Before lawmakers headed home for turkey and cranberry sauce, the bipartisan, bicameral US-China Economic and Security Review Commission issued its annual report to Congress.
Among its 30 recommendations: a request that the House and Senate “address China’s state-sponsored influence and interference” in the American education system.
This may come as a surprise.
After all, it was widely reported Congress already cracked down on the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to influence our children’s education in 2021, when lawmakers cut funding to colleges and universities that host the CCP-backed campus organizations known as Confucius Institutes.
But the truth is China continues to meddle in American schools.
For one, while many colleges and universities are ditching their Confucius Institutes, others are maintaining them, with still others allowing them to reconfigure under different names and arrangements.
Our grade schools, meanwhile, are prey to a nationwide network of Confucius Classrooms that peddle the same Communist propaganda but to more impressionable K-12 students.
Chinese investors are also expanding their control over and even attaining some ownership of what one of the CCP’s English-language mouthpieces calls the “lucrative” market of American private schools.
The US government tolerates this despite the fact at least one Chinese-owned school with CCP ties hosts a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program.
In other words, we are allowing an organization that hates America to cultivate relationships with young men and women who will one day serve in the US military.
Last but not least, there’s the dirty little secret that the American academy has taken countless dollars from Chinese entities in contravention to federal law.
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires government-funded colleges and universities to report foreign gifts and contracts.
In 2020, however, the Trump administration discovered that schools have “aggressively” pursued and accepted foreign money for decades while “systematically” failing to report it.
Subsequent investigation forced institutions to disclose $6.5 billion in previously hidden funds, and there likely are billions more that remain hidden.
One of the greatest sources of those funds is — you guessed it — China.
Too many of these gifts and contracts are not cases of good-faith collaboration between scholars.
They are cases of outright bribery and manipulation.
Since 2013, for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has accepted $11 million from Huawei, despite widespread recognition the company is a front for Chinese spyware.
Even worse, Georgetown University worked with the CCP’s Central Committee to get more than $2.3 million.
Beyond China, there are other concerning “donors” to our colleges and universities.
Consider that the Qatar Foundation, an organization owned by the Qatari government that provides safe haven to Hamas’ leaders, has given more than $600 million to Northwestern University since 2007.
Then consider that Northwestern refused to condemn Hamas’ October invasion of Israel.
Common sense says that is not coincidental.
This insight is backed up by a new study that correlates $13 billion in undisclosed foreign funds with a 300% rise in campus antisemitism across the country.
This has to stop. The flow of foreign money into American schools has risen greatly, so it’s time for Congress to ensure greater transparency.
We should create stricter gift- and contract-reporting requirements, increase their enforcement and expand the requirements that apply to grade schools to get a full picture of which countries are funding our nation’s education system.
To address the threat from foreign adversaries that explicitly seek to weaken America, Congress should also enact bans and work with state governments to prevent schools from entering into relationships with adversarial governments and their controlled entities.
Finally, Congress should cut the US military’s ties to any school owned, operated or controlled by those governments and entities.
I have introduced a bill, the Protecting Education from Malign Foreign Influence Act, which would accomplish all this and more.
It does not need to be partisan like everything else in Washington.
If lawmakers are serious about safeguarding our national interest, they will jump at the chance to counteract the dark money and shadow warriors that are corrupting American schools.
Marco Rubio represents Florida in the US Senate.
