Why GOP efforts to link Biden to the University of Pennsylvania’s Chinese donations is a stretch: report

03 March 2023

When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) visited Taiwan in August 2022 and vowed, in an August 2 op-ed for the Washington Post, to defend Taiwan "in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s accelerating aggression," some MAGA Republicans slammed her as a hawkish warmonger who was going to get the United States into a war with Mainland China. Yet MAGA Republicans have also claimed that Democratic President Joe Biden, a Pelosi ally, is soft on the authoritarian government in Beijing. And they have accused the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia of being too close to Mainland China as part of their anti-Biden efforts.

But journalist Jonathan Tamari, in an article published by the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 3, reports that according to "educational experts," donations to Penn from "Chinese sources" are "unsurprising for an elite school." Full disclosure: this journalist temped at Penn during the 1990s.

Tamari explains, "As Republicans targeting President Joe Biden take aim at the University of Pennsylvania and the offices where classified documents were found, they've also piled on another fraught topic: Penn's financial support from Chinese donors. GOP members of Congress have pointed to sharp upticks in giving to the school from individuals and businesses in China during Biden's time at Penn. They've implied, without any clear lines of connection, that those contributions may add a nefarious layer to the classified documents controversy that began with a discovery at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C."

Tamari notes, however, that according to "federal disclosures," other elite Ivy League schools — including Columbia University in New York City, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — also received "increases in donations" from Mainland China during the 2010s. Penn, the reporter stresses, is not unique in that regard.

Kyle Long of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (a Chicago suburb) told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Penn is in no way, if you look at the broad picture, in no way distinctive…. To be a world-class university requires you to have a global footprint."

The 80-year-old Biden, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long had ties to the Northeastern Corridor's Delaware Valley area — meaning Philadelphia and its suburbs, southern New Jersey and the president's adopted home of Delaware. In the past, Biden taught at Penn. And in 2018, Penn debuted the Penn-Biden Center.

Former President Donald Trump also has a University of Pennsylvania connection; the Queens, NY native lived in Philly during part of the 1960s and graduated from Penn's Wharton School of Business in 1968. Trump's allies in the Republican Party are trying to use Biden's Penn association to link him to Mainland China, which Long believes is a stretch.

Long told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I do think that Republican rhetoric on this issue is out of step with reality and feeds into a large general narrative on the right that is hostile to American higher education for other reasons."

Read the Philadelphia Inquirer's full report at this link (subscription required).

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