The Belt and Road Initiative is China’s most ambitious effort to achieve geopolitical regional and eventual global domination. Several Asian and African nations have acceded to the Chinese regime’s plans, only to find themselves in serious financial distress afterward. The first major western country to agree to join Belt and Road — Italy — less than a year later became the European hotspot for the coronavirus pandemic. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in a previous exclusive interview with Breitbart News, explained that workers from Wuhan, China, transplanted to northern Italy as part of the Italians’ agreement in the Belt and Road program is almost certainly how the coronavirus spread from its origins in China to Italy.
But, Pompeo noted in this exclusive interview with Breitbart News that aired on Saturday, it is not just overseas in distant lands that Americans need to worry about Chinese influence operations. Here at home in the United States, there are ongoing efforts by agents of the Chinese Communist Party to build influence in state and local governments as well as in American universities.
“This is connected to what you talked about with the Belt and Road Initiative, but it is also true here inside the United States,” Pompeo said. “I spoke to the National Governors Association a few months back where I shared that they are working to influence governors, mayors, school board members, private business owners to influence them to put the bright face of China on what is actually the Chinese Communist Party that’s seeking to exert their influence here inside the United States. This is primarily the responsibility of the FBI to police, but your listeners should know the State Department is doing its part too, and we put restrictions on their diplomats who are moving around America — the same kind they put on our diplomats as they move around China. This effort to influence what’s going on here in the United States is a very serious matter. You talked about our universities and our research labs. This is not about good Chinese people working on commercial projects. We find that acceptable. This is about the Chinese Communist Party exerting its influence here in the United States for missions that are deeply connected to the regime in China trying to exert influence in places where it ought not to be, and we’re doing everything we can to push back against that.”
Pompeo did indeed warn America’s governors that Chinese Communist Party officials are attempting to influence them and local officials across the country.
As for the issue of American academics with ties to the Chinese, it is a growing problem in the United States. In January, a Harvard professor — Dr. Charles Lieber, the chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University — was arrested by Justice Department officials and charged with “making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement.” Lieber, the Justice Department said, lied about being part of the Chinese government’s “Thousand Talents Plan,” which buys off American and other western academics with huge salaries and expense accounts. He was reportedly given huge sums of cash and expenses to be part of the Chinese plan.
ConservativeChick