Communist China in Texas: Education Infestation

via Texas Scorecard

Bias, indoctrination, and hostility toward self-governance present in the state’s education system has shocked and outraged Texans, resulting in demands for their public servants to act at local and state levels. As Texas Scorecard has illuminated throughout this investigative series, however, multiple infiltrations by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wielding these same threats are also present in the state’s education apparatus.

As we previously reported, Confucius Institutes (CI) are the Trojan horse that facilitates this infiltration, all done under the guise of exporting language and culture.

While CI contracts have come and gone, some things remain—namely, the relationships between Texas universities and their  Chinese counterparts. Many universities have transitioned their Confucius Institutes into Chinese Institutes, which are merely variations of the original minus the direct funding from the Chinese government.

Many school districts have forged new networks of Confucius Classrooms via organizations that do not shy away from doing business with the CCP, the International Leadership of Texas Global being one of them. However, this next decade may be defined by a new kind of agreement between Texas and Chinese universities—one not directly orchestrated by the CCP, but still just a stone’s throw away from its all-encompassing reach.

Memorandum of Understanding

When universities sign contracts agreeing to collaborate on research, conduct faculty and student exchanges, or work together on any other joint project, these are commonly referred to as MOUs or MOAs: Memorandum of Understanding or Memorandum of Agreement.

These contracts are fairly common. Trouble only begins when the other party shows a lack of trustworthiness.

When that party is the Chinese Communist Party, or a Chinese university that is beholden to the CCP, alarms sound.

Several Texas universities have such agreements. Most of the time, the other party is their Chinese partner from their Confucius Institute. Some of them, like the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), had agreements with their partner universities long before they founded their Institutes. Others started their agreements contemporaneously with their Institutes, and others are seeking to sign agreements after their Institutes have shut down.

Texas Scorecard requested records of such agreements from all universities that had active Confucius Institutes at one point or another. Records from many of those universities, including Prairie View A&M University and the University of Texas at Dallas, are still forthcoming. But we were able to obtain some of these agreements via the results of open records requests filed by the National Association of Scholars. As the following summary will show, they were quite revealing.

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