A few months after actively Asian investments in Tennessee, adding to China, Governor Bill Lee’s administration took a strong stand against the communist country, forcing the closure of the already defunct Confucius institutes at Tennessee universities and ending the state investment workplace there.

Lee recently enacted a law to demand more transparency about foreign investment in state schools and prohibit the creation of Confucius institutes. Tennessee universities and schools have already provided data to the federal government on Chinese investments, so for all practical purposes, you will simply be asked to provide that data to the state.

Read, however, to make a point with China.

“Colleges and universities are a position of concept debate, not a position where foreign governments operate in the shadows,” Lee said in a statement. “After the federal government rescinded critical reporting needs for Confucius Institutes, my administration is taking steps to provide Tennessee Taxpayers with greater transparency in all foreign investments on our campuses. I thank university leaders for working with us to maintain the integrity of our state and country. Security. “

Lee is pushing the law even though the University of Tennessee, the University of Memphis and Middle Tennessee State University have to close their Confucius Institutes by 2020.

In addition, Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development closed its foreign investment center in China, the governor and commissioner of that department, Bob Rolfe, spoke through a video at a convention in early September 2020 in China, encouraging corporations to invest in task creation. Tennessee.

“We just need you to know that here in Tennessee we are open to business. And we sense the price of partnership and relationships, especially with foreign companies,” Lee said in the video.

The branch defended Tennessee’s efforts at the convention at the time, noting that the state had seven foreign representatives in thirteen countries applying for global recruitment, adding 3 in Asia and the rest in Europe. By this stage, the government had secured 70 corporation projects in Asia, representing more than 13,000 jobs and $4. 2 billion in capital investment.

Tennessee attempted to lure a Chinese shooter to the Memphis Regional Megasite in 2016, but lost the deal with Georgia when Sentury Tire Americas announced he would invest $530 million in a plant 60 miles northeast of Atlanta. Memphis’ assets remain their first tenant while the state continues to pour cash on the wheel.

The chances of the mega attracting a Chinese company are even greater now, as China no longer houses a Tennessee economic hiring office.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Economic and Community Development showed that the state had closed the workplace and began focusing its recruitment efforts on “reliable partners such as Japan and South Korea, and we are strengthening our verification procedure around any foreign company seeking to invest here. “. “

The ministry did not mean whether the fence was due to the spread of COVID-19, which would have begun in Wuhan, China, or simply by the Chinese communist government or even by the continuation of the bad relations of the industrial war between former President Donald. Trump and China.

But this is a transparent change, as China’s Ministry of Commerce’s Department for Economic and Community Development and the Investment Promotion Agency co-sponsored the North American Summit on China Investment in Beijing.

In addition, Rolfe, Tennessee’s most sensible economic recruiter, complained in November 2019 that China’s industrial war had forced foreign corporations to press the “pause button” of U. S. expansion in Tennessee, damaging the state’s ability to meet its annual task projection.

Some of these “big projects” were caught up in the tariff war between Trump and China when corporations slowed down their expansion plans here, partly because they depended on the low costs of Chinese metals to pay for the structure projects.

Lee’s proposals from House Republicans say they don’t need “any intrusion” from a communist country.

Similarly, Deputy Governor Randy McNally recently stated that the federal government involved Chinese Red Army affiliates coming to the United States to practice how things are going and bring messages to Beijing.

“I think it will go smoothly and send the message that we’re going to be vigilant to other people who come to our country from non-democracies and that governments are looking inside America,” McNally said.

On the other hand, Democrats say the governor’s efforts are miswhere in this session.

“On the other hand, we see political decisions made that are not the most sensible on our list of priorities. Right now, the expansion of Medicaid, education, those vital disorders are our most sensitive priorities,” said state Rep. John Ray Clemmons. , a Nashville Democrat. ” To the extent that this administration needs to play with any existing political discussion in one way or another, it simply diverts attention from genuine disorders affecting Tennessee families. “

Clemmons and Senate minority leader Jeff Yarbro of Nashville held a news convention last week to urge the governor and Republican legislative leaders to conform to the American Recovery Act and offer a 5% increase in the Medicaid budget to make a broader policy for thousands of Tennessee residents caught without Health Insurance TennCare and the Affordable Care Act. They said it would increase federal investment by $1. 2 billion over the next two years.

“There are many things this year that are being used as shiny items to divert attention from genuine disorders. I think the governor and the legislature would be more interested in resolving the genuine disorders that exist in the state of Tennessee than in seeking to resolve them. . imaginary disorders that exist in the mentality of communicating on the radio, ” said Yarbro.

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