CCP “Confucius Institutes” in RI May Not Have Ended with Bryant University

It may be little known, but Bryant University is one of Rhode Island’s most “woke” institutions. Reality-based employees are fleeing the university in droves, not willing to endure the relentless attacks on their traditional cultural values. From forced pronouns, to constant white-shaming, to mandatory LGBTQIAP+ employee indoctrination training seminars … the once proud school has become a “toxic” place to work, according multiple former employees I know.

Bryant University was also the last institution of higher education in our state to end its “Confucius Institute” contract with the communist Chinese government … and they did so grudgingly in 2021, when its recently appointed and woke-obsessed President, Ross Gittell, finally had to give-in to public pressure.

But was this the end of Confucius Institutes in Rhode Island? Maybe not.

According to Peter Wood, President of the prestigious National Association of Scholars (who has been Mike Stenhouse’s In The Dugout guest), it is the Chinese government that has been one of the major forces behind “transitioning” colleges – via their deceptively named Confucius Institutes – from institutions of learning and free-speech, into corrupt campuses of propaganda and intellectual property theft … all to sow division among America’s populace and to boost the economic and cultural power of China’s totalitarian ruling class.

And while these college-based spy centers may be gone, the Chinese government appears to be shifting strategies to K-12 schools. Wood’s evidence-supported theory is that the CCP has secretly developed a new program that targets elementary and secondary education.

The new subversive program is called “Confucius Classrooms,” and, according to Wood, “it is even stealthier than Confucius Institutes. We don’t know exactly what it is doing, since K-12 classrooms are not places to pick up unguarded intellectual property. Presumably this successor program isn’t collecting lunchboxes. It may be targeting schools that are feeders to our nation’s top scientific and technical universities.”

And Peter Wood believes the motive to indoctrinate young students may be all about economic power.

He harbors the suspicion that the CCP is now “working hard to advance climate hysteria among children. China itself has about 1,200 coal-fired power plants, in contrast to 224 in the US, and China is opening new ones at the pace of two per week. Moreover, US “alternative energy” in the form of wind and solar is crucially dependent on minerals exported from China. Stoking American fears of carbon-based energy, then, is strongly in China’s interest, and what better way to do this than to promote the lesson in American schools?

But this is speculation. With the help of an “Innovation Prize” grant from the Heritage Foundation, we are about to find out whether that is part of what the CCP is up to in our schools.

Let me not veer into excessive optimism. China has had a long run of virtually unimpeded opportunity to buy influence, build “relationships,” acquire access and entangle naive Americans in what looked at first to be perfectly legitimate collaborations. We have a president who looks remarkably like a puppet of Xi Jinping. The CCP has used its time-honored tactic of paying the relatives of politicians it targets for control. ”

Hard to believe? Not really. As Wood lays out in his full piece on The Spectator, recent history clearly demonstrates the degree to which the Chinese have sought to infiltrate and corrupt our American society … and worse, how the Biden administration and prior administrations have turned a blind eye.

In addition to Confucius Institutes, it has now “became clear that China was pursuing a very different game. It is a game that has boxes far beyond campus. Some of them float overhead as high-tech “weather balloons.” Some are underfoot as US farmland, incidentally adjacent to US military installations. Some are in-hand as TikTok videos. Some are robustly present in US capital markets. Some are in downtown office buildings that serve as actual outposts of PRC police. Some of those boxes are underground and hold the corpses of the 106,000 Americans who died last year of Chinese-produced fentanyl.

Wood concluded his piece on a somewhat optimistic note: “Americans may be slow to awaken to the designs of our adversaries, but when we are roused, we know what to do. Yes, we currently face the obstacle of a president who is way too friendly towards Chinese interests and way too complacent about CCP subversion. But we will get past that.”

I hope he is right.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in The Ocean State Current, including text, graphics, images, and information are solely those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the views and opinions of The Current, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, or its members or staff. The Current cannot be held responsible for information posted or provided by third-party sources. Readers are encouraged to fact check any information on this web site with other sources.

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