KS House speaker says Legislature will take ‘closer look’ after KU announces China program

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins pledged Thursday that the Legislature “will be taking a closer look” at plans for the University of Kansas to begin offering in-person classes in mainland China.

Hawkins’ comments come a day after the Kansas Board of Regents unanimously approved KU’s request to begin offering four degrees from the KU School of Education and Human Services at Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua, a city in southeastern China.

Under the program, KU would offer students at ZJNU the ability to enroll in an undergraduate program for elementary education, a master’s program in special education, a master’s program in curriculum and instruction and a master’s program in educational psychology and research. The students will pay KU’s non-resident tuition rate, which is currently $14,706 for undergraduate students and $13,117 for graduate students.

The program will start in fall of 2024.

Speaking to the Board of Regents Wednesday Rick Ginsberg, the dean of the KU School of Education, said the program would be a “significant money maker for the university.”

He said it would also expand KU’s international partnerships, including longtime relationships with universities in China.

“These partnerships can help us because we can learn what other people are doing and help our own work,” Ginsberg said. The program was just recently approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

But Hawkins, a Wichita Republican who ascended to speaker this year, immediately raised concerns about the program given China’s status as an adversary of the United States.

“It’s impossible to do business with the People’s Republic of China without also doing business with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A day doesn’t go by that we aren’t provided with troubling news about the CCP- be it efforts to spy on the United States, the Uyghur genocide, threats against our friends in Taiwan, attempts to cover up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, or countless other distressing topics,” Hawkins said in a statement. “That makes this initiative by the University of Kansas concerning. The legislature will be taking a closer look.”

In a 2022 report, the United Nations accused China of serious human rights violations, sweeping 1 million or more Uyghur Muslim people and other minority groups into detention camps, according to the Associated Press. Those individuals faced torture, sexual assault, and were forced to abandon their language and religion, the U.N. report alleged.

In 2019 KU shut down its Confucius Institute, which offered Mandarin language classes, citing a 2018 military funding bill which restricted U.S. Department of Defense funding for universities that hosted the controversial centers funded by the Chinese government.

KU did not respond to Hawkins’ criticism, but Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Lawrence Journal-World the previous day that he did not believe the partnership with ZJNU should 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,” Girod said Wednesday.

Rep. Rui Xu, a Westwood Democrat and the only Chinese American in the Kansas Legislature, said the House speaker’s concerns about the program did not make sense.

“KU is the one offering classes in China to Chinese students. That is more akin to further exposing Chinese citizens to an American education system, and American culture and American teaching,” Xu said. “I don’t really understand what he’s doing other than just kind of fear mongering around the CCP again.”