A jarring November 2021 article in The American Conservative by John Meroney features a Notre Dame professor all but declaring Firestein a Chinese agent:
“The FBI was all over the catastrophe. They busted in on a meeting. They were up the ass of the whole thing.” I’m listening to Joshua Eisenman, a professor of U.S.-China relations at Notre Dame who used to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s telling me a fantastic story about the time the Chinese Communist Party tried to take over part of the LBJ School of Public Affairs. His first indication that something was up came when he and other scholars went to China for a conference in 2017….
Firestein told him [his] benefactor was something called the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF). Eisenman recognized it as a Chinese Communist Party front that operates in the U.S. It is led by Tung Chee-haw, vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a self-described United Front Organization. In fact, CUSEF is registered in the U.S. as an “agent of a foreign principal.”
The Chinese government didn’t want disagreements; in fact, the goal was to build more entities at UT focused on U.S.-China “cooperation.” Lectures about what China may be doing wrong aren’t on the agenda, Firestein said.
That’s when Eisenman realized that Firestein’s project at UT wouldn’t permit anyone to ever go off script because the Chinese communists were paying for it, as part of Xi’s influence operation. The center had to be in the interests of China.