The Biden Administration isn’t serious about getting tough on China. If it was serious —and could see China for the threat it obviously is —it wouldn’t continue to put national security at risk by encouraging spy balloons, intellectual property theft, and farmland grabs.
…and this latest bone-headed move.
House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) is sounding the alarm after discovering that a $13.5 million taxpayer-funded hypersonic missile research grant has been given to a university in the U.S. with ties to China and the PLA.
Using cash from the Pentagon, Alfred University, in Alfred, NY, is working on hypersonic missile research. But it also hosts a Confucius Institute and partners with a Chinese university conducting similar research “on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”
According to the Heritage Institute, “The Confucius Institutes pretend to be a Chinese version of cultural institutions like the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute, but they are in reality a propaganda machine funded and directed by the Chinese government.”
This fact is making Rep. Gallagher uneasy —and rightfully so. He has sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Alfred University President Mark Zupan demanding more information.
‘As a result of Section 1062, over one hundred U.S. universities shut down their Confucius Institutes as of June 2022. However, Alfred University continues to operate a Confucius Institute to this day,’ the chairman states.
The Daily Mail is reporting that “Gallagher is demanding all communications between the Pentagon and the university by June 14, as well as more information regarding the establishment of Alfred’s Confucius Institute.”
“It is vital to U.S. national interests that sensitive military research is safeguarded from our foreign adversaries,” Gallagher says.
Think he is being paranoid? FBI Director Christopher Wray doesn’t.
“In 2019, the FBI found that ‘foreign state adversaries seek to illicitly or illegitimately acquire U.S. academic research and information to advance their scientific, economic, and military development goals,” The Daily Mail writes.
“FBI Director Chris Wray outlined the threat in a 2020 speech, saying China pays scientists at U.S. universities to ‘secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—including valuable, federally funded research.’”
The DoD needs to answer for this disregard for national security.
