I Bill Cunningham, the Grant American, a coortanate flight between the Trump administration and Harvard continues oun debated along with other universities. It used to be in the nineteen nineties there might be three percent of Cordon students at the Harvard or Yale or Columbia. Now there ranges between twenty
and thirty three percent of students. And it might be financial, which means they're willing to pay full freight, especially Chinese students paid for by the generally the Communist Party of China to commit or learn and to report back to China. That's a different story. But Harvard students right now are subjected to a bunch of anti Semitism, which I did not think was possible on Columbia campus or on major universities. And Greg Rabbidue is an award winning filmmaker, author and
cultural commentator. And Greg Rabbitue also has a calumn up as har is Harvard still committed to Veritas, which means truth. Greg, welcome, I think for the third time to the Bill Cunningham Show. And first of all, let's go back in time a little bit a long time ago, maybe the nineteen nineties, was the Harvard and other these elite campuses fundamentally different then than they are today.
That's a great question. So the short answers, I don't think so, But I don't think they were doing the kinds of things they're doing now on the scope they're doing it now.
And I also when you look back at.
Some of the tuition and the fees and where they were getting their money, they were hitting the alumnus hard.
They were getting a lot of big expansion of their endowment fund, which is fine, but I think somewhere along the line by probably a serendipitus for them, connection between what countries like China wanted to do and accomplished strategically and what Harvard felt they needed, which was a kind of a perpetual injection of money because they wanted to continue to balloon up their tuition, which they have eighty five thousand dollars a year bill for an undergrad to
attend Harvard. And it was a marriage made, I guessed, in Harvard and Chinese CCP heaven because from that point, like you said very accurately, in nineteen ninety to now, we're looking at well over three hundred thousand Chinese foreign national students in the US second only to India. But India is a democracy and not necessarily at all our adversary, and we know China is. And then the third is
coming from the Middle East. So I just pose the question, when you look at these numbers, even if you do a shallow dive and you start saying, hey, over thirty percent and some of our college campuses, Bill, do you believe it are over fifty percent foreign? I think you have to ask the question who's coming, why are they coming? And do we know anything about these folks and what they're doing while they're here and what they're going to do presumably when they graduate. In other words, are we
getting our end of this trade swap? Or is it just universities and colleges are getting the full freight and they're fine with that no matter what, no matter the radicalization, no matter the damage, no matter the anti Semitism, no matter the rampant technological cheating, stealing, taking the proprietary information, because that happens all the time, and I don't think your most Americans realize the scope that that happens at
our universities from some of these foreign countries, particularly China.
Greig Ravenou, Is there something I'm unaware of? Are Chinese universities and colleges elite? And do they want American students to come to Commonist right China? And what's good for the goose is good for the gander? Are there three hundred thousand American students can't wait to go to the University of Beijing? Does China welcome Americans with open arms? Come on in? Does that happen?
No, No, it does not happen.
And I'll give you I'll give you a quick anecdote.
So what they do certain nonprofits again that get a whole boatload of money from China, They encourage a lot of American students who may not know what to do with that sociology major or that gender study major, to come to China and teach English. But I can tell you from secondhand experience from a source I know very well. Two friends of mine went there and did that, and they said that they were scared out of their mind for nearly the entire time once they realized that they
were absolutely under constant surveillance. And they said, well, you know, welcome to China. This is not new. I mean, they surveiled their own people. You don't think they're going to surveil you. And then when they got.
Back to the US and.
They get on their Facebook or they're texting friends or they're chatting, they realized that they're still being surveiled. So again you got to ask yourself the question if it's this idea. At one point, I think that was very maybe naive, but altruistic of this idea of we're going to get students from other countries and they're going to experience our culture and we're going to experience theirs, and it's going to lead to a win win, and we're
going to know more about them and vice versa. You'll recall the Confucius institutes, right, that was.
What was driving them.
And then you have conservative voices saying, wait a minute, there's a lot of evidence to suggest this is not just a.
Nice cultural exchange. We'll get closer.
We may be going into that part of the bargain with that idea, but I can guarantee you they're not. The CCP doesn't do anything, though you know it's better than most, They do not do anything on a whim. It's all strategic, it's all calculated and it all.
Serves their greater good.
So they would not be paying these students and the dollars flowing into our universities if it wasn't benefiting them. And the short answer to your the question is no.
Now the door is not swinging open the same way to Beijing you, nor do they want it.
I can't see a mom and dad, and I was saying, you know, Susie, you need to get to the University of Beijing and learn that. She'd say, what, And for every spot taken by a Chinese student, that's one spot
not given to an American student. So if it's eighty five thousand per head from China, and on top of that living expenses, the Chinese government has an account balance with each of these Chinese kids of about a half million to a million dollars each that they spend on these students to come to America to learn to stay here. What does the Chinese government want in return for all that money invested in each of these three hundred thousand
Chinese students, what is Beijing wan from them? Because it's a quid pro quote.
Well, yeah, a great question. And here's what I would just sort of submit. If you look at the kinds of colleges they're going for. So they target the elite colleges and universities. Why because they know those are very ripe based on the faculty as well, based on the radicalization that occurs at those campuses. So they target Harvard, Columbia, NYU. They're targeting these kinds of schools because they know that's a ripe to do.
What to divide, to.
Create these sort of fissions between people, to bring issues that are only going to create this sort of chasm between people, and then they can go on their propaganda and say, look at the US, look at their campuses, look at the future generation. The fabric of the US is being torn apart. Yeah, because you're injecting a lot of that in and not just China. But like I said, the third area that we get the most foreign nationals are are from the Middle East, where you have radical
in many cases, radical Muslims coming to the US. Now, look, I'm not against the we learned from them, they learn from us, the.
World gets better. That's different.
But when you start looking at where these students are coming from and the kind of schools they go to, Illinois Tech, Illinois Tech is fifty two percent foreign, forty eight percent American students Carnegie Mellon, Stevens Tech, Northeastern Columbia, Johns Hopkins Stamford, NYU where I did my film directing training and script writing, Clark University, Rochester. What do these
all have in common? They're heavy duty tech. So you have a lot of these students coming in and we know, certainly in the film industry, China does not respect intellectual properties.
They know, respect.
Proprietary information, trade logos, trademarks, copyrights.
They grab.
Basically, they walk in and with arms open and load up as much as they can and go back to China. In many cases, that's just what's happening, not me saying it. FBI directors have been saying it, National Intel has been saying it.
You know, unlike the USSR that had a great we thought military and great missile technology, they never had any economy. They're never worth behaving like the Chinese Party and Chinese behaving. And so this is both it is a great military power expanding and it's also a monetary cultural power that's expanding. With the Silken Road initiative, they want to pay off.
For example, the Nation of Columbia, as along with Panama and Venezuela, has struck deals with the Communist Chinese Party to build roads and bridges and sewer systems in exchange for what they own the countries, and then they have the foreign policies and votes in the UN they require. Kevin o'larry have had on a couple of times from he's on Shark Tank, this Canadian he's wonderful, talks about there's no right that a Westerner has in China. Do
it to do anything. For example, if you if you complain, hey, my trademark, my trade name was violated, they would look at you and say, well, what were you talking. They ignore American law, they ignore are requirements to get listed on stock exchanges, and they just they know they're protected once they're inside China. So I'll ask you a big question, Greg Raby, how do how do we confront this?
I don't yeah, so yeah, Well I'll use a little bit of the film industry to answer question. Look for the film industry, China strategically targeted the film industry targeted Hollywood set up a lot of co production agreements, and they do the same thing.
They'll agree to things.
They'll sign things, and then the inks barely dry and they violate it. And then for well over fifteen years, the Motion Picture Association of America, led by Joe Biden's former good buddy, best buddy, Chris Dodd, we're complaining and saying, gee, all these violations, all these violations, and essentially, in about twenty fourteen twenty sixteen, Joe Biden did a number of agreements that basically just said we'll forget everything you did,
we won't follow up and the violations. Just essentially promised to be better and promised to let Hollywood films in China.
Oh, yes we will, Yes we will. Well what happened?
Inconsistency, yep, violating agreement.
They let a few in, they close the door in others.
They change premiere times, they change, they rig the box office numbers. They do everything you think of, and one of the most nefarious things like for me, for example, the independent filmmaker, if I want to do to your question, if I want to do business in China, I got to use the co production company and a code well distributed from China. But as soon as I do, it becomes a Chinese film, and so then I go from Hey,
this is my product, this is my script. I'm the director, producer, this is our studio to you are now at best a junior partner.
You have no say and you have to open up your books.
And any proprietary information or techniques or technology used for the film now becomes common usage from their perspective.
And you're so right, they don't respect it. I've gone I'd live this.
They don't. They basically laugh at you. There's no way what it trademark? What is that but a piece of paper? So how do we confront it? Well, we enforce agreements. First of all, we hold them accountable.
And in my.
Book, The Insatiable Dragon, I'm China to control the Hollywood of Cautionary Tale on Amazon.
I'll just get that and.
Quick because I getting a lot of people asking about it. What I say is stop thinking China is the end all be all.
There are other ears.
I can film India, a democracy that's film crazy, and if you put the investment there, it is so much more open. They have shared laws, shared values. Places like India. Place is outside of China. We've got to wean ourselves from the addiction that is China. For all these years or we're just going it's not going to end well for us.
Trump's the only one to put the thumb in the dike. A friend of mine, I'll call it a widget because that would identify the business. But he had a widget that he put together in the medical industry, had all the trade names, trademarks, all the patents, et cetera. And it was costing him nine dollars to produce this widget. After success for two or three years, he was contacted by Chinese company and said, look for nine dollars. We're
going to make it for one dollar. And he said one dollar instead of nine dollars, I'll take that deal. Transferred the production of this so called widget, I'll call it to communist Red China. It worked for about a year. They got access to all of his customers, all the hospitals, all the doctor's offices, and then dealt with them directly. And eventually my friend had to file bankruptcy because he
gave to them the ability the technology. But he thought he had trademarks and trade names, he thought he had patents and copyrights. Nothing was recognized whatsoever. A brand new entity sprung up in China knew it exactly the same thing, called it a different process. Put my friend out of business.
And that's repeated one hundred thousand times a year by small businesses who think they're getting a great deal from Bom Desroy China for a year and it collapses the country because they don't pay attention to their own agreements.
Bill, You're you're absolutely on spot on with that. And again I call it like that a llure of the Chinese market. Well, the Chinese market now in Hollywood, for example, in film has taken so much that now it is so difficult for films to make it if you're not Tom Cruise, the Sky Dance or Fast and Furious to the Avengers.
That's about it.
And what they do now is their domestic box office. They bragg the largest in the world. They buy up our theaters. I mean, Chinese company owns American movie theaters like AMC for example.
They own it.
People may not realize that I'm not saying, but it doesn't work reciprocal. Like you said before, if you and I said, well okay, let's you and I we've got some venture capital, let's buy some Chinese theaters, it's not allowed.
It's not allowed.
So we got to stop doing business, Bill one way, and we got to look for other areas that are more conducive to American business, American know how, and in this case what I do of filmmaking, We've got to wean ourselves from there because it never ends well. It never ends well because you don't have a partner that respects to say, mores and values and laws as you do.
So how do you make it work?
I mean, you can be super vigilant, you can try to hold them accountable, but ultimately even your accountability has to come from other sources because again, it's not like they're in the same system that you can slap on and you know, bring them to court and then they're going to pay a fine or they'll change their ways.
They just again they laugh at that.
So we have to be a whole lot smarter and a whole lot going into open eyes. And the other element I'll just share with this is also when we start looking at our universities, Bill, and we're looking at twenty twenty five, thirty thirty five percent or more faculty that are not starting out as American faculty, and they're coming from other countries like China, like the Middle East, is it any wonder why again, some of the different values,
the radicalization happens. I mean, it's a toxic brew that we're mixing. And you know, universities also need to realize that their endowment fund fifty two billion at Harvard, thirty eight billion at Columbia, thirty billion at NYU comes with a major.
Price, and one of the big prices is a loss of control.
They can't control it, and it spins out of control, and the damage. It's like a tornado, man, it whips through and leaves a whole lot of damage in its wake.
Greg Rabdu, thank you. And the colleges now are are encapsulated inside the Chinese government and also the most radical elements in the Middle East. I'm watching it in real time. I'm watching what happened in Boulder. I'm looking what's happening around the world. It's frightening. But Greg Ravedue, you're a great American and once again, thank you for coming on the Bill Cunningham Show. Let's keep the lines of communication open.
Thank you, Greg, absolutely, thank you.
Bill.
God bless America. Let's continue with more. And there's Chinese police stations in America, policing. They're citizens in our country to make sure they follow the Beijing line. Bill Cunningham on seven hundred WLW