President Trump should strike back at Chinese education programs in the United States after harassment of American diplomats, Sen. Mitt Romney said.
“It’s stunning to me that they have effectively closed down our cultural centers in China,” the the newly-elected Utah Republican told administration officials during a congressional hearing Thursday. “We continue to allow that without taking reciprocal action and saying, ‘you don’t have our centers, you’re not going to have your centers.’”
Romney’s call for action threatens the Confucius Centers, cultural and linguistic education programs that are established in partnership with American colleges but controlled by the Chinese government.
Senate investigators believe Beijing is using the institutes “to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat,” while thwarting State Department efforts to operate American Cultural Centers in China.
“The State Department has documented at least 80 examples of Chinese interference with American public diplomacy efforts from January 2016 to July 2018,” investigators with the Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee reported Wednesday.
“Chinese officials routinely cancelled events at ACCs that involved U.S. embassy officials. In other instances, the host Chinese school would not allow State Department officials to attend events at the ACC, even when they applied for admission weeks in advance.”
U.S. officials don’t have a plan for how to level the playing field for American diplomats. “If you know how to get reciprocity while still maintaining the lines of communication between our two societies, I don’t know how to do that,” Mitchell Zais, the deputy secretary at the Education Department, told the Senate panel.
“I think we understand that everything in communist China is run by the government. All of their education system and everything. So I don’t know how you take politics out of interaction with that regime, that government.”
Romney, attending his first Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee hearing, said that the administration needs to do more than “protest” the mistreatment. “Why are we not saying ‘it’s going to be harder for you to get visas for people to come here and be part of your Confucius Centers?” Romney said. “Because I think the Chinese — like other people, like myself — respond to action.”
