You can often glean a lot about someone or something based solely on how people talk about them when they’re not in the room.
President Donald Trump’s use of “Rocket Man” to describe North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, for instance, revealed a lot.
It was obviously biting and mocking, noting disdain and a lack of respect, while still acknowledging the dangers that Kim and his missile-shaped dreams represented. You can often find similar phenomena throughout the world, where small, candid quips pack big, layered meaning.
So what does it mean that the Chinese Communist Party has reportedly described an American institute of higher learning as its “party school”?
Here’s the key snippet from an ominous Wall Street Journal report:
“For decades, the [CCP] has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top ‘party school’ outside the country.”
Yikes. Hearing one of the most prestigious colleges in the country casually referred to as a “party school” as if it were, say, Arizona State, is sobering, to say the least.
Does it mean that Chinese students are that far ahead of their American counterparts? Does that mean Harvard is now an extension of the Chinese Communist Party? Does it mean that Harvard has fallen?
(No, we’re not talking about Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, though that’s its own scourge.)
Whatever meaning is packed into “party school,” it’s not good for America and highlights how much of a plague Chinese interference has become.
And it’s not just Harvard. Other brand-name colleges, like Stanford, have been implicated for turning into festering cesspools of clandestine CCP activity.
“Throughout our investigation, professors, students, and researchers readily recounted their experiences of Chinese spying, yet they declined to speak publicly,” the school paper reported in May. “One student who experienced espionage firsthand was too fearful to recount their story, even via encrypted messaging.”
The report added, and perhaps best summarized, one of the ways in which the CCP has so easily slid its tendrils into the Ivy League.
“‘The risk is too high,’ they explained,” the report continued. “Transnational repression, $64 million in Chinese funding, and allegations of racial profiling have contributed to a pervasive culture of silence at Stanford and beyond.”
It added: “It is this pervasive silence that has compelled us to write.”
Remember, once upon a time, these were the sorts of big-name schools your parents wanted you to go to — and now they’re basically extensions of an anti-American communist party.
It’s the sort of plot that you’d expect from a Tom Clancy novel, not from the reporters at The Stanford Review.
And it’s exactly why this current presidential administration’s sweeping block of international student visas at Harvard is so critical and so important.
Yeah, sure, you’re getting the usual wailing from the left about that block being racist/xenophobic/blah blah blah, but extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures.
If this web of CCP spies has infiltrated these “elite” schools as deeply as the evidence suggests, nothing short of complete excision will solve it.
And if that sounds like I’m talking about cancer, it’s harder to think of a more apt description of the CCP’s influence on American ideals than that.
Whatever one may think of Trump, this is one critical fight that every American — regardless of race, creed, or alma mater — should be able to get behind.
The CCP is not our friend, and it has no business embedding itself as deeply into American institutions of higher learning as it so clearly, and so frightfully, has.
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