With growing threats to higher education and state government, Wisconsin Republicans have a plan to put the Badger State at the forefront of combating Chinese Communist Party influence.

Five Wisconsin Republicans unveiled a series of bills this week to keep CCP influence out of state government and institutions of higher education. If the legislative package is passed, national security experts say that Wisconsin would become a state leader in combating China. 

“We can all agree and should be able to rally around the fact that we should not be supporting or doing anything to support organizations, such as the Chinese Communist Party, that seek to undermine the foundational things that make America exceptional,” Senator Patrick Testin told The Daily Wire. 

The bills would block partnerships between the University of Wisconsin system and China, prevent state agencies from contracting with companies controlled by China, ban critical telecommunication companies from using equipment manufactured by foreign adversaries, crack down on transnational repression, target illegal organ harvesting, and protect genetic data from countries like China.

The lawmakers behind the legislative package include Testin, Senator Cory Tomczyk, Representative Daniel Knodl, Representative Clint Moses, and Representative Alex Dallman.

Testin said that the CCP wants “to embed themselves in every element and sector” to “essentially extend their tentacles and their influence.”

The higher education bill would ban the University of Wisconsin from entering into “a collaboration agreement, academic partnership, or research partnership with a college or university based in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or Qatar,” according to a draft shared with The Daily Wire. 

There would be an exception if a federal law enforcement agency performs a national security assessment. 

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A recent House report listed over a dozen Pentagon grants to the university worth tens of millions of dollars that raised concerns over links to China. The university also has relationships with Southeast University in Nanjing and Nanjing University, both of which have been assessed to have medium to high risk in terms of Chinese defense ties. 

Another bill would stop state agencies from contracting with organizations that are headquartered in certain countries, like China, or are controlled or majority-owned by the Chinese government or the CCP. 

A third bill would prohibit “telecommunications providers from purchasing, renting, leasing, obtaining, or maintaining critical telecommunications infrastructure that includes equipment manufactured by a foreign principal of a foreign adversary.”

Another bill aims to protect the genetic data of Americans. It would ban “the use of genetic software from foreign adversaries in medical and research facilities, the storage of any human genome sequencing data within the borders of a foreign adversary.”

State Rep. Clint Moses told The Daily Wire that the intent of that legislation was to ensure that genetic data was not being used for biological warfare or other “nefarious” purposes. 

Another measure part of the package would prohibit “coverage of organ transplantation and related care under health insurance policies and the Medical Assistance program if the organ is transplanted in or originates from a country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting.”

There are between 25,000 and 50,000 people in China every year whose organs are harvested against their will, according to some estimates. 

“When you start looking at what some of these countries are doing, particularly in China, where they’re getting organs for transplant usage, obviously from inmates, prisoners,” Moses said. “I think, [Americans] would find that absolutely shocking and atrocious, because it’s a humanitarian issue. It’s a crime against humanity.”

The final bill in the package would give more teeth to law enforcement in punishing those engaging in transnational repression. Other bills aiming to prevent foreign adversaries from owning land in Wisconsin and to keep Chinese software off state devices are also working their way through the legislature. 

Michael Lucci, the founder of the national security advocacy group State Armor, said that Wisconsin would become the model in the Midwest for targeting China if all of the proposals pass. He said states need to take increasingly strong action to safeguard themselves. 

“Over time, the breadth and scale of the threat has become more apparent and it has grown. It’s become clear it’s quite large,” he told The Daily Wire. “Therefore, the American response, which is both federal and state, needs to expand and become more forceful.”

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth and final installment in the series “American Maoists: Warnings From The Cultural Revolution.”

In Part IV, Xi Van Fleet and Sasha Gong — both activists, scholars, and survivors of Mao’s communist uprising — exposed the radical communist roots of Democrats cringey attempt to seem cool by using profanity.

Today, the authors look to the future, and explore how radical leftist movements rewrite history, not just to justify their actions and demonize the cultures they want to destroy, but to change how people think about their past, present, and future. 

***

Every nation lives by its landmarks. These are not merely dates on a calendar, but signposts dividing history into “before” and “after.” They anchor collective memory and shape how a people understand themselves.

For Americans, the great landmarks have long been clear: 1492, the discovery of the New World; 1776, independence; 1861, the Civil War; 1929, the Great Depression; 1964, the Civil Rights Act. To speak of “before” and “after” these events is to tell the story of a nation striving toward freedom, law, and self-government.

In recent years, however, new landmarks have been imposed by ideological fiat. The most striking is the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which declared that America began not in 1776 but in the year enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia. With that shift, the axis of history moved: “before and after independence” became “before and after slavery.” Liberty and law were redefined as hypocrisy and oppression. More dividing lines quickly followed: before and after Jim Crow, before and after George Floyd, and so on.

These changes are not merely academic. When the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949, it imposed a single ultimate landmark: “before liberation” and “after liberation.” Five thousand years of recorded history were collapsed into a morality tale. Everything before was painted as darkness; everything after as light. The word liberation itself became a judgment on every person and institution. Those who had prospered before were condemned, often destroyed.

The CCP has never ceased wielding this powerful weapon to manufacture historic milestones. After the disastrous Mao era, it crafted yet another milestone by dividing its own history into ‘before Reform and Opening-Up’ and ‘after.’ The Mao years were rebranded as ‘decades of arduous exploration’ in search of a better China, erasing the atrocities that claimed tens of millions of lives.

The post-Mao period, by contrast, is exalted as the Party’s crowning achievement: lifting the Chinese people out of poverty and transforming China into an economic superpower. And the ultimate aim? To enshrine the CCP as the eternal liberator of the Chinese people. This is not just propaganda but a wholesale transformation of society. History was rewritten, language reshaped, culture remade. The “before” was demonized; the “after” glorified. Ordinary people adopted the new vocabulary, willingly or not. And once language changed, thought and memory changed too. The Chinese people, once bound by a magnificent civilization, were divided into “good” and “bad” classes — oppressors and oppressed, loyalists and enemies. Hatred of the designated groups was not just tolerated but demanded.

America is not a one-party state. Our institutions remain democratic. Yet the project of re-framing — what might be called Cultural Marxism — has advanced here with surprising speed. The narrative of American exceptionalism, rooted in liberty, law, and individualism, has been replaced by a narrative of slavery, racism, and oppression.

The Left has shown itself to be even more cunning Cultural Marxists than the Maoists. They have redefined and “simplified” American history into a new binary: before and after. In their telling, the “before” is our present — defined solely as slavery and white oppression — rendering the Civil War irrelevant and erasing the achievements of countless Black Americans, including Barack Obama. The “after,” meanwhile, exists only in the future. And how is that future to be reached? By dismantling the entire system, which they insist is built on racism, bigotry, and injustice. 

History’s landmarks are never neutral. They can unite or divide, elevate or diminish. To say “before independence” and “after independence” is to conceive of ourselves as citizens — free, equal, and striving for self-rule. To say “before slavery” and “after slavery” is to fix identity forever in terms of bondage and resentment. One story moves toward freedom; the other freezes us in grievance.

Nations cannot thrive on grievance. A shared history, however imperfect, is the glue that binds generations. To rewrite that history into a tale of villains and victims is to dissolve the glue.

The real question is whether we will continue to allow new landmarks to redefine us. Will we pass on to our children the story of a free people, equal under God, struggling but advancing toward justice? Or will we hand them a fractured narrative that teaches them to see one another as permanent enemies?

History is never only about the past. It frames the future. What we choose as our “before” and “after” will decide who we become.

READ MORE:

American Maoists, Part I: License To Kill: What Turns Normal People To Political Violence?

American Maoists, Part II: The Wheel Of Misfortune: Victims, Victimhood, And Victimization

American Maoists, Part III: From Red Guard To Blue Hair: Why Leftists Destroy Womanhood

American Maoists, Part IV: Proletarian Profanity: Why Democrats Want To Trap Voters In A Linguistic Ghetto

Xi Van Fleet is a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, activist, and author of “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.”

Sasha Gong is a writer, scholar, journalist, and filmmaker. A dissident in Mao’s China, she holds a PhD from Harvard University and was previously Director of the China Branch at Voice of America.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.