President Joe Biden’s refusal to hold China to account is even worse than we reported last week.
That’s the word from Robert Eitel, top legal aide at the Department of Education during two Republican administrations and now president of the Defense of Freedom Institute. In National Review Online, Eitel complains that Biden not only is dismantling the successful “China Initiative” against Chinese intellectual-property theft and espionage but has also stopped actively enforcing a law forcing colleges to disclose gifts and contracts from foreign entities such as the Communist Chinese.
We wrote last week numerous times about the bizarre decision to end the China Initiative. Eitel, whose work overseeing federal policy on higher education gave him a direct view on how China nefariously partners with American universities, explains why the initiative was needed. He says it helps counteract the worst parts of a Chinese program called the “Thousand Talents” plan, which “is a Chinese-government scheme that pays academics to infiltrate American research universities and abscond with technology secrets for the benefit of the Chinese state.
As an aside, Eitel also notes the hypocrisy of stopping a program that battled Communist Chinese influence, specifically because of the “mere perception” of “racial” bias, at the same time Biden defends open, flagrant discrimination against Asian Americans through race-based college admissions programs. And he is right about that, too.
Apart from that, here’s the big thing Eitel adds to last week’s reports on the China Initiative.
“Congress has understood for decades that foreign powers may seek to influence higher education and harm American interests through large gifts and contracts,” Eitel wrote. “In 1986, spurred by the efforts of Arab governments to influence U.S. educational institutions by way of large gifts to Middle East–studies programs, Congress required higher-ed institutions to report to the Education Department and to disclose to the public their foreign gifts and contracts. Now codified as Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 … this mandate requires nearly all colleges and universities to report, twice each year, foreign gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more.”
Over time, Red China even more than Islamist governments began exploiting its ties with American colleges. That’s one reason it was good that the prior secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, rigorously enforced Section 117. Alas, Biden is doing the opposite: “To public knowledge, the Education Department has yet to launch a Section 117 investigation against any institution of higher education since President Biden took office, giving up an important enforcement tool.”
Eitel writes that Biden also has not implemented a regulation proposed by DeVos “that would have required schools to submit more detailed information.”
By ending the China Initiative and refusing to enforce Section 117, Biden inexplicably makes it far easier for China to harm U.S. national security. “Storm clouds are growing overseas,” Eitel says. “It’s time for us to take them seriously.”
Eitel knows how all this works. He knows how much damage China’s so-called Confucius Institutes at American universities, and related efforts, do to U.S. interests. His is a voice to be heeded. Yet Biden, whose son Hunter infamously secured huge riches from Chinese-government-related interests as Biden flew him to China on Air Force Two, seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing dangers from Chinese economic perfidy.
It is long past time for Biden’s aides, his Cabinet, and his congressional allies to start pushing back against his abandonment of important anti-China programs.
