To the editor:

Dateline June 15, 2023: Canada freezes all activities at the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank after Bob Packard, a Canadian citizen who had been serving as the bank’s director-general for global communications flees to Japan out of concern for his personal safety. Packard said that as a patriotic Canadian he had no choice but to resign. In Tokyo he told the Financial Times that Communist Party members “are like an invisible government inside the bank and this is what I can’t be part of… I don’t want to be a useful idiot.”

Dateline June 15, 2023: The University of Kansas announces a new Chinese-government-proposed-and-approved partnership with Zhejiang Normal University that will have KU granting KU graduate and undergraduate degrees to Chinese students after they complete a course of study approved by the Chinese Communist Party. Responding to concerns about this new partnership being compared to KU’s 13-year partnership with the CCP to operate a Confucius Institute that he supported, Chancellor Douglas Girod said that this program “shouldn’t be controversial. It is fair to say that we don’t have an issue with the Chinese people. Where our government has a problem is with the Chinese government.” The Chinese people? This program is not a people-to-people program. It has CCP objectives written all over it. All it requires to work is “useful idiots” willing to serve as front men. Unfortunately, as events since 2006 have shown, Mount Oread has this type of person in abundance and the CCP seems to know it.

Gary J. Bjorge,

Lawrence