China Infiltrates American Universities

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China has adopted an approach to infiltrate American Universities. It is a secret campaign to spy on the US and buy influence. It has been going on for a couple decades now without drawing any attention. It was happening right in front of our eyes.

For years, China has invested in American universities in various ways, donating millions of dollars, collaborating with academics, and setting up cultural centers. Each tactic is part of a broader strategy of the Chinese government to compete with the United States by buying influence and conducting espionage at these schools.

Many Chinese contributions are listed as coming from anonymous donors, a practice that experts say is an easy tactic that allows Beijing to penetrate America’s educational system. The issue of Chinese influence on American campuses through investments is alarming, especially because of the lack of transparency.

Fortunately, the U.S. government is ramping up its scrutiny of China’s activities at American universities. The results of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts have been crucial but troubling, revealing a nefarious campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. To make matters worse, the American people know very little about what China is doing.

One of the schools most targeted by China is Harvard. The elite university has received tens of millions of dollars from China in contracts and gifts in recent years.

In January the Justice Department announced that Dr. Charles Lieber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested and charged with one count of making a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement about his involvement with China.

And, according to a former scholar at Harvard, the school shut down a panel discussion on human rights in China in 2015 because it was around the same time the president of Harvard was meeting with Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s investments, in both money and time building relationships, seemed to pay off.

I recently received a briefing from the team at the Education Department focusing on these issues and was amazed at the hostility and unwillingness of the universities to release information on who is giving them money.

A provision in the Higher Education Act requires universities to report publicly when they receive more than $250,000 from a foreign source. Yet these schools are fighting to avoid following the law, saying such information is confidential and proprietary.

One of the most challenging things about China’s bid for influence at American universities is that most of it is legal. Beijing sees where there’s a strategic gap that needs to be filled, especially in a technological field, finds an academic with the right expertise to fill that gap, and offers him or her a ton of money to collaborate on some project.

Source: China’s secret campaign to spy on US and buy influence is exposed

So it is not that the U.S. is entering another cold war. It is just that the U.S. is waking up to the fact that we have been in a cold war for many years and are finally noticing that we are in one.

Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has deliberately transformed what was once an intertwined, symbiotic economic relationship with the U.S. into the most palpable great power competition. China is militarizing the South China Sea; stealing our intellectual property as well as military and trade secrets; and sending its students, business people, and intelligence officers to flood the zone with spying operations targeting our academic institutions, private sector and national security officials.

China’s willful effort to conceal the outbreak and severity of the coronavirus, while rejecting any sort of transparent collaboration against this global pandemic, exposed even deeper fault lines in the highly acrimonious U.S.-China relationship.

China menaces Taiwan and democracy activists in Hong Kong, exploits its “Belt and Road Initiative” as cover for debt-trap-diplomacy to project global influence, and knowing no bounds, brazenly targets the American Wild West.

The specific location in Xi’s crosshairs is the iconic frontier landscape, framed by the pristine Devils River and legendary Pecos River, in the West Texas borderlands of Val Verde County.

Beginning in 2015, GH America Investment Group purchased over 130,000 acres of property in Val Verde County. GH America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Xinjiang-based Guanghui Industry Investment Group. Xinjiang is notorious for its so-called “re-education” camps, where China detains Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities against their will and violates their human rights.

Local elected officials and organizations dedicated to the protection, conservation and preservation of Val Verde County have expressed reasonable concern about GH America’s plans to erect the Blue Hills Wind farm, using some of the tallest onshore turbines in the country on the land it purchased. I’m a retired CIA officer and not a biologist, so I’ll leave it to the scientists for the most authoritative assessment on the extent to which GH America’s construction would decimate the fragile ecosystem, obstruct migratory flight paths, disrupt groundwater flows and degrade water quality in this area.

But I will loudly ring alarm bells about the threats to our national security from GH America and its Chinese Communist Party overlords. Sun Guangxin, the founder and director of Xinjiang Guanghui Industry Investment Group, served in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and was the vice chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Youth Federation. Having long maintained a close relationship with China’s Communist Party leadership, Sun is one of the 200 wealthiest businessmen in China.

Xi might allow Sun the independence to earn a staggeringly high income, but if Sun is like any other Chinese businessman, then he is also on the hook to serve as a surrogate against China’s adversaries, especially the U.S. According to China’s 2015 National Intelligence Law, “All organizations and citizens shall support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work.” Sun reportedly overpaid for the land in Val Verde County and Blue Hills Wind appears to be his only renewable energy project in the U.S.

Aside from gathering intelligence on U.S. border security operations and plugging into Texas’ critical infrastructure, including its electrical grid, China could use Sun’s wind farm venture as cover to collect intelligence on nearby Laughlin Air Force Base, which is the Air Force’s premier training facility and graduates hundreds of pilots per year.

With leadership from National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) needs to review GHA’s purchase of this land, given its close proximity to a U.S. military installation. In a shockingly similar case, President Obama blocked the Chinese from building wind turbines near a military facility in Oregon.

In addition, Congress should determine whether Sun or any of his associates might fall into the category of Chinese officials, for whom President Trump just signed legislation calling for sanctions over their repression of Uighurs.

In contrast to cloak-and-dagger espionage, China’s nefarious attack on our national security interests in the great state of Texas is endangering us in plain sight.

Source: China's assault on Texas – this project threatens US national security

Siting a wind farm near Laughlin Air Force Base is a direct threat to the operation of the airbase. Wind turbines can cause “reflectivity” contamination. The rotating blades of wind turbines constantly change their orientation based on the wind direction, which can be detected by the Doppler radar as an object with velocity.

Some 54 scientists have resigned or been fired as a result of an ongoing investigation by the National Institutes of Health. At issue is the failure of NIH grantees to disclose financial ties to foreign governments. In 93% of those cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.

In the vast majority of cases, Lauer reported, the person being investigated has been an Asian man in his 50s. Some three-quarters of those under investigation had active NIH grants, and nearly half had at least two grants. The 285 active grants totaled $164 million.



Source: [url=https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/15/every-picture-tells-story-–-china-stealing-us-intellectual-property-14850]Every Picture Tells A Story – China Stealing US Intellectual Property[/url]

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During the cold war with Russia several decades ago, it was common for the communist party to use relatives as a bargaining chip, as a possession to influence an outcome. In espionage, if someone was outside Russia, the communist would use any relatives within the Iron Curtain to achieve their mission to steal secrets. Therefore is someone from China is in the U.S. and holds technical information that the Chinese communist party desired, they would threaten the family still left in China (parents, wife, children, aunts and uncles, etc.) with death or a quick trip to the labor camps if a person refused to spy. Now I do not know if that is what is happening here, but it might be a component. It is part of their playbook.

We have issues with Chinese influence in universities down here as well:

Hooray for America!
Boo for the ccp!