Part 3: How China Undermines Democracy

Welcome to Harvard — a division of the People’s Republic of China

There is an existential cancer that has consumed the West. Other sites are dedicated to documenting it. (here and here). We’ll avoid it until we can’t, but some of it is relevant for this story.

It starts on university campuses. If the battle to reclaim the West is to be won, it will go right through the heart of academia. The role China has been allowed to seize in many universities underscores the rot. But first, we need some background to understand how the cancer spread.

Higher education today resembles a massive Ponzi scheme.

The data here is American, but the problem is little better in Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Colleges desperately recruit ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating.

Before their inevitable withdrawal, those students’ tuition dollars fuel the growth of the bureaucracy, which creates the need to get an even larger pool of likely dropouts through the door to fund the latest round of administrative expansion. Administrative positions at colleges and universities grew at ten times the rate of tenured faculty positions since 1993.

There are now slightly more campus administrators nationwide than faculty; spending on the bureaucracy was equal to spending on all educational functions, including faculty. Tuition rose to cover those bureaucratic expenses, regardless of whether families could afford to pay it. Tuition at private four-year colleges grew 250 percent since 1982, while the median family income rose about 18 percent.

Half of American colleges and universities lose a quarter or more of their first year class. (for all my Canadian friends who love to sneer at things American: I went to one of the top three universities in Canada. The first year drop out rate was 45 percent. Fifty percent failed the mandatory first year English fundamentals course. Worse? That class is now no longer required of every first year student, so as not to highlight declining standards.)

Forty percent of those who start college never graduate. But no one holds the colleges responsible for admitting students who are obviously unprepared for college work. In the U.S., the government funds this scam by backing the loan of every student who goes to college. If the student fails to repay the loan — the U.S. government pays it. That’s right. There is zero risk and big rewards for colleges and banks to admit students who can’t possibly succeed.

Nowhere is the rot more palpable than in the Humanities, which have become bastions of Marxism and identify politics. Humanities generally admit the most marginal students. You can’t hide it if you can’t solve a math problem. You can hide your intellectual weakness in gender studies. To enable that, instead of teaching the classics, modern Arts Departments teach a Jacobin political correctness and hatred of Western Civilization.

Hegel and Rosseau are hard. You need not understand challenging concepts if you can simply dismiss either the author as racist or the idea as sexist. Keep in mind, after two generations of allowing this rot to be taught on campuses, the people who teach these courses are as mentally deficient as their students.

The result is those graduating with these degrees find they have paid inflated costs for worthless degrees that qualify them for little other in the real world than being the most credentialed (note: not educated) barista at their Starbucks.

In fact, one of the few places they do find the kind of paid work to justify the cost of their degrees is on college campuses … as the kind of bureaucrats mentioned above. This is one reason why ANTIFA, the violent leftist group that is behind so much of the recent violent protest in the United States this month, is reportedly full of people with college degrees. Many of its members work on college campuses, too.

What does this have to do with China?

These principleless and cash hungry academics take as much Chinese money and students as they can get their grubby hands on. Almost 900,000 Chinese study in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or Britain. There’s 370,000 in the U.S. alone. To put that in perspective, Canada has a total of just over one million university students.

In New Zealand, 18 percent of university students last year were from overseas, up from 13 percent 10 years ago. Forty-seven percent of those were from China, up from 29 percent in 2009.

Since 1995, the number of Chinese students traveling to study full-time in Britain has increased 75 times, from just 1,510 to 115,435. During the same period, domestic places rose a mere 50 percent, meaning that in just 25 years Chinese students have gone from a rounding error in universities’ balance sheets to their second largest source of funding, after taxpayer-funded loans.

In the last four years alone, the number of Chinese students studying in Britain has risen by 36 percent, more than three times the 11 percent rate of growth for domestic students. This means that more Chinese students traveled to study in the UK last year than from the entirety of the Commonwealth or from the rest of the G7. Indeed, fewer full-time places on UK campuses went to young people from economically disadvantaged areas like the East Midlands or Yorkshire and the Humber than from the People’s Republic of China. Among postgraduates, this concentration is starker: for every two and a half UK postgrads, there is now one Chinese postgraduate studying in Britain.

International student spending is Australia’s fourth-largest export earner; the overwhelming number of students from China places universities in a precarious positions. Chinese students represent nearly 30 per cent of international enrollments. If these students came from the United States, the kind of dependence on this business model the Australian government has allowed would still be risky. That they come from China, a hostile power, can only be chalked up to recklessness and greed.

In recent months, the Australian government has found its voice and has been aggressive in calling for an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. There’s good reason to believe it escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, and begs serious questions about what China was working on.

China has retaliated in several ways, including threatening to keep its students from returning to Australia. Certainly China’s right.

But why would Australia allow this dependency on a malicious country?, If students from China do not return to Australia, universities could lose A$12 billion over the next two years. Chinese students contribute 11 to 26 percent of revenue in Australia’s eight major universities.

In the U.S., there are 2,618 registered universities. Let’s put that in some perspective. There are 50 American states. If each state had six universities, there would be 300 schools. Clearly, the U.S. has way too many colleges. Which is why there are entire bureaucracies dedicated to pulling in those one million foreign students a year. More than a third of those come from China.

Without Chinese students, its estimated hundreds of institutions would become insolvent. How is China leveraging this campus presence?

Start with espionage. It floods centers of high tech research with spies. Student spies play a fundamental role. They help bolster a system of espionage where each person does a small share of the work. It’s based on the idea that you could have one spy steal 10,000 documents, or you could have 10,000 spies each steal one document.

By taking this approach, the Chinese have intelligence agencies outnumbered. In terms of both keeping tabs on their activities, and prosecuting Chinese spies, the west can’t keep up.

The idea behind recruiting students as spies is then they can be used to gain access to experimental research at universities. And then after college, the Chinese can work them into positions in research, government agencies, or companies. Many Chinese spies are not “official spies.” The majority are people asked to do something on the side.

According to the FBI, the grooming process typically takes place before the students leave to study abroad. They may get approached by Chinese security officials who inquire about their families, then remind them to remain loyal to the motherland, and ask them to report back with anything that could benefit China.

In recent months alone:

• A Chinese Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught in December with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at a Boston hospital.

• A Chinese professor conducting sensitive research at the University of Kansas was indicted in August on charges he concealed his ties to a Chinese university.

• A Chinese scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles was convicted in June of shipping banned missile technology to his homeland.

• A Chinese student at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology was charged last year with helping to recruit spies for his country's version of the CIA.

I’ve found at least 33 other similar cases since 2008. Why the American media could care less is a subject we’ll come to in a later chapter. For now, suffice to say journalism is taught in the Humanities Departments of American colleges.

That universities allow their campuses to be flooded by Chinese nationals who spy for China is disastrous. But a bigger problem may be outright treason involving local academics.

Chuck Lieber: Pride of Harvard. Really.

Take the case of Charles M. Lieber, the “eminent” chair of “renowned” Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

In January, Lieber was charged with lying to the U.S. government about his involvement in a top government lab in China. That appears to be the tip of the treason iceberg in his case. Prosecutors say Lieber set up shop in China in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the Chinese government. He then denied knowledge of those payments to U.S. investigators.

If nothing else, that’s against the law because he was getting money from the U.S. government for advanced research. According to court documents: since 2008, Lieber has received more than $15,000,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD).  These grants require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities.

Beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017.  

China’s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese spying initiatives. It’s designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security. These talent programs seek to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China and reward individuals for stealing proprietary information.

Under the terms of Lieber’s three-year Thousand Talents contract, WUT paid Lieber $50,000 USD per month, living expenses of up to 1,000,000 Chinese Yuan (approximately $158,000 USD ) and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT.  In return, Lieber was obligated to work for WUT ‘not less than nine months a year’ by ‘declaring international cooperation projects, cultivating young teachers and Ph.D. students, organizing international conferences, applying for patents and publishing articles in the name of’ WUT.

Did Lieber share his sensitive U.S. government funded work with the Chinese? A jury will decide. 

Harvard says it was unaware of what Lieber was up to. It’s also very clear they didn’t much care, and didn’t ask any questions even though he was working on business for WUT and not Harvard nine months a year.

The real question: how many other Charles Liebers are there in America’s corrupt universities, which as we have noted above, are a happy home to those selling hatred of their country? You can be certain Lieber is not alone.

U.S. intelligence agencies assess that America is suffering economic losses of up to half a billion dollars a year from Chinese espionage. That's theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, which results in a loss of about $4 ,000 per American family of four.

More importantly, take a look at Chinese stealth fighters and bombers. They are clearly stolen American designs; so are China’s drones.

"No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China," said Boston's top FBI agent, Joseph Bonavolonta. "China's communist government's goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there."

That’s what you’d expect from authoritarian dictatorship that sees democracy as a threat to its lucrative rule over one billion people. What’s shocking is western academics are so enthusiastic to help them do it.

They’re also gladly helping China spread its propaganda and stifle free speech. Something we’ll examine in Part 4.