Chinese Involvement in Higher Education in America

Floor Speech

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Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleague for yielding.

Here are some facts you need to know about the abysmal record of the Chinese Communist Party on human rights and against our American way of freedom.

China has carried out the torture, forced sterilization, and sexual abuse of over 1 million Uyghurs.

China has ranked 175 out of 180 countries that lack free press, and it is notorious for jailing journalists with dissenting voices. Chinese officials have detained, tortured, and executed protestors with impunity.

Since 2013, U.S. colleges and universities have received more than $1 billion in gifts and contracts from the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated sources.

As a result, professors, student groups, and guest speakers critical of the Communist Party's human rights abuses have been silenced, threatened, and de-platformed. The China regime is spreading anti- democratic, anti-American propaganda by funneling large sums of money into education.

Sadly, we have Americans who have and continue to think that turning their back on our Nation for self-aggrandizement is okay. This profit over patriotism culture that has infested our country and our institutions of higher learning is okay.

This must end.

It is a national security issue when the Communist Party simply buys onto platforms that manipulate our children, their education, the vision and ability to appreciate this great country.

We have for years allowed the Chinese Communist Party to find a home in our high schools and colleges with their Confucius Institutes.

Granted the credibility of our institutions and the pipeline of our children, they indoctrinate them into their form of government, one that can only survive through tyranny, is good, and that our form of government, a representative republic that thrives on freedom, is bad.

It is on these college campuses where the stealing of our intellectual property, technology, and national security secrets is not looked upon as betrayal, which it is at the highest, but instead deemed a necessity to build bigger, more spacious buildings and to hire more bureaucrats committed to teach our impressible and trusting children that Marxism is okay after all.

The manipulation of our children on American soil, paid for by American taxpayers, is unacceptable. Again, the profit over patriotism culture that has infested too many of our higher education institutions must stop now.

As we watched a slow-moving Communist spy balloon that took a week to lumber over our Nation, doing figure eights over our military bases; then, as we learned this morning of the secret Communist Chinese police station spying on, intimidating, and disrupting free speech of Chinese Americans in New York City, we have to wonder what is really being taught or not taught in our educational system.

It is indeed broken if our past generations taught by these institutions can see the blatant attacks on our American culture and think there is nothing wrong; that the presence of misery, chaos, hopelessness, and divisiveness throughout our Nation is normal and acceptable.

From establishing a bipartisan select committee on China, to reducing reliance on foreign adversaries for our American energy needs, the House GOP has delivered on its promise outlined in our Commitment to America; that is, to counter the malignant influence of China in corporate boardrooms, social media, and on college and high school campuses. We have done so in our first 100 days.

As the chairman of the Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, I am proud to lead the charge in ensuring the freedom of speech of every American on every college campus and to preserve the integrity of America's higher education.

I am committed to championing the freedom and liberty we enjoy as Americans. As was the statement made by a Japanese Admiral after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the deaths of close to 3,000 Americans, ``I fear we've awakened a sleeping giant.''

To the Biden administration that has for 2 years been asleep as our Nation has faced threats from within and without, the American people will not stand by and let our children be indoctrinated out of our belief in freedom, our American way, and the history of proud Americans who sacrificed their blood, sweat, and tears to grant us this great gift.

You have awakened a sleeping giant, a freedom-loving we the people.

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