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Have Chinese spies infiltrated American campuses?
- luciusdomitius 5y ago[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- krapp 5y agoMeh. Americans would call Ronald Reagan a Marxist nowadays. Only a nation without any semblance of actual leftism in its body politic could be so confused. Also, you appear to be referring obliquely to Cultural Marxism[0], a right-wing conspiracy theory originally created by Nazis linking Western intellectualism and academia to a secret Communist or Marxist agenda. In the context of the linked article, the Trump-era neo-McCarthyist program described, that bogeyman of the Jewish/Marxist academic has been replaced by that of the Chinese operative, with the concern being intellectual property theft, rather than Marxist indoctrination. It's a thought-provoking article. You should read it and consider providing a substantive comment. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
- luciusdomitius 5y ago[flagged]
- krapp 5y agoSo your rebuttal is... that cultural Marxists took over Wikipedia and edited the article for cultural Marxism in order to make themselves look like anti-Semites? You're right, that is ridiculous. Fine then, here are some articles from the Guardian[0], the Conversation [1] and SPLC[2]. Let me guess... all of those were taken over by cultural Marxists as well? The fact is TFA doesn't even have anything to do with Marxism in academia. You just saw the words "Chinese" and "American campuses" in the title and got triggered, which doesn't help disprove the thesis that belief in "cultural Marxism" is fundamentally rooted in xenophobia. [0]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/cultural-marxism-a-uniting-theory-for-rightwingers-who-love-to-play-the-victim https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/cultur... [1]https://theconversation.com/is-cultural-marxism-really-taking-over-universities-i-crunched-some-numbers-to-find-out-139654 https://theconversation.com/is-cultural-marxism-really-takin... [2]https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
- malermeister 5y agoPlease stop spreading a conspiracy theory started by the literal Nazis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
- SkittyDog 5y agoIt's helpful to recognize that the family of things commonly called "Marxism" is not a singular school of political economy. Over the 20th century, Karl Marx's original theories and philosophy have constantly evolved, branched off, and swapped DNA with other areas of thought... The easy examples are Leninsm, Trotskyism, Maoism, postmodernism, critical theory, but there a thousands on thousands of identifiable influences that Marxism has left on politics, economics, history, literature, art, game design, language, philosphy, and more. It's hard to imagine many humanities fields without their modern Marxist stripes, so deep runs the inheritance. This part isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a well documented and well-studied phenomenon. Marx and his intellectual descendants have massively shaped the modern world. And that includes the Western-aligned societies that stridently rejected Communism during the Cold War. Even the conspiracy theory has evolved over time... the modern versions you hear about on Fox News have changed a bit from the old Nazi stuff.
- usednet 5y agoI quote Zizek from the Peterson debate - “Where are these postmodern Marxists?” The number of universities offering any sort of heterodox economics in the US is in the low tens. As somebody with an economics degree, I’d love for you to prove that the average western university even teaches about Marxism at all.
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
- usednet 5y agoI’d love for you to list even 5 western universities that have courses on MMT. In addition, equivocating MMT to central planning (which is in your view, equivalent to Marxism?) is completely nonsensical.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoWhile I think you are correct that Marxist economics is out of the mainstream in US Academics, I find that Marxism still has its advocates within history departments as well as sociology and liberal arts fields. My alma mater still has an undergraduate course on Communism whose professor had a reputation of being a staunch but not uncritical Marxist https://history.rutgers.edu/academics/undergraduate/course-details/173-general/comparative-history/1551-01-506-361-history-of-socialism-and-communism-3 https://history.rutgers.edu/academics/undergraduate/course-d...
- acadapter 5y agoRegardless of the proportions between truth and exaggeration in this article - today's political climate is becoming like a playground for psychopaths that are willing to push the xenophobia-buttons of the crowd in service of their own purposes. Articles like these make me formulate various escape plans in my head, even though I'm not Asian. I'm not part of the majority group where I live. What if one day my ethnicity becomes targeted by other people's arrangements of bad reputation? How will I start a new life?
- usednet 5y agoIn mere decades the nation will look back at these cases against respectable academics as what they truly are: blatant, nonsensical xenophobia. Academic collaboration is “Chinese ties?” Incredible that these cases are even being sent to trial with 0 evidence of these professors sending any kind of sensitive information to China.
- Jtype 5y agoSo you don't believe that a country with a long history of stealing technology IP would have spies in the Universities that are doing cutting edge research in those areas?
- throw4887643 5y agoJapan had “a long history of stealing technology IP” until they didn’t. Then it was South Korea that “a long history of stealing technology IP” until they didn’t. Now it’s China getting blamed. I wonder which country will be next? India?
- Dracophoenix 5y agoThere have been incidents with Japanese corporations stealing IP: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/23/business/japanese-executives-charged-in-ibm-theft-case.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/23/business/japanese-executi...
- Jtype 5y agoSo your argument is that other foreign nationals have been unfairly accused in the past so we shouldn't worry about it happening? Or, is it that other nations, as they developed, spied and stole technology until they didn't need to anymore? Either way I don't see why we should ignore technology theft.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoThe US did it too, until they became top dog. I can't get worked up about it. It's just the way of things.
- troon-lover 5y ago
- temp8964 5y agoWhy can't journalists use honest titles for their reports? This is simply a story about one single case. The report tries to spin this as if it represents a wide-ranging phenomenon. Did soviet spies infiltrate American state department and other government agencies during the cold war? Yes. Were there cases of wrong accusations? Yes. But you can't simply point out a case of wrong accusation and deny the wide-ranging infiltration of soviet spies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United... The wide-ranging of recruiting of U.S. academics by the Chinese government is no secret at all. It is self-evident by the Thousand Talents Plan. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan ). Many of the involved academics did so secretly and illegally. They are not necessarily "spies", nor were they commonly accused of being "spies". The article created a strawman narrative, and then try to debunk the strawman with a single case, for the whole purpose of creating an xenophobia narrative.
- helen___keller 5y agoThe article is definitely making an emotional appeal here. For the numbers supporting it I recommend looking at the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the China Initiative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative and you’ll find some appalling figures (like 50% dropped charges on academics so far, which indicates feds are more than willing to bring make arrests and bring charges when they don’t even have a strong case for their allegations, ie witch-hunts against Chinese academics) > They are not necessarily "spies", nor were they commonly accused of being "spies". The charges don’t indicate they are spies, but if you read the indictments of e.g. Gang Cheng, it repeatedly accuses him of being loyal to China, which is all but calling him a spy > The wide-ranging of recruiting of U.S. academics by the Chinese government is no secret at all. It is self-evident by the Thousand Talents Plan. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan ). Indeed, academics have been ensnared by political bullshit. The way I call it is China offered the carrot and USA offered the stick. If you want to work with China, the Chinese government will be more than happy to reward you; if you are caught working with China, USG will be more than happy to throw you into prison and try to ruin your life (even without enough evidence to convict, as in at least half of this cases) Frankly, I wish I could say we were winning the battle over academia using free speech and anti-authoritarianism, but it appears being anti-China is the best we can do
- dirtyid 5y agoMost likely, but the explicitly racist China Initiative did a terrible job of catching them, because I surmise the goal was to disrupt legitimate Sino-US education links in general, which in some people's estimation is more significant than catching some spies. Can't really stop PRC from hacking institutional DBs from across the ocean, or transmitting knowledge back via 1000s of research interns, but can certainly dissuade leading educators from participating in PRC thousand talent exchange programs.