Abolishing the Confucius Institute: Chinese Communist Influence in American Universities

i'm not cynical enough to suggest that
it's all about the money but you can't ignore the fact that i think the communist party of china has given our universities through the years don't hold me to this figure exactly but about 150 million dollars the list goes on and on we have a number of things that are very different between the perspectives of a free people in the united states of america and the leadership of of china and so i wonder whether these confucius these uh confucius institutes are part of an influence campaign by the chinese government to shape attitudes in the minds of the american children the coming generations as to those those kinds of differences is this really a propaganda effort a a a mind-shaping effort of our young people being carried out through the auspices of these confucius institutes i would say generally the state department supports international educational exchange we support americans learning critical languages that that makes all the sense in the world to study other languages and to learn about other cultures but the question i have is whether the chinese government is selecting individuals funding for individuals into our into our educational institutions um uh with the intent not just of letting us learn a a important global language but also and and and a different culture but also to gain a perspective on a host of issues where they and we have different points of view thank you for the question i would say that in the course of the work that we did looking at confucius institutes the one thing that really popped out for us was the variety of activities that they do you know you certainly heard about the language training and i think as as ranking member carper talked about in his statement there are a variety of other cultural events that they focus on holiday celebrations cooking events things like that we didn't really focus on questions that you were focused on there but i think that the it's notable the variety of activities that they perform [Music] yeah i'm not sensing anyone jumping to the to the bait on that senator for louisiana thank you mr president i want to i want to talk for a few minutes mr president about the good people of china confucius institutes and the chinese communist party the communist party of china is trying to not only swallow china it's trying to swallow the communist party of china being as aggressive as it is has for a number of years reached out to our colleges and universities to establish what the communist party of china calls confucius institutes and this was the pitch made by the government of china to our universities we will give you bucket loads of money if you you know our universities american universities will allow us to establish confucius institutes these institutes run by the authoritarian government of china will not allow the free exchange of ideas they will not allow anyone to talk about the uighurs or the people of tibet or hong kong or what happened to tiananmen square um they basically they meaning the communist party of china has used these confucius institutes as propaganda arms i have a bill if kids i shouldn't call them kids if young people in our universities want to talk about tibet they get to talk about tibet and the bill would say that the universities have to take back control of these confucius institutes from the communist party of china otherwise they're not going to be eligible for federal funds the senate passed twice twice as bills passed united states senate the last time with bipartisan support we put the bill on on the ndaa and mr president you know how conference committees work at the ndaa sometimes it's a ferret fire drill and there's a lot of confusion and somehow the confucius institute bill got watered down to do nothing so i'm going to ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass the confucius institute act for a third time s 590 a bill to establish limitations regarding confucius institutes and for other purposes without objection the senate will proceed to the measure mr president i ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered a third time in past and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table is there objection without objection thank you mr president what is the single most effective method of language education in the history of the world you need a minute you need a minute marriage what is the second most effective method of language education in the history of the world prostitution governments have an astounding failure in the province of language education even when they have the strongest most strident motivation possible to succeed and when they try to put the most resources imaginable into succeeding this video is partly about politics partly about propaganda partly about strategic diplomacy between the united states and china and it's partly about the politics of language education and i am unusually qualified to speak about both there was a time when i applied to become a citizen of israel in fact there has been more than one occasion on which i started doing the paperwork to become a citizen in israel and you start making phone calls to people i've told anecdotes with these funny conversations i had with the bureaucrats who handled that process and you know it seems less and less likely with each passing year that i will end up retiring in israel shall we say but i would still say there is a more than zero percent chance i will end up becoming a citizen of israel eventually government of israel has the strongest motivation in the world to have highly effective programs to teach the modern hebrew language to new immigrants and they have new immigrants coming from the united states of america from france from russia from iraq from iran it's it's remarkably multicultural and multilingual just speaking within the jewish population of israel it's also a country where the atheist minority are besieged by the religious majority and publish in english remarkably incisive criticisms of everything wrong with the institutions created and sustained by that religious majority and we know thanks to this skeptical minority of israelis that the language institutes in israel are a total utter failure i read about this from a kind of academic perspective just interested in what was going right what was going wrong and i read about it from the perspective of someone who is looking at the enormous challenge of struggling to learn hebrew while continuing to improve my ability in chinese okay yeah look at this partly with my own self-interest in mind partly out of just comparative interest right now in the 21st century the canadian government has the strongest motivation imaginable to try to make a success out of education in cree ojibwe mohawk the indigenous languages of canada okay there is a remarkable pattern of governments failing even when they have 110 percent commitment to language education as a focus and when they have less than 110 commitment and less than an infinite budget the rate of failure only increases from there now i am not a libertarian i am neither a left-wing libertarian nor a right-wing libertarian nor centrist libertarian i'm in many ways an anti-libertarian as it happens the libertarian frame of mind with these things always goes well you know the government tried this project and it failed therefore this will suddenly become successful and more cost efficient and more effective all kinds of profound problems will be solved the minute it's taken out of the government's hands and handed over to charity in the private sector to handle as soon as civil society takes over one way that yes yes yes so you're telling me that um if the coroner's office in new orleans is you know operating very poorly getting very poor quality of service very poor accuracy very poor reliability maybe long delays maybe corruption the coroner's office that if we just take the responsibility for the coroner away from the government and give it to the private sector all those problems will will evaporate right because when you when you take the same institution operate it at a profit in a market context where it may only be possible to operate it at a loss losing then then it'll be a big set how about the fire department how about drinking water how about sewage systems okay i find the whole libertarian approach to these things fundamentally stupid we're staring into the unbelievable abominable failure of elite level education in the united states of america in the 21st century and one of the most crucial one of the most important failures of all is indeed what they call education in strategically important languages have you heard of you're this war in iraq thing you heard about you heard about the war in afghanistan how many people have you met in your entire life who studied any of those languages and i'm sorry but here we can't count people if you know some refugees or you know some immigrants so you know some people are actually born and raised in those cultures no no no no no no no americans whose mother language at home was english and english only but who sat down to learn to crack open the books and start learning dari or pashto or one of the salient dialects of arabic with the same spirit whereby ambitious young men in the british empire sat down and started studying sanskrit so they can get a good posting in the colonies in india okay now the british empire i am not applauding it was bad and sick and evil and wrong in its earlier phase it was built on slavery in its later phase it was built on the opium trade great story could talk about another video right i'm not speaking in support of the british empire but you know pretty much any time you ask a specialist what was the difference between the british empire period and the american more vaguely imperialist period in the middle east specialists will say again and again you know the people the british sent over they were scholarly america innumerable advantages over the british empire new world advantages over every other rampart that's ever existed in the history of the world i could praise the american empire in many ways you know what the only guys who became fluent in vietnamese during the vietnamese war were the guys who got married to local vietnamese women or the guys who slept with a whole lot of vietnamese prostitutes okay today why don't you just look around at universities in the united states of america where are your learned men who are fluent in vietnamese and where are your alerted men who are fluent in the languages of afghanistan central asia iraq this is not a feature of the american empire and there is a critical shortage of americans learning chinese especially when you talk about learning the chinese language at a high enough level to be capable of dealing with chinese politics this is not merely being able to give a guided tour to tourists if the confucius institute existed in the united states of america in order to transmit the language and to train people to have that level of language ability or any language any level of language ability whatsoever all right it would be worth much much more than 150 million dollars it would be something absolutely priceless for the united states of america and it would be a strategic asset the united states america and it is not the confucius institute has existed from the first day of its inception its implementation as a strategic asset for the government of china which yes happens to be the communist party the rules china it exists for absolutely no other reason than to advance the interests of the government of china in the united states of america it's a little bit of a different story if we're talking about the rest of the world now what is the agenda of the confucius institute and then it says america i happen to be vegan and you know a lot of forms of vegan activism are really counterproductive and fail and frankly ruin people's lives and put people in prison and i'm a critic of a lot of the things that vegans do to try to advance the vegan cause but one of the things i point out is now every so often you walk into a coffee shop and sitting there in front of you as you're staring at the counter is the word vegan and maybe it's there four or five times because there are some muffins and some cookies on sale and next to them in parentheses it says vegan oh this is a chocolate mousse this is a vegan chocolate mousse and i know there are little kids who walk into that coffee shop with their mom holding their mom's hands say oh vegan what does that mean like oh gee there are two cookies and they look the same but one says vegan and it's possible the mom will say shut up forget about it no it's possible they've almost split there is a kind of propaganda function just in communicating to children and communicating to young people hey veganism exists veganism matters veganism is an option veganism is a competing worldview in some ways equal to and counter opposed to the other world view represented by the chocolate cookie that doesn't say vegan next to it you know oh there's milk and then there's vegan milk in this way china does profoundly influence people's lives what kind of people people like my own father people like my own mother people who don't think they're spineless followers but really they are i heard a really tragic interview today with an old man he was talking about his youth and he was talking honestly about how he listened to a rap album and it made him decide to become a crack cocaine dealer and he was talking about how he got out of prison and never decided to live a better life but then he went back to his neighborhood and he basically just came into contact with what happened to be in fashion in his neighborhood rap music and other things culturally and he got back into he joined a formerly joined a gang and got involved with gang violence and murdering people raping people too he was willing to admit this he was willing to admit his involvement in past rapes murders and so on and he was fundamentally willing to admit that he did this because he was a follower because he wanted to fit in because he wanted to be cool with the other guys and he talked about his desire to be manly and important and real and the different totally irrational you know yearnings behind these decisions on his part none of you none of you would listen to a rap album and decide to become a drug dealer or a murderer or a rapist because you listen to a rap song right it seems laughable it seems ridiculous to everybody except the people who actually do it the guy i saw an interview with today he's all grown up now i'm sure if you were talking to him back when he was 21 or 20 or 22 years old or something this would not have been a laughing matter of him this would have been his life this was the path he was committed to he thought of himself as a rebel when he was really the weakest and most spineless conformist of them all he was the most susceptible to influence okay my father was raised by a single mother in a steel town and her job was in a steel factory she did paperwork back in those days they didn't have women doing the heavy lifting or pouring molten steel but she worked in a steel factory okay my father had every privilege imaginable handed to him in part because the teachers in his school wanted to be kind and encouraging and hand him opportunities because he was a poor kid from a single parent family in a still working town i have never had any teacher have any kind of positive attitude towards me such as he completely took for granted and he responded to all this by deciding that what he wanted to be was a rebel and the reason why he responded to chinese propaganda and the reason why he became a devoted follower of mao zedong and the reason why he became a member of a communist extremist rebel faction which i'm not going to get into describing here in canada you know despite his privilege just by the fact he was given a scholarship to go and get a phd which he dropped out of by the way he didn't actually he didn't ever get it you know despite all the numerous advantages in his life right he thought he was being a rebel he thought he was being a real man he thought he was being strong when what he was doing was proving to us all that he is the most susceptible to influence that he's the weakest of us all so many of us can pick up that same rap album and we can we can laugh at it or we can listen to it as a kind of wistful reflection from someone about drug dealing and pimping and maybe even you know contract killing whatever the rappler except no isn't that interesting that's someone singing about his experiences in life we don't feel any need to follow this person as our leader we don't feel any need to emulate them or be like them the guy i heard the interview with today he was saying explicitly that he thought his own criminal career originated from above all else the absence of a father figure in his life and he doesn't know why for whatever reason there's something there they they're looking for they reach out for all right and my father was the one guy who picked up the same pamphlets promoting mao zedong and chinese communism that you or i or any reasonable person would just have a laugh at or regard wistfully or think oh that's interesting here's you know here's someone writing about their experience fighting against the japanese you know maybe it's just interesting we just regard it with maybe we don't laugh at it but what does that have to do with me you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna become a cult flunky for this story you know there was this powerful delusion for my father that he was going to lead the revolution the problem is it wasn't his revolution somebody else's he would never be a leader he would always be a sheep he'd always be a follower because it was joseph stalin's revolution or was mao zedong's revolution or was che guevara the cuban revolution right it was never his he never got past that childlike view of the world of reaching out for heroes reaching out for an absent father figure right he never took the next step of realizing these people were just creative writers these people just took a blank sheet of paper and wrote down their ideas and tried to change the world at some point creatively soon enough destructively right he never really started a revolution of his own he never started writing his own questions and then coming to his own answers and of course the greatest joke of all is when you live this way when you live as an imitation of christ you know you're not christ you're living in imitation of christ you're not a revolutionary you're living as an imitation of revolutionary and the other guy i mentioned you know maybe you're not a real gangster maybe you're a second-rate imitation of a gangster you're imitating a rap song right this isn't who you are this is an act no matter how deeply you commit to it you know what you want to believe that's who you really are it's not right the other bitter irony is right no matter how hard you try you're never going to be cambodian you're never going to be vietnamese you're never going to be chinese you're never going to really understand their struggle and your attempt to recreate that struggle in canada your attempt to do a second-rate knock-off imitation of chinese communism in canada for the canadian climate shall we say for the canadian political context right that is going to be at best ridiculous it's never going to have the character of something that developed in that country in that culture by those people of by the people of the people for the people the danger of the confucius institute is greater precisely because it's so easily ignored and it's ignored because we all want to ignore people like my father nobody wants to deal with them you know within the classroom or amongst your brothers and sisters if you've got nothing nobody wants to deal with your brother or your cousin who's become addicted to following conspiracy theories on the internet and then you find out he went to washington dc and participated in a riot and got himself put in prison nobody wants to deal with your uncle or your nephew who's becoming a member of the kkk he's more and more racist and then you find out how far he's taking it that he went down the went down the rabbit hole into extremism how dangerous is the confucius institute compared to christianity on our university campuses compared to mormonism compared to hasidic judaism compared to islam there are myriad ideologies that are on university campuses and they are open for business and they are recruiting today the ultimate reason politically why nobody wants to deal with putting in a heart limit to the confucius institute and what it can and cannot do is that it's going to lead people in the united states of america to question their own communist parties their own neo-nazi parties their own you know miscellaneous extremist parties the greatest least examined most unquestioned form of radicalism of all is boring mainstream christianity and far more people will decide that they want to fall into lockstep and become the followers of some form of protestantism or some form of catholicism every day in the same way that my father was seduced by chinese communism and others find other ways to rebel through mindless conformism [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes