Columns: No Limits, No Kidding!

DOG BREEDS AND POLITICS

A lot of AKC dog breeds originated in China as do most of our imported goods but the Confucius Institutes present great risk to our American heritage.

June 12, 2023

Col. Sam Harper, Dogsport Reconnaissance

I was doing some personal research on our trade balance with China and was surprised that so many dog breeds originated there. I knew Chows, Pekingese and Pugs came from China but I was more interested in what else we Americans welcome from there.

I feel duty-bound to cover something else we are currently “importing” from China. As an aside though, I noted that we don’t get many dogs from there nowadays. Maybe there’s a food shortage and they are eating dogs instead of exporting them?

Not meant to be funny. Anyway, as a trained spotter, I didn’t have to look far for the fact that only a few years ago CNN enthused over China’s President Xi Jinping's “grand plan for the world economy.” That was smoke and mirrors. The Grand Plan was only for China’s economy. I don’t want to rub it in but in less than a decade he succeeded.

My job was spotting potential problems and training taught me that knowing what was behind my men could help me see what was up ahead. So let’s do that here…

Part of China’s plan to better control our thinking (and our leaders) is the Confucius Institutes program which was quietly added to college curriculum in 2004. The “course” was meant to popularize socialism among American students and diminish cultural opposition to the influence of China. By 2017 there were over 90 such courses.

I had to dig but found this, “China spent over $158 million on Confucius Institutes in the United States between 2006 and 2019, according to a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report.” ~ Congress.gov

Donald J. Trump was elected President in 2016 and as an international entrepreneur, he recognized China’s subversive goals. He must have wondered how previous leaders had overlooked more than 525 Chinese propaganda centers operating as Confucius Institutes in a lot of top American colleges.

I don’t know Donald Trump but I salute him for taking decisive action to expose their teachings and adversely reduce their funding. The politically slanted courses were reduced from over 500 down to only 27 during his term. President Trump put America first and in my personal opinion, that was his downfall.

To the contrary, President Biden’s State Department said the Confucius curriculum supported cultural exchange programs and thus was a good thing. Shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated, the Defense Department quietly announced that it would issue waivers allowing “…schools to host chapters of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese Communist Party-backed program that Beijing uses to peddle influence and steal intellectual property from American universities.”

The waiver program reversed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred American colleges from receiving federal dollars if they maintained Confucius Institute chapters.

That’s about it for now. I hope I haven’t overstepped my authorization here but I thought you ought to know what we’re up against in 2023.

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