OPINION:
Efforts are afoot to get critical race theory out of our schools once and for all, and we commend this initiative.
But recently some have floated a well-meaning but misguided proposal to expose those teaching CRT by installing video cameras in American classrooms. Having spent years working in the realm of foreign affairs, we can say with certainty that this is an idea out of the Chinese Communist Party playbook, which has led them to build the world’s most sophisticated surveillance state in the world, robbing their people of all privacy and enforcing conformity to the will of the party.
We had the great privilege of serving together on the House International Relations Committee, as it was known at the time. The committee’s focus was learning and debating about policy involving international negotiations, diplomatic affairs between nations and the dangers faced by the United States.
Today, one of those dangers — if not the imminent threat of our century — is China.
The adversarial nature of the relationship between our two nations is no secret. The Chinese government’s decision to encroach into Hong Kong and repeatedly fly military aircraft in Taiwanese airspace are only two such examples of many that include intellectual property theft and rabid cyberterrorism.
This super power contest is over leadership in technology and innovation.
One aspect of this fight is the CCP’s desire to control the back end, hardware infrastructure of our technological world. Thankfully, many U.S. officials have taken note of Huawei’s aggressive push to involve itself in the development of 5G networks — and are working to stop it.
States like Arizona also have been smart to strengthen their strategic relationships with Taiwan through U.S.-based semiconductor investments, fortifying Taiwan’s independence while enhancing America’s manufacturing prowess, which was allowed to atrophy in recent decades, giving the Chinese a leg up.
The other aspect of this brewing struggle is the CCP’s efforts to exert power over the information transmitted online in their country and around the world.
China created and maintains a “Great Firewall” to block foreign websites and censor everything not in line with Communist ideals. This is in tandem with wide-reaching propaganda that infiltrates Western democratic countries.
In order to monitor and influence the daily lives of its citizens, China has built a web of surveillance cameras that account for over half of the world’s CCTV cameras in use today. As of 2021, there were approximately 415.8 million cameras located in China, a number that could rise to as many as 540 million in the next year. That would mean nearly one camera for every two people of their 1.4 billion population. No part of an individual’s life is off-limits. Churches have even been forced to install cameras on podiums and entrances in order to monitor attendees and the content of the service.
This surveillance and oversight is used by the Chinese government to control their population.
Unfortunately, similar proposals arose in the U.S. in recent months in response to revelations that CRT and other woke political agendas are being taught in our schools.
The idea was that, by installing these video cameras and contracting with a technology company to store and index the footage, parents would be able to watch what is happening in their kids’ schools. However, there is a high likelihood that the cameras inside the classrooms would be manufactured in China. That makes us concerned by proposals to mandate the installation of video cameras watching children across America.
This proposal would constitute a massive surveillance operation akin to nothing we have ever seen before in our country, with technology that would likely be produced by Chinese manufacturers. It could leave extensive data on school children at risk to hostile state actors, including the Chinese government, whose operations to access and steal American proprietary data is well-documented.
American parents have the right to inform what their children are taught. However, that does not come at the price of over surveilling our children with a CCP-style system. More surveillance is not the solution.
While we understand and affirm parental rights to be informed and have a say in what their children are taught, we urge conservatives to focus their efforts on bringing more parents into classrooms and on more transparency into the curriculum process — not promoting Big Government proposals that reduce children’s privacy and play into the CCP’s hands.
• Sam Brownback served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom under President Donald J. Trump. Matt Salmon is a Republican candidate for governor of Arizona.
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