https://nypost.com/2023/01/26/the-mike-pompeo-speech-on-chinas-influence-on-us-universities-that-mit-killed/
“Pompeo says that American schools that are “hooked on the CCP’s sugar must go into rehab.”Frankly I think a lot of institutions — including some of our financial institutions — should join them there. In the end it´s about whose side you are on. It would be good to know that American universities were on America’s side — for once.”
It’s always the way with political memoirs that everyone sifts them for the high-grade gossip. So it is with Mike Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch” released this week. Media reports have understandably focused on the former CIA director and Secretary of State’s opinions on Donald Trump, John Bolton, Kim Jong-Un and a bunch of other folks.
But as is often the case, one of the biggest stories in the book has so far been overlooked.
When Pompeo was Secretary of State he took probably the most hawkish view any American official has yet taken towards the Communist Party of China. In a speech in October 2019, he told an audience of business-people (many of whom made money in China) that the Communist Party of China is “a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination.” He couldn’t be more correct. But something that happened afterwards proved his point.
As Pompeo relates it, he wanted to give a major speech on China and especially the way in which the CCP is distorting universities and other research institutes inside the United States. Not just by funding these institutions, and directing their research, but by trying to turn Chinese students into agents of the communist regime. It’s a crucial subject and was high time that an American official made such an intervention.
The speech was scheduled to take place at MIT, which had previously held an MIT-China Summit in Beijing sponsored by Chinese tech companies including ones that are now under sanctions for providing technology to crush human rights in China.
But shortly before the speech MIT said they couldn’t host the US Secretary of State after all. A strange move, no? Well according to Pompeo he picked up the phone and spoke with the president of MIT, Rafael Reif. And Reif claimed that there was no way that the speech could go ahead because of the risk of offending Chinese students. By MIT’s own data in 2021-22 a full 25% of international students at the university were from China.
