Pompeo shames MIT, calls Chinese authorities ‘jackbooted thugs’ in remarks about academic freedom
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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dialled up his anti-China rhetoric on Wednesday, referring to authorities in the country as “jackbooted thugs” while also calling out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for declining to host his address about national security threats posed Beijing.
Speaking at Georgia Institute of Technology, Pompeo, America’s top diplomat, asserted in a discussion that many Chinese students doing research in the US “are returning home to suffer”.
“A Fulbright student coming in from some country ought not be returned to their home country and to suffer from the jackbooted thugs that now want to take the information that they got, send them back into the United States only to have them just take a little bit more information that they’re going to hand off to the Chinese [Ministry of State Security] … or the People’s Liberation Army”, he said.
“MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks,” Pompeo said in his opening address. The school’s president, L. Rafael Reif, he added, “implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors”.
MIT offered another explanation for its decision.