Free Republic

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, or has had, ties to 143 school districts in the United States, including 20 near military bases, through its "Confucius Classrooms," according to a recent report, "Little Red Classrooms: China's Infiltration of American K-12 Schools" by Parents Defending Education (PDE), a grassroots organization. Attention to Confucius Institutes has mainly been centered around colleges and universities, but less so on K-12 education. This means that Chinese state propaganda is probably now pretty much all over American K-12 classrooms. PDE observed that more than $17 million had been spent by the CCP on Confucius classrooms in...

China reportedly reached an agreement with Cuba to allow them to create an electronic eavesdropping facility on the Caribbean island, which is located about 100 miles south of Florida, as tensions between Beijing and Washington have been rising dramatically over the past several months. The Cuban facility would allow Chinese intelligence officials to monitor U.S. ship traffic and to listen to electronic communications throughout the southeastern United States, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of highly classified intelligence, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. China reached an agreement in principle to pay several billion dollars to the impoverished Marxist-Leninist nation...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has provided over $158 million to U.S. schools for Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese culture, U.S. Senate investigators said on Wednesday, releasing a report saying the centers have acted as tightly controlled propaganda arms for Beijing and should be changed - or shut down. The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations spent eight months investigating the Confucius Institutes...(snip) ...many staff had obtained the wrong type of visa and that 70 percent of U.S. colleges and universities that received at least $250,000 per year from the Chinese government did not report it...

I don’t believe we’ve written about Monica Witt, the former U.S. Air Force intelligence specialist accused of espionage for Iran. Witt, who now resides in Iran, out of our reach, is said to have caused significant damage to America. She is suspected, among other things, of revealing the names of double agents run by the United States. Why did Witt become a traitor? Douglas Wise, former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, rules out a monetary motive. She wasn’t in it for the money; this wasn’t a fee-for-task thing. At some point, she took an ideological left turn to...

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, my guest was Rachelle Peterson, director of research projects at the invaluable National Association of Scholars, and author of the groundbreaking report "Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education." Peterson’s investigation into these Chinese Communist Party-backed purported cultural exchange and language studies centers on U.S. college campuses — which she demonstrated were actually used to propagandize and penetrate our schools — preceded the recent disclosure of an FBI investigation into Confucius Institutes and a legislative effort to probe and counter their malign activities. Given China’s increasingly...

Chinese spies are spreading throughout the United States as part of “a whole-of-society threat,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Tuesday. The problem is exacerbated by the “naivete” of U.S. academics who don’t recognize the intelligence collectors among them. “They’re exploiting the very open research-and-development environment that we have, which we all revere, but they’re taking advantage of it,” he said. “So, one of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end and I think it’s going to take a whole of-society response by...

More than 100 American colleges and universities house Confucius Institutes, centres of Chinese language and cultural teaching funded and staffed in part with instructors screened by a Chinese government-affiliated entity known as Hanban. The Confucius Institutes may seem to many to be benign outposts offering cultural events programming and non-credit courses in introductory Chinese, calligraphy or Tai Chi, but for nearly as long as the Confucius Institutes have been around – more than 10 years now – they’ve been controversial.

The Secret Service says a bullet hit an exterior window of the White House and was stopped by ballistic glass according to the Associated press. An additional round of ammunition was also found on the exterior of the White House. The bullets were found Tuesday evening. The discovery follows reports of gunfire near the White House on Friday. Witnesses heard shots and saw two speeding vehicles in the area. An AK-47 rifle was also recovered.

As Confucius Institutes — nonprofit branches that fund Chinese language and culture learning — spread to universities around the world, Penn is reconsidering its 2009 decision to reject them. … CIs, which are affiliated with the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education, have garnered controversy since they began in 2004 over issues of academic freedom and the Chinese government’s involvement. Academic programs affiliated with CIs at Stanford University — which received $4 million from this fund — may not include discussion on issues such as Tibet. …