America's New Target: China

A funny thing happened when Trump targeted China on trade. There was widespread opposition at first, with lots of political enemies joining with free trade economists. Then came grudging acceptance that Trump had finally done something, even if it wasn't the best thing. He shifted the Overton Window and opened new areas of debate. Russia collusion is fading fast and in its place is the China threat.

Foreign Policy: The Chinese Communist Party Is Setting Up Cells at Universities Across America

One Chinese exchange student who studied at UIUC in the fall of 2017 says that before embarking on the study tour in Illinois, the students had to attend a lecture on the dangers of the Falun Gong, a strongly anti-party spiritual group banned in mainland China but active in the United States.

After the students’ arrival in Illinois, their home university asked the group to set up a temporary party branch and requested that the students hold a viewing party to watch the 19th party plenum in October, the major party planning conference held every five years. (The plenum was the subject of a major global propaganda push, with Chinese embassies and consulates reaching out to Chinese community organizations around the world, asking them to organize events for their members.)

The exchange students at UIUC were also asked to report on any potentially subversive opinions their classmates may have evinced while abroad, according to the student.

“After we went back to China, we had one-on-one meetings with our teachers. We talked about ourselves and others performance abroad,” the student says. “We had to talk about whether other students had some anti-party thought.”

The irony missed by the globalists is how this is pure globalism. The Chinese government doesn't respect borders, it respects the people. All Chinese people in the world will eventually be considered part of Greater China if they aren't today. In contrast, the idea that America is a political entity because of geographic borders is a throwback to a pre-nationalist era of monarchs who ruled over territory and all the different nations within them.

The party isn’t shy about the purpose of these new branches. “The rising number of overseas party branches is a new phenomenon, showing the growing influence of the [Chinese Communist Party] and China,” according to a November 2017 report in the party-aligned Global Times newspaper. “Overseas party cells are also responsible for promoting party and government policies.”

How is this different from other nations pushing their agenda in the United States? The only difference with China is its a bit more overt. It's not taking place through a network of NGOs, charities and cultural exchanges. It's not hiding behind the academic language, it's not peppered with buzzwords like diversity and inclusion. But what China is doing is very much in line with how America operates in 2018.

“We take the safety and security of all of our students seriously and work extremely hard to ensure that they have the opportunity to freely pursue the full educational experience we promised them when they chose to come to Illinois,” the university said in a statement to FP.

They are every bit as concerned with ideological conformity as the Chinese government. The pot is calling the kettle a container of color.

Grouping students into party cells while abroad sounds like a “downward extension” of a policy that has long been applied to high-ranking Chinese officials who travel overseas, says Andrew Chubb, a fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World program. “This is important information that should be carefully considered by universities hosting exchanges. Host institutions need to make sure they are familiar with the kinds of situations their exchange students may be in,” he says.

The party cells popping up on campuses across the United States aren’t the Communist Party’s only expansion abroad. The U.S.-based party branches are part of a growing network of cells located on campuses in Canada, Mexico, Chile, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, South Korea, Thailand, and elsewhere.

The cells aren’t always used for ideological purposes. In March 2011, as the Arab Spring protests devolved into a civil war in Libya, Beijing sent a warship to the region to evacuate all 35,000 Chinese nationals there. A small group of Chinese students on Crete, members of a party cell at the University of Athens, participated in the evacuation effort, according to an article in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper.

Helping to evacuate compatriots from a war zone is the type of humanitarian work many university groups would want to promote, but the students’ mobilization demonstrates Beijing’s growing capacity to establish functional party cells in Western countries that can be activated if needed.

Most people reading the FP article see nothing wrong with flooding the West with millions upon millions of Muslims, or the United States with millions of Mexicans, or take issue with various minority populations pushing foreign agendas in Washington, D.C., but a few hundred party cells at universities are a threat.

For Chinese students abroad, there’s a clear message, according to Hoffman of the Mercator Institute.

“You know that the party’s there,” she says. “It’s integrated directly into your study abroad experience.”

If they're going to return to China, why wouldn't it?

Two takeaways. One, China is going to become the new target for American jingoists. Russia collusion was a joke, China's ascent is not.

More broadly, nationalism is rising. Even the globalists are falling victim to it and advancing nationalist agendas. They should be celebrating the diversity of viewpoints brought by CCP members. They should speak of inclusion, bringing the CCP's ideas on various issues to students. After all, it is such a large force in the world, you can't really understand a globalized world without understanding the Chinese Communist Party's view on things.