Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology, saying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is poisoning our institutions. He and the director of National Intelligence described the CCP’s strategy as “rob, replicate, replace, and repress.”
Pompeo asked schools to step up the fight against the CCP. He said administrators need to shut down groups backed by CCP money. Researchers, he said, should be vigilant against fraud and theft from the CCP. He asked students to truly stand for free speech.
He said “so many of our colleges are bought by Beijing.”
“What more bad decisions will schools make because they are hooked on CCP cash? What professors will they be able to co-opt or to silence? What theft or espionage will they simply over look? What business will get done?”
Pompeo said China sends 400,000 students a year to study in the United States and American schools received at least $1.3 billion from China since 2013. Many universities failed to disclose gifts and funding from the Chinese regime.
He gave several examples of students in American universities being harassed and repressed by the Chinese Communist Party.
One student at the University of Georgia said: “They have harassed me repeatedly and asked me to give them information about the activities of overseas democracy activists and dissidents. And they are particularly interested in the activities of Uyghurs and Tibetans.”
Pompeo said: “At Princeton, just this year, students in a Chinese politics class were forced to use code names on their work, lest the CCP discover their identities and prosecute them for free expression of views on Hong Kong and the CCP under its draconian new security law. That’s right here. This happened right here in the United States of America. American students.”
He also spoke of Vera Zhou, a U.S. permanent resident who attended the University of Washington. In October 2017, she went to China to visit her father, where she was placed in a reeducation camp for five months and placed under house arrest for 18 months. All of this for using a virtual private network connection to her school’s website.
The U.S. State Department team petitioned her school to advocate for her return.
Pompeo said: “But the University of Washington—a woman named Sarah Castro, head of the federal relations office—said that the university wouldn’t help because of a multi-million dollar deal with China.”
Zhou was released, but with no help from her school.
Pompeo said the United States cannot allow this “tyrannical regime to steal our stuff,” “brainwash our people”, or “buy off our institutions to help them cover up these activities.”