{C} ongressional Republicans led by Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, are pressing a University of Montana institute affiliated with a former U.S. ambassador to China to cut ties with a Beijing proxy group operating in the United States. The GOP lawmakers are urging the school to end an educational exchange program that is counter, in their view, to U.S. national-security interests.
While many Chinese government front groups operate in the U.S. in relative obscurity, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) is an officially declared foreign principal whose lobbyists register with the Justice Department as foreign agents. The foundation has been at the center of several prominent controversies involving China’s malign influence in the U.S.
Despite repeated public warnings in recent years about CUSEF’s role as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an institute affiliated with Montana’s former senator Max Baucus continues to have an active partnership with it. Baucus, whom President Obama sent to Beijing as the U.S. ambassador to China, is one of Beijing’s boosters in the U.S. He argues regularly that the only alternative to war is a form of cooperation with Beijing according to which U.S. officials should never publicly criticize the CCP’s misbehavior.
The lawmakers asked University of Montana president Seth Bodnar to cut ties with CUSEF, warning in a letter Sunday night that his school is an unwitting partner in advancing the CCP’s malign aims. “CUSEF is not a benign entity interested in the objective education of Montanans — it is an organ of the CCP’s approach to influence operations, including those intended to shape Americans’ views toward the CCP-controlled People’s Republic of China (PRC) government,” wrote Gallagher and Representatives Ryan Zinke and Matt Rosendale. They also asked Bodnar to set up a rigorous process to vet foreign partnerships to prevent a similar situation from arising in the future.
Specifically, the lawmakers are troubled by the Baucus Institute’s 2024 study trip to China, for which CUSEF will cover most students’ expenses. The program, which is scheduled for next May and June, is centered around a curriculum in comparative law and is a partnership between the University of Montana, CUSEF, and Tsinghua University. The itinerary includes stops in Chongqing’s China at Southwest University of Political Sciences and Law and the Xiamen University Law School. Participants will be responsible for “very few!” expenses, with CUSEF covering most costs, except for air travel to China, the institute’s website states.
The University of Montana, the Baucus institute, the Blewett School of Law (which hosts the institute) did not respond to requests for comment.
The letter to Bodnar comes as the House select committee warns Americans about the dangers posed by the CCP’s “united front” work — malign influence campaigns operated by a sprawling network of individuals and semi-official organizations dedicated to advancing the Communist Party’s aims within China and abroad. Gallagher and the committee’s top Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthi, recently unveiled a memo explaining that “united front work damages U.S. interests through legal and illegal technology transfer, surveillance of Chinese diaspora communities, promotion of favorable narratives about the PRC through ostensibly independent voices, and the neutralization or harassment of critics of the CCP.”
Writing to Bodnar, Gallagher described CUSEF as a key united-front actor, given that its founder, Tung Chee-hwa, served as the vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference — an influential body that coordinates united-front actors from across Chinese society.
This isn’t the first time that CUSEF’s close proximity to the CCP has drawn attention. In 2018, the University of Texas rejected a CUSEF-funded project after Senator Ted Cruz raised foreign influence concerns about the proposal.
CUSEF, which is based in Hong Kong, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment this morning.
Yet Baucus has maintained a partnership with CUSEF, and he traveled to China in June with students in this year’s iteration of the exchange program. That cohort met with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. The latter is another united-front actor; in 2020 then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned it was “malignly influencing” Americans.
During a debate hosted at Pepperdine University last month, Baucus said that all U.S. officials need to go to China to understand how to shape U.S. policy. He needled Gallagher’s handling of China-related issues in Congress: “This fellow Mike Gallagher, who’s chairman of the committee on China in the House of Representatives, hasn’t stepped one foot in China,” Baucus said. “He’s never been to China, yet he’s pontificating about how bad China is. He’s never been there!”