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A small, highly specialized American music college in Princeton, N.J., is up for sale — and its prospective buyer is a Chinese for-profit company that is partly owned by the Chinese government. The planned sale is raising red flags on and off campus, triggering speculation about the prospect of an authoritarian, foreign government running an American institution of higher learning on U.S. soil and creating chasms between the groups most invested in Westminster Choir College's ongoing health and success.Westminster is a very select music conservatory, with room for some 400 students. ...But then, in the fall of 2017, a Chinese company called Kaiwen Education put together an offer for $56 million: $40 million for the purchase, Dell'Omo says, and an additional $16 million investment in the school's infrastructure and programs.Soon after, the potential sale became the subject of a pair of lawsuits. ...Kaiwen is an unusual entity to buy an American institute of higher learning. The Chinese company has no experience running a college, or a music school — facts that Dell'Omo admits. ...Education was not even the company's main business. It was called Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure and manufactured steelwork for bridges, ships, cranes and power plants. ...Afran argues that at this point, preventing the sale is a matter of protecting the independence of a U.S. institution. "This is the first time that any functioning, intact American college is being sold to a foreign government, particularly an authoritarian government," Afran says. "We're going to see that their academic freedom will now be subject to control by government bureaucrats in Beijing." ...
It's a private school, one of the premier music colleges in the country. What in the world do the Chinese have to gain?
