The ordeal scarred Genshaft. “It was a very devastating and painful time for the university and particularly for the president,” says a former USF administrator. “She’s very sensitive. She doesn’t want to go there again.”
USF sought to mend the rift with key constituents. In 2009, it hired a retired three-star general in the U.S. Marine Corps, Martin R. Steele, who promotes military partnerships and oversees a research initiative on veterans’ health. In 2011, USF signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Central Command to collaborate on “activities of mutual value,” such as workshops, conferences, guest speakers, and professional exchanges. That same year, it became one of twenty universities designated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence. It has received almost $2 million to train students for certificates in national and competitive intelligence, and has placed interns at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the White House, the Secret Service, and the State Department. In 2014, the state of Florida created a cybersecurity center at USF, which helps faculty attract grants for unclassified research projects. The center also worked with South Florida professors to create an online master’s degree program in cybersecurity.
USF has made “a healthy transition from a university that was antimilitary, anti-intelligence to one that wants a partnership,” says Walter Andrusyszyn, a former State Department official who runs USF’s intelligence certificate program. Because of the Al-Arian tempest, “some folks there started seeing things in a different light.”
* * *
PENG FLOURISHED AT USF. He offered courses in international political economy, Japanese business, U.S.-China relations, and other topics, earning tenure and a promotion to associate professor in 2001 and winning an award for outstanding teaching. He enjoyed impressing students with feats of memorization, rattling off the population and capital of any nation they named. On a website for grading their professors, anonymous students praised Peng as knowledgeable, helpful, and an easy grader, though some grumbled that he was disorganized or digressive. Sample comments:
“He is one of my favorite professors at USF! He knows his stuff and cares A LOT for his students. I took wealth/power with him and the class was a breeze. He gives you essay questions and terms in advance for the exams. Gives a lot of extra credit too. Soo nice and yes he has a thick accent, but he knows that and makes fun of himself at times. Take him!!!”
“Peng is great. He’s not very organized and NEVER checks his email, but he’s friendly & genuinely wants you to do well. It’s not a tough class. He curves heavily.”
“Dr. Peng is one of the most knowledgeable, dynamic professors I’ve ever had. Yes he strays off topic, but mostly it makes the class less boring.”
“Peng has trouble keeping on topic & is unorganized. Overall, I learned more from the book than his lectures. However, I did like the way he related the class material to current events.”
He became a citizen in 2000, proudly swearing his allegiance to the United States. (Six years later, his father followed his example.) Peng split his time between his new and old homelands. Taking advantage of the flexible academic schedule, he began supplementing his USF salary by teaching mid-career business students in China—starting at Nankai University in 2005, then gradually adding more universities, including three in his hometown of Wuhan. Money wasn’t the only motivation for his trans-Pacific teaching load. With his Princeton doctorate, he impressed the fair-weather friends who had snubbed his family when his father was sent to the labor camp. With every trip, he felt as if he reaped prestige and respect for the family name.
Peng’s international commuting is typical of his generation of China-born scholars, said his college friend Zhou, now a professor at the University of Hawai‘i. “They like the United States but they also want to benefit from the rise of China,” she said.
His China excursions distracted him from family turmoil. In 2004, his mother died of cancer, and Peng and his wife split up. Under the 2005 divorce terms, their two sons stayed primarily with Mi and visited Peng twice a week.
For now, the kind of opportunity that only comes once in a career beckoned. USF’s dean of international affairs, Maria Crummett, asked Peng in May 2007 to use his contacts in China to establish Florida’s first Confucius Institute at USF. He had to find a partner university in China and then gain approval from Hanban, a Chinese education ministry affiliate that operates Confucius Institutes worldwide.
Peng rapidly secured both a partnership with Nankai University and Hanban’s blessing. Hanban agreed to supply $100,000 in start-up funds, which increased to $200,000 in the second year, plus staff salaries and educational materials. Nankai provided the institute’s co-director and staff.
“I believe you have magical powers,” Crummett emailed Peng in August 2007. “Great work in moving forward with all your ability to convince that USF is the right institution and that we are committed.”
As director, Peng choreographed the opening ceremonies in March 2008, which featured a lantern-festooned dinner, a magic act, a boat tour of Tampa bay, and a trip to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. The Chinese consulate general from Houston and dignitaries from Nankai University and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., were on hand. Renowned Chinese artist Fan Zeng donated a portrait of Confucius.
“Thank you for planning and orchestrating such a marvelous opening event,” USF provost Ralph Wilcox emailed Peng and Crummett. “You made my job easy; extended a warm welcome to our guests from out of town; ensured that USF ‘shone’ in the Tampa Bay Community; and generally represented the university so very, very well.”
Outside USF, Confucius Institutes were drawing less favorable attention. The program started in 2004 and grew rapidly, fueled by at least $1 billion in Chinese spending. By the end of 2015, Hanban had seeded 500 Confucius Institutes worldwide, including 109 in the United States. It was also operating 1,000 Confucius Classrooms for elementary and secondary school students. More than one-third, 347, were in the United States. In 2013 alone, China spent $278 million on Confucius Institutes, an amount roughly matched by host universities.
Instruments of “soft power,” as former Chinese president Hu Jintao described them in a 2007 speech, the institutes typically provide instruction in Chinese language, history, and traditional arts such as calligraphy, though some specialize in one area, such as research, business, or tourism. They toe the Chinese government line, avoiding topics such as China’s treatment of Tibet, or the 1989 suppression of student protests in Tiananmen Square.
“By peddling a product we want, namely Chinese language study, the Confucius Institutes bring the Chinese government into the American academy in powerful ways,” Jonathan Lipman, a professor of Chinese history at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, told me in 2011. “The general pattern is very clear. They can say, ‘We’ll give you this money, you’ll have a Chinese program, and nobody will talk about Tibet.’”
For instance, Hanban attached a caveat to its $4 million offer to Stanford to host a Confucius Institute and endow a professorship: the professor couldn’t discuss controversial issues like Tibet. Stanford yielded, using the funds for a chair in classical Chinese poetry.
In 2014, the American Association of University Professors urged universities to cease involvement with Confucius Institutes unless they could gain control from Hanban over all academic matters. “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom,” the faculty union said. Subsequently, both the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University cut ties with their Confucius Institutes.
Western intelligence agencies have a different concern about Confucius Institutes: espionage. “There’s no getting around the fact that they are outposts of Chinese state outreach and absolutely obvious places to assign people as agents,” said Mark Galeotti, the New York University professor of global affairs. “The Confucius Institute is ideal b
ecause it’s outward-looking. The whole purpose is to have more people come through its doors. It’s where I would be looking to recruit people if I were a Chinese spymaster.”
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service suspected the institutes of serving as “a cover-up for a gigantic system of siphoning and draining away of other people’s scientific research.” The FBI considered starting an investigation of all Confucius Institutes in the United States before deciding it didn’t have enough grounds, according to a former federal official. The bureau looked for connections between the institutes’ locations and China’s business interests, the person said.
“We think it’s an influence operation at the very least,” the former official said. “At worst, it could be far more nefarious.”
While Hongshan Li, Peng’s college friend who teaches at Kent State, was attending his son’s graduation from Harvard University, he received a call on his cell phone. It was an FBI agent, asking about his efforts to help Kent State set up a Confucius Institute. “I told them clearly, ‘I was invited by the university to do this job.’ I said, ‘I won’t talk to you,’” Li recalls. “‘You want information, talk to them.’”
The FBI contacted one of Li’s faculty colleagues as well. Kent State partnered with Shanghai Normal University to apply for an institute, but it didn’t pan out. “To me, that’s a relief. If it’s established, I will be involved, it takes too much of my time,” Li said.
It seems far-fetched that the Chinese education ministry would tailor the Confucius Institutes for espionage, since exposure would imperil a program in which it has invested so much. More likely is that China’s powerful security services, either bypassing or overriding education officials, directly recruit institute staff or teachers—much as the FBI would try to enlist Peng.
“Chinese intelligence does see Confucius Institutes as a way to gather information,” Zao Cheng Xu, director of the Confucius Institute at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), told me. “That’s not the intention of Hanban or headquarters. Different agencies have a different agenda.” The spy services “can approach a teacher, a student, anybody.”
I had called Professor Xu, a neurologist at Indiana University School of Medicine, after reading a comment he had made on a Listserv for directors of Confucius Institutes in North America. With the subject heading “more trouble for Confucius Institutes,” another director had circulated my February 2015 Bloomberg News article about Peng, and Xu was responding to it. “I am sure many of us have been contacted by FBI,” he wrote. “We are in the middle of politics and secret service between the two countries.”
Xu told me that both the FBI and Chinese intelligence had approached him. The FBI had questioned him at least twice, primarily about teachers sent by IUPUI’s partner, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. “They are professors,” he told the FBI. “I know them. I know their background.”
In 2013, Xu was visiting China for a Confucius Institute study-abroad program when someone asked him to dinner, saying that a mutual friend would join them. The mutual friend turned out to be from Chinese intelligence—though he didn’t have to say so. “I am Chinese. I know where he works.… I frankly tell my attitude. I am not interested to be a spy. I am not going to go further. The way I say it, they can tell. I am not a political person. They won’t invite me for coffee, tea, or dinner again.”
* * *
LIKE OTHER FBI field offices, Tampa’s was keeping an eye on the Confucius Institute in its jurisdiction—the one sprouting at USF. “There’s a lot of concern about Confucius Institutes,” says Koerner, the former head of counterintelligence in Tampa. “Anytime there was the Chinese government with involvement in student populations, there’s a reason for it. Chinese officials would come from the consulate in Houston ostensibly for receptions and other events, or to show a film on China, but actually to check on students. They want their tentacles in the student community. Who are the problems? The Falun Gong people? People bad-mouthing the regime? They need somebody to spot and assess who’s a problem. The embassy needs to know which students it can rely on in technological fields to be helpful. Who it can recruit, what’s their family background. Who’s a dissident to stay away from.”
Unaware of any FBI scrutiny, Peng embarked on an ambitious agenda. He ramped up the institute’s course offerings and opened a cultural center. He persuaded leaders of Tampa’s Chinese community to form a committee that donated more than ten thousand dollars to the institute, which reciprocated by training Chinese language teachers and sponsoring cultural events.
He also grew close to Xiaonong Zhang, a Nankai business professor who came to USF in 2007 as a postdoctoral fellow, reporting to Peng. She became a visiting faculty member at the Confucius Institute and then associate director for the spring 2009 semester. At the time, she and her husband, also a Nankai professor, were considering a divorce.
“Given my exceptional capacity, both academically and administratively, I had been admired by many women,” Peng later wrote about his relationship with Zhang. “The fact that I was single unfortunately leaves more room for imagination by some.”
During Peng’s frequent travels, they exchanged affectionate emails, addressing each other as Little Sea Elephant and Big Sea Elephant. Her messages were longer and more passionate than his. “Yesterday I went through our correspondences and felt something special in my heart,” she wrote to him in December 2007. “Maybe this is what’s called ‘passion developing with time.’ I love the feeling I have when I communicate with you. I feel lonely when I am all alone at home. I miss you very much and I enjoy all the sweet memories we have together. I love you!”
When Peng went to Japan in March 2008, she wrote to “my dear brother Sea Elephant: You have left me again, for such a long time. Sadness arose in my heart the moment we waved good-bye to each other … maybe separation can help us truly be aware of our love and the existence and value of each other.”
After he answered that he had arrived safely and missed her, too, she wrote, “I miss you very much, my dear brother. I always miss you whenever I am by myself. I miss your kindness, your smiles and your warm embrace.… Without you around, I feel the room is so cold and the night so quiet, and I don’t quite know what to do.”
“Dear SSE,” Peng replied, presumably using an acronym for Small Sea Elephant. “So glad to get your lovely e-mail. I am missing you badly in Tokyo. I must bring you here some day in the near future. Tokyo has wonderful food.… Tomorrow we will buy a lot of Japanese food and bring them back to China and US. I am sure you will love them especially the Japanese soup!”
Zhang wrote back, “I had a good nap this afternoon, (I pretended you were the pillow next to me.) I am very happy that you can always think of me at happy moments. From the standpoint of romantic psychology, this shows that you love me a lot.”
Peng: “Yes, I really wish that we were together. I wish we would be together again very soon.”
Eventually, they had a bitter falling-out. Peng says she was angry because he rejected her advances. She says that she realized Peng has “a bad personality: dishonest, scheming, selfish and arrogant,” and patched up her marriage.
In early March 2009, a year after the Confucius Institute opened, Zhang arranged to meet Maria Crummett, the dean of international affairs and Peng’s boss, at a Starbucks in the USF library. She complained that Peng was micromanaging the faculty, requiring them to be in their offices at all times during the workweek and attend evening and weekend meetings, asking them to clean his office and car, and making inappropriate comments to female teachers. He had taken to asking one female professor, Baojing Sang, to stay in the office after everyone else had left, and was also calling Sang in the evenings, Zhang said.
Crummett consulted Provost Wilcox but took no action. Then, on March 27, Shuhua Liu Kriesel approached Eric Shepherd, a USF professor of Chinese language, to denounce Peng. Born in Shandong Province, on China’s northeast coast, where her father was a teache
r, Kriesel attended the University of Washington in Seattle. She moved in 2006 to Tampa, where she was assistant principal at a Chinese school and worked at the Confucius Institute as China projects coordinator. Peng had just fired her; her last day of work was March 24.
Over lunch with Shepherd, Kriesel accused Peng of “leaning against her or placing his arm around her while she was working at her computer,” and of asking her to buy clothes, wash dishes, and fix meals for him. Like Zhang, she expressed concern about Peng’s behavior toward Sang. She also raised the possibility of financial wrongdoing, saying Peng had requested that she falsify a Confucius Institute budget. On April 1, Zhang went to Shepherd’s office and “recounted many of the same complaints and incidents” that Kriesel had.
Was it just coincidence that two women approached the same professor within five days with similar complaints against Peng? Shepherd says that each confided in him independently. “Either they were really, really good at concealing that they had planned everything together, or they didn’t know the other was coming forward,” Shepherd told me in August 2015 as we chatted in a USF conference room. They chose him, Shepherd added, because of his fluency in their native language. “The staff felt comfortable telling me. They were afraid it would come back on them. They wanted to express their concerns” in Chinese.
Zhang and Kriesel may also have sought out Shepherd because they expected him to be sympathetic. The friction between Peng and Shepherd was no secret. In the small world of China experts at USF, both were rising stars, and hence rivals. Shepherd had studied Chinese at Ohio State, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, “because it was clear to me that the Chinese had a strategic advantage.” They could take advantage of business and technology opportunities in the United States, but Americans lacked the linguistic ability to reciprocate in China. After teaching at Iowa State and Ohio State, he arrived at South Florida in 2008 and gained renown for his skill in teaching Chinese by using the traditional storytelling art of kuaishu. Shepherd thought that Peng, as a specialist in international politics and business, was miscast running an institute of language and culture, and was mistakenly steering it toward academic research rather than teacher training and community outreach.
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