Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. and its Universities Remain Asleep at the Switch on the China Tech Threat

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Argonne National Laboratory, China, higher education, Hoover Institution, John Pomfret, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, science, technology, technology transfer, universities

The word “blockbuster” has been so overused and misused by the national media during the Trump era that it’s impact has been watered down. Yet a new report by the California-based Hoover Institution definitely deserves that description – for it details the shocking and dangerous extent to which the U.S. government’s science and technology research arms, along with many of America’s top universities, have in recent years been merrily working, and no doubt sharing crucial defense-related technology, with individuals tightly connected with China’s military.

You can read an excellent summary of the report here by John Pomfret, a former longtime Washington Post China correspondent who’s turned into a full-time scholar of U.S. relations with the People’s Republic. But there are six points that I think deserve special attention.

First,even anyone who didn’t know that the Chinese institutions from which the Chinese researchers have come are called by China’s regime itself “Seven Sons of National Defense,” two of the names alone should be kind of a giveaway: Beiing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Unless anyone at any of the American universities involved doesn’t know that any activity in China with an aerospace component isn’t largely military in nature?

Second, the research projects themselves being conducted by teams of scientists from these U.S. and Chinese institutions haven’t been given names with obvious military implications. But any American authorities with a tech background should be aware of this dimension. Take “Effect of gallium addition on the microstructure and micromechanical properties of constituents in Nb-Si based alloys.” Gallium is a metal used mainly in micro-electronics manufacturing. Among its properties: It can “produce laser light directly from electricity….” Nothing military to see there! Ditto for the role played by gallium arsenide its role in making semiconductors for pressure sensors for touch switches.

“Nb” is niobium, another metal, is useful for making “superalloys for heat resistant equipment” – and therefore is handy for producing items like jet engines. And of course “Si”, or silicon, is a core building block of semiconductors themselves.

Nor is that work the only research that should have raised eyebrows. In 2018, an entity called the China-US International Cooperation Project (about which a Google search turned up squadoosh) and the Harbin Institute of Technology jointly funded a Master’s thesis on the “Modeling and Analysis of Energy Characteristics and Equivalent Carbon Emissions of CNC Centerless Grinding Machine.”

These types of machine tools are critical for defense manufacturing – including in aerospace – because they can make sure that metal surfaces of parts and components of complex manufactured devices have smooth enough surfaces to operate friction-free – an especially important goal to achieve when producing weapons that need to be highly reliable even in the most challenging situations. Indeed, when these grinders get advanced enough, their overseas sale is regulated for national security reasons by the U.S. government. Why on earth would that same government be helping the Chinese find out anything new about them?

Possibly most obvious – and therefore possibly most maddening – of all: Why did a researcher at the University of Virginia co-author with three colleagues affiliated with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics a 2018 article titled “Research Progress of Adaptive Control for Hyper-Sonic Vehicle in Near Space”? Did he and the University of Virginia think we’ve arrived already at the United Federation of Planets phase of human history?

Third, as indicated above, the list of American universities involved in these potentially dangerous activities is as long as the inividual schools are highly regarded. It includes Virginia, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, Purdue University, Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, the University of California-Irvine, and Georgia Tech.

Fourth, the list of U.S. government agencies involved is impressive, too. It includes the National Institutes of Health, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.

Fifth, U.S. universities aren’t close to getting a handle on making sure that the research they sponsor in various ways doesn’t strengthen the Chinese military – and therefore undermine U.S. national security. As the Hoover authors point out:

“Only now is the US research community awakening to the intensity and scope of [the China challenge] and its military or dual-use dimensions. However, in the absence of external regulatory or policy mandates, US research institutions have been slow to adapt their due diligence and risk management frameworks. Weak institutional reporting mechanisms and compliance cultures have permitted some collaborations to go unknown, unreported, or underreported. Even among vetted collaborations, conflicts of commitment, unreported or misreported elements, or other activities that undermine the integrity of US scientific research and exceed the scope of collaboration agreements occur. In short, prevailing due diligence and risk management practices for screening and tracking potential collaborations with PRC entities fall far short of what circumstances require.”

Sixth, as must be obvious, the U.S. government isn’t doing much better. Specifically, according to the Hoover study, official U.S. responses (as with those of universities) focus too tightly on whether current laws and regulations aimed dealing with these threats are being violated, without considering whether these restrictions are still adequate. Moreover, Washington seems to view its processes of granting visas as the predominant way to fend off the Chinese threat. As noted by the Hoover authors, however, “collaborations with US partners may move online or to sites outside of the United States.”

So although the Trump administration is far more keenly aware of this problem than its predecessors, clearly is still has a very long way to go.

The Hoover authors are very careful to say that they’re not urging a complete ban on U.S. scientific and technological cooperation with China, and fully acknowledge that the nation has enjoyed major benefits from its academic and research-related openness. Indeed, they lay out a strategy for the research community to avoid handing China many of the keys to America’s scientific and technological kingdoms – in hopes that a heavier government hand can be avoided. Unfortunately, they make such a strong case that both the public and private research communities have been so far behind the eight ball in this respect, that it’s hard to see how anything short of sweeping official measures can deal adequately with the kind of systemic threat posed by China.

Im-Politic: On a Parkland Applicant, Harvard Flunks the Character Test

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adolescents, character, college admissions, colleges, Earl Warren, Florida, forgiveness, gun violence, Harvard University, higher education, Hugo Black, Im-Politic, Japanese internment, Ku Kux Klan, Kyle Kashuv, Parkland, racism, school shootings, Supreme Court, universities, World War II

The more I read and think about Harvard University’s decision to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because this survivor of the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting last year made a variety of racist and other offensive and bigoted remarks in a digital document two years ago, when he was all of sixteen years old, the more outraged I get. And the more convinced I become that Harvard pounced upon an excuse to respond to pressure to punish Kashuv for refusal to jump aboard the gun control bandwagon.

Let’s get one aspect of this incident clear right away. Kashuv’s remarks were genuinely appalling. But for any fair-minded observer, the mitigating factors are overwhelming. He was in mid-adolescence – when even good kids often get tempted to do and say lots of stupid and even cruel things. His remarks were so loopy that they even included anti-semitic slurs – even though Kashuv is Jewish. They were made in private digital communications to a handful of apparently equally stupid friends and other schoolmates – i.e. no one has ever accused him of voicing such sentiments in public, an act that would create actual victims. He has admitted responsibility and apologized profusely. Further, nothing known about him so far – and clearly, folks have been looking, since he was outed by a fellow Marjory Stoneham Douglas student who apparently opposed his views on guns – indicates that these remarks ever reflected his actual views, much less do so now.

In fact, overall, Kashuv’s behavior has been far more honorable than Harvard’s handling of his character issues. To its credit, the university first responded to “media reports discussing offensive statements allegedly authored” by Kashuv by noting the morals clause that’s one of its admissions considerations and asking for “a full accounting” so that the matter could be “considered.” (The best source for these and the following Kashuv and Harvard statements is Kashuv’s Twitter feed:  @KyleKashuv.   

But Harvard’s professed open-mindedness was actually a sham, as is clear from its June 3 letter to Kishuv following his apology and explanation, and rejecting his appeal. The admissions dean William R. Fitzsimmons told Kashuv that he and his colleagues “appreciated [his] candor and…expressions of regret” and “discussed [them] at length.” And they bounced him anyway.

It’s disturbing enough that Harvard refused to accept a lengthy apology for a 16-year old’s misdeeds, an equally lengthy promise to learn and grow, and evidence of actually acting on this promise (in the form of reaching out to the university’s diversity office for guidance and counseling). At least as disturbing is seeing this inflexibility at an educational institution – which presumably is in the business of human improvement and focuses on teenagers, who surely represent many of the most improvable individuals on the planet.

As Kashuv himself has wisely noted, Harvard’s actions also raise broad moral questions about whether “we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistake brand you as irredeemable.” I’d add that the odds of making offensive comments in particular have risen dramatically in recent years, since the amped up coarsening of culture and society is bound to trickle (and even flood) down to the young. Moreover, given how unpopular his guns views tend to be in the left-leaning political cultures on so many college campuses, and especially at so-called elite institutions like Harvard, the school’s treatment of Kashuv reeks of a politicized admissions process.

At the same time, the potential practical consequences of such gun jumping (no pun intended) should be sobering. I’m thinking in particular of Hugo Black. This mid-twentieth century Supreme Court Justice belonged to the Ku Kux Klan as a young adult. He was never especially apologetic, either. But on the High Court, he became one of its staunchest proponents of racial integration and a singular champion of free speech and other individual liberties – for Americans regardless of color.

And don’t forget Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Court during much of Black’s tenure. As Attorney General and Governor of California during World War II, he was instrumental in carrying out the federal policy of indiscriminately throwing Japanese-Americans into internment camps solely because of their race or ethnicity. Not until his memoirs were published posthumously is there any public record of regret for these actions. Yet as Chief Justice, he became an even more powerful force than Black for racial justice and civil liberties.

The main – and screamingly obvious lessons – it seems to me are:

First, people can evolve even as adults, much less from their childhood and adolescent selves.

Second, the case for affording the benefit of the doubt, especially when the offender is young, and forgiveness is sought, is impressive.

And third, to understand these truths, you sure don’t need a Harvard education.

Im-Politic: A Chinese Cure-All for America’s Schools?

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college, education, foreign students, high schools, Im-Politic. China, Leonora Chu, parents, schools, students, teachers, The Wall Street Journal, universities

Nothing would be easier to look at the headline of Leonora Chu’s Wall Street Journal column on lessons that American schools could learn from their Chinese counterparts and conclude that it’s a naive whitewashing – at best – of education in totalitarian countries. And nothing would be more off-base. For the headline is utterly misleading, and the author acknowledges that propagandizing even very young children with communist dogma is only one of the numerous major failures and shortcomings of Chinese schools.

Still, Chu comes off as an unmistakable admirer of many crucial features of the Chinese system, and especially its insistence that parents as well as students respect the authority of teachers, along with the academic results that this attitude produces.

I agree with Chu that too often, “Western teachers spend lots of time managing classroom behavior and crushing mini-revolts by students and parents alike”; that “Americans have arguably gone too far in the other direction, elevating the needs of individual students to the detriment of the group”; and that, “Educational progress in the U.S. is hobbled by parental entitlement and by attitudes that detract from learning: We demand privileges for our children that have little to do with education and ask for report-card mercy when they can’t make the grade.”

Not that even these reasonable propositions are bullet-proof. Principally, how many American teachers today truly deserve this absolute respect? How many are flat-out incompetent? How many are determined to push their own political beliefs on students, at all levels of education, and in public and private schools alike? It’s true that the nation collectively has caused much of this problem by underpaying teachers and thus preventing many individuals of real talent (and integrity) from choosing this profession. But we don’t solve the problem by indiscriminately entrusting our children’s future to the present teacher cohort.

Yet oddly, Chu seems to overlook what seems like potentially the most damning indictment of the Chinese educational system of all. And so have her Wall Street Journal editors: Chinese parents appear to abandon Chinese schools whenever they can. How do I know this? In part because I read The Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, the very same day that Chu’s article ran, the Journal ran a report titled “U.S. High Schools Picking Up More International Flavor.” In this case, the headline was completely accurate. And guess where the plurality of the foreign students streaming into American high schools are coming from? Pat yourself on the back if you answered “China.”

Indeed, correspondent Tawnell D. Hobbs cites a federally funded study finding that the foreign student population in American high schools more than doubled between 2004 and 2016, to just under 82,000. And fully 42 percent are Chinese. Just as intriguing: Three of the other top student-sending countries are known for hewing to Chinese-style, Confucianism-based educational values, too – Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Moreover, why are so many students from these countries with China-like schools coming to America for secondary education? According to one of the study’s researchers, “For most of these students, the goal is to graduate with a high-school diploma. They’re really looking at seeing themselves as being more competitive to get into a U.S. university.”

On the one hand, the decision to try gaining entry into the (still world-class) U.S. higher education system may have nothing to do with any supposed advantage of American high schools. After all, foreign parents may assume that their children will benefit in terms of college admission simply from getting exposed to U.S. schools and their approaches, and to the broader society (including English speakers).

On the other hand, it’s surely no secret to foreign parents that American colleges and universities are turning cartwheels to attract foreign students – mainly for financial reasons. For both public or private institutions have taken to relieving cash crunches by welcoming students from overseas – who pay full freight. So especially if the family has the bucks, there’s no reason to think that junior can’t sail into an American institute of higher education without attending a U.S. high school. And still American secondary education is considered appealing.  

So it seems like the real takeaway here is that although there’s ample room and urgent need for improvement in American schools, and that although some foreign practices and attitudes no doubt can be imported, there’s no reason to think that some magic formula for success lies overseas. The main solutions for what ails U.S. education, as Shakespeare might have said, are “in ourselves.”

Im-Politic: A New China Threat to U.S. Higher Education

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China, Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, colleges, Confucius Institutes, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Norman Matloff, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, universities

A few weeks ago, a tweet of mine on the infiltration of China’s dictatorial regime on U.S. college campuses got a huge (for me) amount of feedback. I was responding to this New York Review of Books article titled “Should the Chinese Government Be in American Classrooms?” and I asked in turn, “This is even a question?”

After all, the piece dealt with the spread of so-called Confucius Institutes throughout American higher education (as well as, shockingly, into the nation’s primary and secondary schools). These organizations purport simply to be teaching Chinese language and culture. But as the article explains:

“[T]heir curriculum is largely shaped by Chinese [government] guidelines. Moreover, they have often been set up in secretive agreements with host institutions, which has caused Western scholars to question whether their universities are ceding undue control to a foreign government—in this instance, a foreign government well known for aggressively propagandizing its official views, censoring dissenting opinions, and imprisoning those who express them.”

So it sounds to me like an open-and-shut case for closing all of them down. But this past week, Norman Matloff, the University of California-Davis computer scientist who’s one of the leading U.S. authorities on America’s Chinese immigrant community, spotlighted another emerging threat from the People’s Republic to the nation’s colleges and universities: the mounting numbers of students they’ve been admitting from China.

The main ideas behind educating Chinese (and other foreigners) look great on paper and often work out well in practice. Americans clearly hope (and even expect) that exposure to these quintessentially free institutions will wind up injecting these newcomers with democratic values – which they hopefully will spread, either consciously or not, in their home countries upon their return. And of course U.S. educators rightly and reasonably hope that native-born students and teachers will benefit from the resulting new opportunities to learn firsthand about foreign countries.

But as made clear in a New York Times piece from last week mentioned in Matloff’s excellent blog, the Chinese government, again, is being imported along with these Chinese students. According to Times reporter Stephanie Saul, these students “often bring to campus…the watchful eyes and occasionally heavy hand of the Chinese government, manifested through its ties to many of the 150-odd chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations. The groups have worked in tandem with Beijing to promote a pro-Chinese agenda and tamp down anti-Chinese speech on Western campuses.”

It would be nice to think that American higher education, with its historic commitment to free inquiry, would have pushed back strongly against these practices – and even kicked off campuses any students found colluding with Beijing. But such optimism seems to be totally unjustified. Although the Associations’ pressures have by and large been resisted, according to Saul, their presence evidently continues to be tolerated. One likely reason: Chinese students tend to come from wealthy families, and to pay full-freight tuition and other costs – which financially strained public and private institutions value highly.

In other words, although U.S. higher education’s Chinese students policies aim in part to turn these youth into freer thinkers, the Chinese presence is turning these institutions more receptive to a major contemporary Chinese norm: Money talks.

Im-Politic: America Keeps Importing Corruption from China

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admissions process, China, colleges, corruption, education, higher education, Im-Politic, meritocracy, Reuters, universities

Sorry for the recent hiatus! Those darned computer problems!

Luckily, although today’s subject is based on a news story more than a week old, it will be incredibly timely for as long as the problem it describes is with us. Simply put, Reuters has reported – complete with devastating evidence – that China is corrupting the U.S. college admissions process. And the findings should prompt Americans and especially their leaders to start asking much more searching questions about the People’s Republic’s growing role in the nation’s economy and society than they’ve been posing so far.

As is no doubt known by anyone who’s sent a kid to college lately (or who keeps up with China-related developments), the population of students from the PRC on American college and university campuses has been surging for years. China’s nouveaux riches and Communist Party leaders (two classes with lots of overlap) increasingly want to give their kids the benefit of an American education. And since they’re able to pay full freight, American higher education has been only to happy to welcome them.

This practice has disturbing enough overtones – especially when you find it in taxpayer-supported public institutions. But assuming that the Chinese students involved meet a school’s academic standards, or come close, it’s not outright corrupt – at least no more so than the longstanding admission of children of wealthy actual or prospective American donors or influential alumni even when they’d otherwise be uncompelling candidates.

As the Reuters investigation shows, however, at least one Chinese “education company” has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities “to help students apply to American schools.” The perks consisted of travel expenses for “workshops” held in China to advise students whose families are clients of Shanghai-based Dipont Education Management Group “on how to successfully apply to U.S. colleges.”

In theory, that can be excused. (Although one Boston University researcher quoted in the article claimed that such behavior, too, raises major ethical problems.) But not the payments – which consisted of “honoraria” for attendance that went right into the pockets of U.S. admissions officers, which amounted to $4,500 per head in the last two years, and typically in the form of hundred-dollar bills.

Moreover, the seven schools that have confirmed that their employees have been on the take from China aren’t only or even mostly smaller private institutions that, especially since the Great Recession, have been struggling financially. They’re Carleton College, Hamilton College, Lafayette College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tulane University, the University of Vermont, and the University of Rochester.

In addition, the following schools declined to comment or did not respond at all about the travel expenses or the honoria when contacted by Reuters about the article’s allegations: Davidson College, Wesleyan University, Claremont McKenna College, Colorado College, Harvey Mudd College, Syracuse University, and Texas Christian University.

Nothing reported by Reuters about the Chinese practices should surprise any knowledgeable readers. After all, a perfect storm of skyrocketing national wealth, the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, and the millennia-old absence of rule of law has produced in China a society that arguably is the most corrupt in contemporary history. Nor should it be news that the United States is full of individuals, organizations, and institutions that are happy to play along.

Here’s what Americans should be asking, though: Given the undeniable reality of systemic Chinese corruption, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with the admissions offices of any American institutions of higher learning? Indeed, given Chinese corruption and the importance of fund-raising in U.S. higher education, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with any American colleges or universities that may have an impact on admissions.

And, as suggested, the main reason for barring the Chinese has nothing to do with the supposed purity of American morals. Instead, it’s a matter of recognizing how extensively home-grown pollution has already stained this supposedly meritocratic system, and wondering why a well-known foreign source of corruption needs to be invited in.

In fact, the same question should be raised about China’s growing economic footprint in the United States (on top of crucial national security and economic concerns). For any Chinese actor large enough to consider buying into America has surely succeeded at least in part due to its mastery of the country’s kleptocratic politics. Does business in the United States really need immense new injections of graft and cronyism from abroad?

Openness to foreign individuals, organizations, capital, goods, technology, cultures, and other influences unquestionably has been a tremendous boon to the United States throughout its history (and a decisive one when it comes to immigration). But not all foreign countries are created equal, and the example of China strongly suggests that some systems are at best incompatible with and at worst dangerous to America’s well being. China’s undermining of U.S. higher education’s integrity signals loud and clear that the actual downside of permitting Chinese participation is already outweighing any conceivable benefits – and that more wide-ranging official U.S. discrimination is needed in order to choke off similar Chinese threats in other spheres of American life.