rights abuses.

"China's central value is the stability of the collective," Friedman said. "And it values that more than Uyghur nationalism or Jack Ma getting rich."

Friedman added that while Americans might have legitimate criticisms about Xinjiang, the Chinese can lob equally valid criticisms about American policing issues. "I can say, 'How you're treating your Muslim population, that bothers me,'" Friedman said. "And China can say, 'Wait a minute, looking at what's going on in Minnesota, Minneapolis, how you have large numbers of poor people, maybe that bothers me too.'"

Friedman's comments tying Chinese human-rights atrocities to American political issues is in line with the strategy adopted by Chinese propagandists. Chinese propagandists have implied that the Chinese treat the Muslim Uyghurs much better than Americans did African Americans during the Jim Crow and antebellum era.

The post Chinese Propagandists Tout NYT Columnist Thomas Friedman's Comments appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Western China's Xinjiang region—where China is forcing more than a million Uyghurs into brutal forced labor regimes—dominates the solar sector's supply chain. Nearly half of the world's polysilicon, a raw material crucial to producing solar cells, comes from Xinjiang. That economic dependency is attracting the attention of a bipartisan group of lawmakers and union heads, who cite credible reports linking the solar industry to the modern-day slavery regime.

The first volley came from AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. A top Biden ally whose union spent millions backing Democrats in 2020, Trumka called on the White House to block solar product imports from Xinjiang due to "convincing evidence of systematic forced labor" in a March letter. Weeks later, a group of eight GOP senators unveiled the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, which would prohibit the use of federal funds to purchase solar panels "manufactured or assembled in Communist China." 

Congressional Democrats are also getting in on the act. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) in March urged the Solar Energy Industries Association to "protect consumers from inadvertently contributing to human rights abuses abroad" by banning certain Xinjiang products. The national trade association, which represents more than 1,000 solar companies, responded by noting that it has called on its members to "completely leave the Xinjiang region by June."

The wide-ranging effort to distance U.S. solar from the Xinjiang genocide illustrates the challenges facing the Biden administration's "clean energy economy." Top White House climate officials have touted the solar sector's ability to deliver "good-paying union jobs," particularly for displaced fossil fuel workers. But China's stranglehold on the industry means most U.S. solar jobs merely involve installing Chinese-made parts. Biden's Environmental Protection Agency administrator conceded that dynamic during a recent confirmation hearing, stating "most of the parts we want to install come from China."

Heartland Institute president James Taylor told the Washington Free Beacon that it is "entirely impossible" to ramp up wind and solar power on the scale Biden is proposing without Chinese  goods. He also argued that the "high-paying jobs" Biden has promised "won't be in America."

"Conventional power plants are built here in the United States, they're built with materials produced here in the United States, they're operated and maintained here in the United States, and they employ workers perpetually here in the United States," Taylor said. "By comparison, wind and solar materials are mined and produced primarily overseas, the equipment is manufactured primarily overseas, and the jobs that are created … tend to be temporary."

The White House did not return a request for comment.

Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, which is another name for Xinjiang, said that Xinjiang only produced raw materials for 9 percent of global solar production before 2016, the year the Chinese government started opening reeducation camps. Now, that number is up 400 percent. The huge spike in production capacity is likely driven by the use of forced labor, according to a report by Horizon Advisory, a D.C.-based consulting company.

Hudayar said Western companies are "kowtowing to China" by importing Xinjiang-made polysilicon. "They are selling out their moral, ethical, and Western values just to be able to operate in China," he said.

The solar industry is not the only industry under fire for its ties to Xinjiang. About one in five of the world's clothing apparels likely contain cotton grown in Xinjiang, much of which is produced by Uyghur forced laborers. While Western apparel firms such as H&M and Nike signed a pledge in 2020 to avoid Xinjiang-made cotton, some of the companies backpedaled after Chinese nationalists backed a nationwide boycott of all offending Western companies.

The Chinese government's steadfast refusal to acknowledge its atrocities in Xinjiang—and its willingness to punish Westerners who do—puts the Biden administration in a pickle, according to Nury Turkel, a Uyghur American senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. While Biden in general supports a confrontational approach to China, he also hopes to cooperate with the authoritarian country on the issue of climate change. 

But that cooperation, Turkel said, should not come at the expense of Uyghurs.

"It is unconscionable that Americans who are conscious about climate change unwillingly become complicit in the ongoing modern slavery," Turkel said.

The post Solar Industry's Reliance on Chinese Forced Labor Threatens Biden's Green Economy appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Cornell faculty senate rejected a resolution endorsing a partnership with Peking University on Wednesday, citing the authoritarian regime's human rights abuses, as well as its threats to academic freedom. The non-binding resolution failed in a 16-39 vote with 20 abstentions. The sizable opposition to the resolution complicates the university's plans to push forward with the China partnership paid for by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

The growing faculty opposition is part of a society-wide reckoning about the lucrative relationship between America's elite universities and China. For decades, Cornell and other top-tier American universities established numerous programs and partnerships in China that raised hundreds of millions of dollars. But as the Chinese government's repression grows more severe, some professors worry their institutions value lucrative relationships more than their moral principles.

Professor Richard Bensel, a government professor leading the charge against the partnership, said Cornell's staunch refusal to recognize any Chinese human rights abuses, including the genocide of Muslim Uighurs, is a "total abdication of moral responsibility."

"The central administration is much more revenue conscious, much more materialistic than it was five years ago," Bensel told the Washington Free Beacon. "It basically in many ways has just abandoned some of the moral and ethical concerns that a great university should have."

The Cornell professors are not alone in their disapproval. Cornell student leaders unanimously voted to demand a "halt" to the Peking University partnership, a sign that the faculty discontent is spilling over into the student body. And across the country, more than 100 academics and professors signed a letter urging Western universities to fully disclose their China ties.

The successful campaign against the Peking University partnership has emboldened professors, who are pushing for more sweeping changes. Both Bensel and Joanie Mackowski, an English department faculty member, have introduced new resolutions that will strengthen the role of the faculty senate in deciding future partnerships with not just China but all authoritarian countries. Electronic voting for those resolutions will finish on April 7.

"What we don't want is a superficial revision just to pacify people," said Mackowski.

Not all professors are gung-ho about curtailing the university's ties to China. Computer science professor Ken Birman said that his father, also a professor, was able to help Soviet refuseniks get visas to leave their oppressive regimes because he had strong academic ties across the Iron Curtain. He said Cornell could "lose leverage that lets us help people who are in difficult situations" if it abandons programs in China.

Other faculty members defended the Chinese government. Communications professor Connie Yuan rejected the genocide designation for China's crackdown against Muslim Uighurs as "quite misleading."

"Lot of professors in Cornell thought this was a humanitarian disaster, and they came to the defense of Uighur Muslims," Yuan said. "I understand their good intentions, but it seems to me an exaggerated reality or misinformation."

The Cornell faculty senate will reconvene in mid-April, where they will likely discuss additional legislation to rein in Cornell's ties abroad.

The post Cornell Professors Overwhelmingly Reject China Partnership appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"Unfortunately, the Cubans never made their list available to us," U.N. Human Rights Council spokesman Rolando Gómez told the Washington Free Beacon.

The Cuban envoy to the United Nations said in a March 12 statement to the Human Rights Council that international criticism of China's Xinjiang crackdown on Uighurs was based on "unfounded allegations made out of political motivation." Cuba claimed to be speaking "on behalf of 64 countries," a jump from the 45 countries that signed a similar resolution last October. Cuba did not identify, however, what the supporting countries were.

The Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Cuban mission to the United Nations in Geneva did not respond to a request for the signatories list.

The opaque nature of the Cuban statement could be a sign that fewer states are willing to defend China's human rights on the record, forcing China to adopt increasingly confrontational and coercive measures to tamp down on international criticism. Chinese media have already published incendiary propaganda arguing that America's history of slavery is far worse than the regime's treatment of Uighurs. Chinese nationalists are also boycotting popular Western brands, including Nike and H&M, after the companies said they will stop using cotton from Xinjiang.

Countries typically publish the signatories to their resolutions to broadcast the diplomatic support they enjoy. When 50 countries submitted a UNHRC resolution supporting China's crackdown in Xinjiang in 2019, the signatories made the letter available to the public. And when the Cubans introduced a resolution defending China in October, the country's envoy read aloud all 45 signatories.

Ivana Stradner, an international law expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said it would be highly unusual for countries to fabricate diplomatic support—but not out of the question.

"Usually these statements are written as a one-page document where they just list all signatories and a few sentences, but I couldn't find such a document," Stradner said. "I frankly wouldn't be surprised if they made things up."

The lack of transparency has caused headaches on the international stage, forcing countries such as the Maldives to swat down rumors that they were among the group that chose to praise China for its "achievements" on human rights.

The Cuban statement comes as China struggles to tamp down growing international criticism of its repression in Xinjiang. The United States, Canada, and the Netherlands have each officially recognized the Uighur genocide, with scores of Western states considering similar legislation. The growing outcry might affect China's economy as well: The genocide has convinced some Western brands to reconsider their relationship to China, with some businesses deciding to leave the country entirely.

China has historically turned to the United Nations to shore up international support. Since at least 2019, Western states and China have backed dueling statements condemning or supporting China's repressive policies in Xinjiang, according to the Diplomat. Chinese propaganda outlets regularly cited U.N. resolutions to deflect Western concerns.

"Western countries should stop imposing double standards regarding human rights," state-owned outlet Xinhua News wrote in an article that referenced Cuba's March 12 statement.

But China "sometimes bluffs" with these U.N. resolutions, according to Hillel Neuer, executive director of United Nations Watch. He pointed to another pro-China statement, delivered by Belarus in 2019, that failed to name 48 out of 54 alleged signatories.

Brett Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation expert on international organizations, said Cuba might be hiding the signatories list because it is "exaggerated" or to "avoid embarrassment for cosponsors." He said it is "highly unusual" for states to refuse to publish signatory lists, since "most countries want to know who else is supporting the letter/resolution."

The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

The post U.N. Casts Doubt on Chinese Claims of Growing Support for Human Rights Record appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The university's student leaders have chimed into the faculty-administration row over a multimillion-dollar partnership with Peking University, demanding during a March 25 meeting that Cornell suspend the partnership and "reevaluate all current international collaborations" for compliance to ethical standards.

"Obviously there were people in the student assembly who weren't happy with the cooperation with Peking University," Youhan Yuan, a student assembly member, told the Washington Free Beacon. "There is a risk that Peking University might do something despicable that you do not like. And that would be bad for your ethical standards."

The resolution—which passed with 18 yeas, 0 nays, and 4 abstentions—is not binding. University rules, however, require Cornell president Martha Pollack to respond to the petition within 30 days, forcing the president to provide an on-the-record statement about the partnership for the first time. Cornell University has thus far refused to acknowledge that China is committing any human-rights abuses that warrant a response from the university. 

The resolution's passage is a sign that students, not just professors, increasingly see the Peking University partnership as an unseemly collaboration with a regime that inflicts genocide on Muslim Uighurs and jails students for speaking their mind. The growing campus-wide discontent threatens to upend not just Cornell's partnership with Peking University, but the entirety of its multimillion-dollar association with China.

"Continuing to partner with [Peking University] and other institutions in China normalizes and accepts the genocide that is currently ongoing," Laila Abd Elmagid, another student assembly member, said during the March 25 deliberations. 

Since the beginning of the row in February, Cornell administrators feared that opposition toward the Peking University partnership might morph into a larger movement questioning whether Cornell should be in China at all. In a Feb. 24 faculty senate meeting, Michael Kotlikoff, the university's number-two administrator, conceded that professors opposed the Peking University program out of human-rights concerns that "could be leveled" at "many programs, existing programs in China." 

The student resolution indicates that the administrator's fears are now reality. The resolution targets not just Cornell's ties to China, but with all countries "where academic freedom is in question," such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

Cornell has a mixed track record when it comes to its response to student demands for divestments. In the last two years, the university administration rebuffed student demands to boycott Israel but accepted their petition to divest from fossil fuels. But even if Cornell yields to faculty and student demands, the university must decide what its new relationship with China will look like in light of the country's human-rights abuses. Should Cornell withdraw from China entirely, or only from some programs?

Weifeng Yang, a Chinese student activist at Cornell, opposed a "complete ban" on Chinese partnership. Instead, he proposed that the university should jettison all "academically unfulfilling" programs but keep immersion programs in China that will help raise the next generation of China hands in the United States. Yang said the Peking University partnership should be on the chopping block because it is an obvious cash grab by the university. Administration officials have admitted as much, calling the partnership a "very profitable venture" that will raise up to $1 million in annual profit.

"Cornell gets cash and Peking University gets prestige," Yang told the Free Beacon. "Cornell is selling its prestige at a particular time when China needs this prestige because of the s— they have done."

But whatever the university's new relationship will look like, Cornell Republicans president Weston Barker said Cornell must acknowledge that the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity.

"Cornell University should at the bare minimum take the stance of both the Trump and Biden administrations in acknowledging the Uighur genocide," Barker said. "The actions being taken in Xinjiang by the CCP have been increasingly documented and cannot be ignored."

The university did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Cornell Students Call to Halt China Partnership appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

After President Joe Biden scrapped a Trump-era proposal that would have required universities to disclose their foreign monetary ties, Governor Bill Lee realized that he needed to act quickly to protect the state's universities from Chinese influence. The Tennessee Republican introduced a bill in the state legislature that would require the public universities to sever ties with the Confucius Institute.

"The Biden administration has rolled back the transparency that was put in place by the Trump administration, so we want to take care of that at the state level," Lee told the Washington Free Beacon in a Tuesday morning interview.

The Tennessee bill is one of several state-level initiatives that seek to curtail foreign influence on American campuses. The Texas and Utah legislatures are debating bills that seek to close down Confucius Institute programs in state universities, according to a list of ongoing legislation maintained by the National Association of Scholars. Four other states are also considering bills with a wider scope, including measures to ban public universities from partnering not just with the Confucius Institute but with any "communist regimes" or "the government of China."

The spate of anti-Confucius Institute legislation is a sign that states are taking matters into their own hands as the Biden administration drags its feet in responding to foreign influence. The Trump-era Department of Education opened 13 investigations into the foreign ties of American universities between February 2020 and January 2021. The Biden White House has so far opened zero investigations. Elite U.S. colleges, a key constituent for the Biden administration, have spent thousands of dollars lobbying the Democratic administration to halt federal probes into their multimillion-dollar partnership with China and other human rights abusers.

The White House is not solely to blame for the lackluster federal response. House Democrats have also blocked the passage of sweeping legislation against the Confucius Institute. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) refused to hold a vote on an anti-Confucius Institute bill that unanimously passed in the Senate in 2020. Lee said states must step up amid federal inaction.

"National security is a state issue as well," the governor said. "It's increasingly a state issue when the federal government is not keeping a strong defense."

Tennessee already leads the way in the nationwide effort to shut down the Confucius Institute. The state's public universities—which together received more than $2.5 million from Confucius Institute and its affiliates—are in the process of shutting down the Chinese government program. The bill's passage will ensure that the Confucius Institute will not be able to establish any foothold in Tennessee. 

Growing government and public scrutiny has greatly diminished the influence of the Confucius Institute, which today counts 51 branches in universities down from an all-time high of 103. But the Chinese government program continues to draw up new schemes to avoid scrutiny. On some campuses it has adopted new names, though the substance of the program remains identical, to avoid detection. Lee said he has made amendments to his bill to cover all iterations of the Confucius Institute program. But he warns that the re-branding effort is a sign that the Chinese government will continue to find new ways to influence American civil society.

"This is not an issue that's going to be quickly resolved or quickly fixed," he said. "This is an issue that we're going to have to watch for months or years."

The post As Biden Admin Caves on Confucius Institute, Tennessee Moves to Pick Up Slack appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

China's role in the systematic repression of Uighurs is complicating the Ivy League university's efforts to jump start an educational partnership with China's Peking University. Standing in the way are the university's guidelines on "ethical international engagement," which bar partnerships with foreign groups accused of "serious legal or human rights violations." 

That explains why the university, asked by the Washington Free Beacon whether the Chinese government or Peking University is guilty of "serious legal or human rights violations,'' dodged the question. The proposed partnership is "under review by the university," Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford said in a statement. "The full faculty senate, among other constituents, is engaged in robust discussions about the program."

The proposed program is already the subject of controversy on the Ithaca, New York, campus, as faculty members object to an education partnership funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education. Many professors see the program as a morally dubious money grab—one administrator repeated the term "profitable" four times within one minute during a presentation about the program. Professor Magnus Fiskesjö, a Cornell anthropologist leading the charge, says it is not worth the money because it is tantamount to "legitimizing and endorsing" China's genocide of Uighurs and other human rights abuses.

The drama unfolding in upstate New York is illustrative of the growing discomfort in the United States of educational partnerships with China, which is increasingly seen as the country's top geopolitical adversary. At Cornell, vocal faculty discontent threatens not just a lucrative partnership with Peking University—which could rake in up to $1 million annually, according to one administrator—but the entirety of Cornell's multimillion-dollar relationship with China, which has raised at least $27 million for the university between 2014 and 2019.

The fate of the new partnership now hangs in the balance. Faculty members are now citing the ethics guidelines, which were written in 2019 to mollify growing criticism of Cornell's partnerships with China, Qatar, and other human rights abusers, to argue that the university policy prohibits the partnership.  

Professor Eli Friedman, who studies Chinese labor rights issues, said Peking University students who expressed sympathy with Chinese workers have been harassed, jailed, and tortured by Chinese authorities—acts that Friedman told his colleagues are a clear violation of the ethics guidelines during a faculty senate meeting on March 17.

"We haven't heard why this recent behavior should be overlooked," Friedman said.

"There are legitimate questions," said Michael Kotlikoff, the university's number two administrator, "about what to do if difficult or heinous things occur" at a partner institution. But he told professors that it is the job of the administration, not faculty members, to judge whether a specific program violates the ethics guidelines. Professors should avoid regularly weighing in on "how we value engagement versus democracy," he said.

Kotlikoff's comments echo the university's strategy of keeping the dissenters out of the decision-making process. At the March 17 faculty senate meeting, the administration proposed turning the joint program's fate to the "international council" with veto authority over any joint degree programs with foreign universities. But the faculty senate will only hold an advisory role in the council, which is staffed almost exclusively by administrators.

The university's stonewalling tactics are frustrating professors, many of whom worry that Cornell's financial interests in China might compromise its moral compass.

"As the entanglement with China increases, and as the financial disincentive to severing relationships become overpowering, I worry that Cornell will be too willing to overlook serious transgressions by the Chinese Government," law professor Joe Marguiles told his colleagues during the meeting.

The faculty senate once again declined to vote on the issue during the Wednesday meeting. The body will revisit the issue at its next meeting, on March 31. 

The post Cornell University, Pursuing Partnership with China, Can't Say Whether Beijing is Guilty of Genocide appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

United States government oversight and faculty pushback have curtailed the influence of the Confucius Institute, which has dwindled from 103 college branches in 2017 to just 51 today. But the propaganda program is not going away without a fight. Experts say that after host institutions shutter Confucius Institutes, some of the programs continue to operate by adopting new names.

The rebranding has allowed the Beijing-backed influence program to continue to shape the education of students from kindergartners to college students. According to a new report by the American Security Institute, more than 100 "Confucius classrooms" that cater to the K-12 system are now rebranded as the Asia Society Chinese Language Partner Network. 

"Confucius Institutes are trying to repackage themselves—same old wine, brand new bottle," Will Coggin, managing director of the American Security Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon.

The persistence of the Confucius Institute in the U.S. education system speaks to how difficult it is to convince American schools to sever ties with Chinese entities. Hanban, the Chinese Ministry of Education-backed group that runs the Confucius Institute, has spent more than $100 million to support the institutes in U.S. universities. Many universities fear that ending ties with the Confucius Institute will cause funding shortfalls and program cuts.

But U.S. officials say the Chinese money is not worth the strings attached to it. A bipartisan Senate report found that the Confucius Institute curtails academic freedom because the Chinese government controls "nearly every aspect" of the program in the United States. The report said Beijing requires instructors to follow Chinese laws and bars them from discussing topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Tibet issue. 

After Congress pursued legislation to rein in the Confucius Institute—including a bill that won unanimous support in the Senate—host institutions started to rebrand their China partnerships.

Asia Society, a U.S.-based nonprofit with ties to China, helped the regime establish more than 100 Confucius classrooms in elementary, middle, and high schools across the country. Until late 2020, the nonprofit touted its collaboration with the China-backed program on its website, according to the American Security Institute report.

"Asia Society's Confucius Classrooms are a national network of exemplary Chinese language programs," read an archived version of the Asia Society's website from August 2020.

Asia Society's website no longer mentions the propaganda program. The nonprofit has replaced every mention of the Confucius Institute with its new name, the Chinese Language Partner Network. The new program is functionally identical to its predecessor and teaches the same materials in the same schools, according to the website.

Asia Society did not respond to a request for comment.

Confucius Institute programs in American universities are also adopting new names to avoid scrutiny, according to Rachelle Peterson, an expert at the National Association of Scholars. She has found cases in which a university that claimed to shutter its Confucius Institute branch actually rebranded it as a new "China Center," though it taught the same materials provided by the Chinese government.

"Most [Confucius Institute] 'closures' result in the opening of a new China center, which retains at least some of the Confucius Institute staff," Peterson said. 

The Confucius Institute has long avoided government scrutiny by relying on its U.S. partners: Seventy percent of American universities with financial ties to Hanban kept them secret from the federal government, according to the Senate report. Coggin said the U.S. government must step up its transparency efforts in order to curtail Chinese influence in academia.

"Biden should focus on increasing transparency about Chinese operations in the U.S.," Coggin said. "Whether that's about universities or somewhere else, I think there's areas where we'd want to have more sunlight."

The post China-Backed Confucius Institute Rebrands to Avoid Scrutiny appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

At issue is a program introduced at a faculty meeting in early February, when Professor Alex Susskind, an associate dean at Cornell's school of hotel administration, touted a joint degree program funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education that he said would generate up to $1 million in annual profits for the university, according to meeting minutes and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 

Susskind's introduction elicited blowback from his colleagues, who expressed deep concerns about whether Cornell could maintain its academic independence given the Chinese government's increasing control over all aspects of civil society. The faculty senate postponed a vote to endorse the venture as a result.

"When I talk to my colleagues at Peking University, there's a dean and then there's a political officer," Ken Birman, a professor of computer science, told Susskind. "I'm wondering how we maintain Cornell's independence and freedom of bias and our standards?"

Susskind said he understands the concerns but doesn't consider them "overwhelmingly significant."

The pushback prompted the intervention of a top Cornell administrator, who participated in a subsequent faculty meeting on Feb. 24. There, university provost Michael Kotlikoff issued a warning to faculty members who had raised objections: Stop meddling. "The proper role of the faculty senate is really to set general principles," Kotlikoff said, urging faculty members "not [to] hold individual programs hostage to individual concerns."

The joint degree program with Peking University seeks to expand Cornell's footprint in China by catering to mid-level Chinese executives, offering them an American education under the tutelage of Cornell professors. The faculty pushback was prompted, in part, by the fact that the motivation for the program seemed purely financial: Susskind—who repeated the term "profitable" four times within one minute during his Feb. 10 presentation—appeared to be discounting Chinese human rights concerns in the face of the enormous economic opportunity. 

China has long been a cash cow for the Ivy League university, which raised $27 million from Chinese donors between 2014 and 2019, federal records show. But now, the dual degree program is at the center of a university-wide reckoning about Cornell's close ties to China in the wake of the country's genocide of Uighur Muslims and other human rights abuses.

"If we were running a joint degree program with a Nazi university, then we would have said, 'Well, we shouldn't be doing that, because they're committing genocide,'" Professor Eli Friedman, who studies Chinese labor issues, said at a March 10 faculty meeting.

Susskind responded to the criticism by conceding that "there are issues and problems in that part of the world," but that tourism and hospitality are some of the largest sectors of the Chinese economy. "Because we dominate the hospitality industry education," he said of Cornell's hotel school, "we want to be a part of that." 

Susskind did not respond to a request for comment.

The backlash also stems from a recent shift in how American academics approach China. While a decade ago, many believed that increased academic engagement with China was beneficial because it might expose the next generation of Chinese elites to democratic ideals, today faculty members are asking whether Cornell should have any ties with Beijing at all. 

The shift is the result of a growing awareness of Chinese state repression—not only in Xinjiang but also in elite Chinese universities. Professors say that Chinese authorities routinely suppress academic freedom at Chinese campuses, including at Peking University, where authorities kidnap students and subject them to inhumane interrogation techniques for speaking their minds about labor issues.

Professor Magnus Fiskesjö, a Cornell anthropologist who studies Uighur issues, told the Free Beacon that these Chinese universities are often under the direct control of the Chinese state, which directs them to violate academic freedom and other human rights. "I thought that [the dual degree program] was not a good idea because all these universities are similar in that they are under the thumb of the government," Fiskesjö said. 

University administrators countered those concerns by pointing to several ethics agreements with Chinese universities that they say will protect the academic freedom of students and faculty members in these programs.

Friedman, former chair of the China ethical engagement committee, is not convinced that the provisions in those ethics documents are actually enforced. "We have good principles that are enshrined in the university's core value statement, as well as in the guidelines on ethical and international engagement," he said at a March 10 faculty meeting. "They need to be rigorously enforced, and currently, they are not."

The university responded to a detailed list of questions from the Free Beacon with a statement from the provost, who repeated his claim that it was the administration's responsibility to review ethical considerations, not that of the faculty senate. "My suggestion was that going forward, the full faculty senate could focus on more general recommendations," Kotlikoff said. 

The senate will hold a nonbinding vote on the issue on March 17. Administrators can push ahead with the plan even if professors disapprove, but the stakes are high. If faculty members vote against the joint degree program, they might also oppose Cornell's many other programs in China. 

Abandoning those partnerships would be disastrous to the university's bottom line, something Fiskesjö says may be its only choice. 

"If you carry on business as usual, you end up legitimizing and endorsing what they're doing," he said. "You can run a genocide … and it doesn't matter, we'll keep opening new exchange programs with you."

The post Cornell Faculty Revolt Against China Partnership appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas) introduced a bill in September to "reduce America’s dependence on China" by supporting domestic production of rare earth minerals, key resources for advanced electronics that China has a global monopoly on. But even as Gonzalez urged Americans to distance themselves from China, the congressman held up to $50,000 in shares of HSBC—the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation—and kept up to $100,000 in a HSBC bank account, according to his 2020 financial disclosures.

"Ending our dependence on China starts today," Gonzalez said in a press release accompanying the bill. "The RARE Act will allow the United States to develop a reliable domestic supply of critical minerals and rare earth elements and eliminate this pressure point that could have lasting impacts on our national security and most importantly, our way of life."

While it moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to London in the 1990s, HSBC continues to source more than half of its global profits and one-third of its global revenue from Hong Kong. The company’s dependency on China has made it a close ally of the Chinese regime. HSBC backed a controversial national security bill in 2020 that human-rights observers say crippled the city's fragile democracy.

Gonzalez also kept up to $250,000 in a Bank of China account between 2017 and 2020, according to the financial disclosures. Bank of China is one of the largest banks in the country and is directly controlled by the Chinese government. Gonzalez’s spokesman said the Bank of China account "no longer exists" but did not comment on the status of the congressman’s HSBC investments.

"Congressman Gonzalez has fully complied with disclosure requirements for this investment," the spokesman said.

Gonzalez is not the only U.S. official under scrutiny for business ties to China. Senators grilled U.N. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield about a paid speech she gave for the Chinese government-controlled Confucius Institute during her confirmation hearing, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken faced questions about his consulting firm WestExec's Chinese business dealings during his confirmation hearing. Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, also received criticism for his business dealings in China during the Obama administration.

The Texan congressman's support for U.S. divestment from China is a new phenomenon. In 2018, Gonzalez traveled to China as part of a congressional delegation to promote closer trade ties with Beijing.

"Only by engaging with China can we secure fairer market access and intellectual property protections for businesses in the 15th district of Texas," the congressman said during the trip. "I look forward to continuing this dialogue and working with our two governments to expand economic opportunity for Central and South Texans."

The post Dem Congressman Who Pushed China Divestment Kept His Own Chinese Investments appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Microsoft acknowledged on March 2 that Chinese "state-sponsored" hackers used vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange's software to install malware and access the emails of thousands of victims. The tech company has nevertheless barreled forward in its Chinese business plan, announcing on March 4 that it will expand its cloud computing service Azure. The move is meant to "empower" Chinese citizens, who live in a country with some of the most heavily censored and monitored webspace in the world.

"Our intelligent, trustworthy, and neutral cloud platform has been empowering hundreds of thousands of developers, partners, and customers from both China and the world to achieve more with technical innovation and business transformation," Alain Crozier, Microsoft's head for the Greater China Region, said in a statement.

The Azure expansion is the latest sign that the Chinese hacking campaign has had little impact on Microsoft's decades-long relationship with China. The U.S.-based tech company has outsourced a large portion of its research and development department to the authoritarian country, where it has had a presence since 1992. The company also partnered with a Chinese military university to conduct research into artificial intelligence.

Microsoft declined a request for comment.

The global cyber attack has claimed a number of high-profile victims, including the European Banking Authority and thousands of businesses. The Biden White House said the hackers remain an "active threat" and that companies should patch up their softwares as soon as possible. The Chinese government has so far denied responsibility for the hacking campaign.

The Azure expansion plan will build a new cluster of data centers in northern China, speeding up the cloud service for Chinese users in the region, according to a press release. The cloud service employs Chinese company 21Vianet as a local partner. As China's leading data service provider, 21Vianet also conducts business with other Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba and Huawei, which U.S. officials say act as conduits for Chinese state espionage.

The Azure cloud computing service includes facial recognition software, a feature that might be attractive for authoritarian regimes. The company touts that "no machine learning expertise is required" to operate the program, which can search through a repository of up to one million people. Chinese authorities are increasingly using facial recognition to police their citizens, including the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Microsoft has nurtured a close relationship with Chinese entities over the course of nearly three decades, counting more than 17,000 partners in the authoritarian country. Despite the pandemic, Microsoft has continued to recruit even more local business partners. In December, Microsoft said it partnered with Huawei's spinoff company to build laptops in the country.

Microsoft also built its largest R&D base outside of the United States in China, employing more than 3,000 engineers and researchers located across four separate Chinese cities. The American company said its Chinese R&D division will contribute to China's prosperity.

"Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group's teams are spread across the region … Located in tech parks and recognized hubs for innovation, these campuses are strategically positioned to take advantage of— and contribute to— China's rapid transformation to an innovation economy," the company said on its website.

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We remained in Canada for weeks until air traffic resumed. Even after arriving in New York, our family still could not move into our downtown Manhattan apartment because the police had restricted entry to the area. I spent my first few months out of Japan living in hotels, where I played Donkey Kong 64 as my parents anxiously watched the news out of earshot.

But as terrible as 9/11 was, it was also the first time I came into contact with Americans from across the country. On Christmas, my school—located just five blocks away from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center—received gifts from hundreds of people living in Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, Oregon, and scores of other states. Each gift had an encouraging message attached: "We are with you!" "Mom said you might be hurting. We hope this helps." "Sending my love. Praying for you." 

As I stood up on Wednesday to take the Oath of Allegiance in a small room in the New York City federal building, I spotted a small placard that said "9/11 Never Forget" in the corner. My mind wandered to those happy Christmas days. As I pledged my service to my new adopted homeland—flanked by a deaf black man and a short Asian girl—a decades-old question returned to the front of my mind. What prompted those anonymous donors to give hundreds of expensive toys to us, not just in 2001 but for years afterward?

While I was only a child back then, the outpouring of unconditional love and compassion from complete strangers still puzzled me. I understood if people sent us gifts in 2001, when the memories of the terrible event were still fresh in everyone's minds. But they kept on sending us presents, year after year, long after 9/11 moved on from the daily news cycle. Every single year, our school would receive presents from those anonymous Americans. Every single year, I picked out the year's trending Hot Wheels set.

Every single year, those Americans had a choice. They could spend their Christmas bonus on themselves or their family. But instead, they chose to spend that money on the children of complete strangers. What inspired them to this act of unconditional kindness?

As I repeated the Oath of Allegiance in that brightly lit room, I felt that I finally had a satisfying answer to the question. The anonymous gifters sent me presents because they are Americans.

For the vast majority of the people in the world, they are born into their citizenship. It is an automatic bureaucratic process, stemming from a coincidence of birthplace. But for Americans, specifically immigrant Americans, citizenship is a choice. You must freely choose—"without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion"—to make an Oath of Allegiance to the United States during your naturalization ceremony. No one is forcing you to be an American, after all. 

While the voluntary oath explicitly lays out only war-time responsibilities—"support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies"—I believe the pledge implies something more. By pledging to give your life in combat to protect fellow Americans if necessary, newly minted citizens also make an implicit promise to do what they can to improve the lives of their fellow countrymen in more general terms. (I'm not a lawyer, though, so don't take this as legal advice!)

And every day, Americans strive to fulfill that pledge of service, through gestures big and small. Anonymous Idahoans did so when they sent gifts to my kindergarten class. My editor did so when he stopped by a homeless man to offer some cigarettes. My college classmates—Austin McLaughlin, Cris Lee, and so many others—did so by joining the armed forces.

On Wednesday, I was once again on the receiving end of that infinite capacity for kindness from fellow Americans. When I published a tweet announcing my naturalization, I received a torrent of messages from Americans across the country welcoming me into the family. 

As of today, I am a US citizen! pic.twitter.com/jVvfCzuQP1

— Yuichiro Kakutani (@kakutani_y) March 3, 2021

I expected that some of the comments would be nasty or xenophobic, but to my surprise, almost every single comment was a genuine message of congratulations. Some of the replies, however, included messages that lamented the decline of America: "Dude, are you sure about this?" "Thanks for picking us despite our huge flaws!"

I believe America is a great country, but I am also not blind to its faults. Simply being dejected about the current state of the country, however, is not the answer. I have faith that as long as Americans do not forget the spirit of mutual service and kindness that they showed to a three-year-old newcomer, we can overcome any obstacles through mutual cooperation. 

Maybe this all comes off as starry-eyed idealism. Perhaps I haven't been in this country long enough for it to drain me, as it has for so many native-born Americans. But maybe that is why some Americans look to immigrants as the future of the country: Our almost naïve faith in this country is necessary to periodically rekindle the American spirit when others have lost heart.

Our country is undoubtedly in dire straits—and that's not just because of the pandemic. We are lost as a country, struggling to rediscover our moral compass. I hope that, as a newly minted American, I can play a small part in that process of rediscovery. That, I believe, will be my own service to my fellow countrymen.

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