U.S. Taxpayers Subsidizing Education Costs for China

Friday, September 02, 2011
By Susan Jones




(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) is asking President Obama to immediately suspend the U.S. Peace Corps program in China, where American volunteers are restricted to teaching English in Chinese universities.

Coffman said he was “shocked” to learn on a recent trip to China that millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to defray China’s higher-education costs, at a time when the U.S. government is short of money to fund its own higher education system.

“Education in China is under a state-run system; our contribution of teachers to the university systems means we are subsidizing the cost of the system for the Chinese government and borrowing the money from them to do it,” Coffman wrote in a recent letter to his colleagues, urging them to join him in cutting unnecessary and wasteful government spending.

Coffman says the Obama administration is spending $2.9 million in fiscal year 2011 to fund the Peace Corps program in China, and it has requested an increase to $4.7 million to fund Peace Corps operations in China for FY 2012.

“No doubt, this is certainly a small amount of money given the context of our deficit, but it is symbolic of the arrogance and carelessness in how our tax dollars have been handled by Congress and the Obama administration,” he said.

If the Obama administration does not suspend the Peace Corps program in China, “I will be offering an amendment to the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs appropriations bill that will eliminate funding for it,” Coffman said.

The congressman noted that Vice President Joe Biden recently visited China, partly to convince the Chinese to continue holding U.S. debt. “We are literally borrowing money from China so we can fund a Peace Corps program in their country,” he said. “This is an insult to the taxpayers of the United States and to so many of our manufacturing workers who lost their jobs to the Chinese.”

According to the Peace Corps Web site, volunteers in China “work in the area of education, focusing on teaching English to university-level students.”