On one front, at least, President Biden is already giving Beijing a gift – even if that is not his reason. His “No Trump” rule seems to be a higher priority than checking China’s power: why else would it cancel the last president’s mandate by requiring schools and universities to disclose any connections their exchange programs might have with the controlled Confucius Institutes for Beijing?
The last president approved the order in late 2020, in response to the growing concern of the FBI, the State Department and the Department of Education that China’s rulers use the Confucius Institutes to steal American research and promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda. in American schools.
The Confucius Institutes operate at 75 American universities, officially offering cultural and language enrichment. And 500 K-12 schools across the country have partnered with the Confucius Institute US Center in DC, which the State Department designated in August as a Beijing “foreign mission”.
The now-canceled order did not close any Confucius programs, but just kept them on federal radar. The news followed in December that a number of major universities failed to register at least $ 6.5 billion in funding from foreign sources, including China. Perhaps elite universities, eager to keep their funding secret, have made Biden’s team eliminate the reporting requirement.
But the result is to relax the scrutiny of the institutions that secretly spread the “influence of the CCP in the academy,” as Congressman Michael McCaul, the main Republican on the House’s Foreign Relations Committee, said.
A sad thing for any president to do, whether to avoid embarrassment to special domestic interests or just to erase another piece of his predecessor’s legacy.