On one front, at least, President Biden is already giving Beijing a gift – even if that’s not his reason. His “No Trump” rule seems to be a higher priority than checking China’s power: Why else would the last president’s mandate to require schools and universities to disclose any links their foreign exchange programs have with Beijing-controlled Confucius institutes?
The last president approved the order in late 2020 in response to growing concerns from the FBI, the State Department and the Department of Education that China’s leaders are using the Confucius Institutes to steal American research and promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda in US schools.
The Confucius Institutes operates in 75 American universities, officially offering cultural and linguistic enrichment. And 500 K-12 schools across the country have a partnership with the US Center for the Confucius Institute in DC, which the State Department in August designated a “foreign mission” in Beijing.
The now-canceled order did not shut down any Confucius program, but only kept them on federal radar. It was reported in December that a number of top universities had failed to report funding of at least $ 6.5 billion from foreign sources, including China. Perhaps the elite universities, eager to keep their funding secret, made the Biden team kill the reporting requirement.
The result, however, is the relaxation of control over institutions that secretly spread the “influence of the CCP in academia,” as Rep. Michael McCaul, top Republican in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
A sad thing for any president to do, either to prevent the embarrassment of special internal interests or to erase only part of the legacy of his predecessor.