At least on the one hand, President Biden is already giving Beijing a gift – even if that’s not his motive. His ‘Not Trump’ rule seems to be a higher priority than controlling China’s power: Why is the last president’s mandate otherwise required of schools and universities to disclose any commitment their foreign exchange programs have to the Beijing managed Confucius institutes?
The last president approved the order at the end of 2020 in response to growing concerns from the FBI, the State Department and the Department of Education that China’s rulers were using Confucius institutes to steal US research and to propagate the Promote Chinese Communist Party in American Schools.
Confucius Institutes operates in 75 American universities and officially offers 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 “foreign mission” from Beijing.
The order that has now been canceled did not shut down any Confucius programs, but only kept them on federal radar. This follows the news in December that a count of top universities did not report at least $ 6.5 billion in funding from foreign sources, including China. Perhaps elite universities, eager to keep their funding secret, have the Biden team come up with the reporting requirement.
But the result is to loosen the investigation into institutions that secretly spread the “CCP influence in academia”, as Mr. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the foreign affairs committee, put it.
A sad thing for any president to do, either to avoid embarrassment for domestic special interests or to wipe just a little more of his predecessor’s legacy.