WASHINGTON: The US Defense Department has designated Chinese-funded cultural centers on university campuses known as Confucius Institutes as a threat to US national security, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday.
Washington has long accused Confucius Institutes of being Chinese propaganda tools and has taken steps to crack down on them. Hegseth, in a video posted on social media, alleged that Confucius Institutes were continuing to operate under disguise at American universities and that the Pentagon had added them to its list of institutions that threaten US national security.
“It turns out that 80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters, but with the same mission: to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students,” Hegseth said. The Defense Department over the past two months has “systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations,” he added.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A decades-long pattern of scrutiny
The Pentagon’s action marks the latest escalation in a multi-agency campaign by Washington against the Chinese government-backed language and cultural centers.
The initiative gained significant federal momentum on August 13, 2020, when the US Department of State designated the Washington, D.C.-based Confucius Institute US Center (CIUS)—the de facto headquarters coordinating the network across the country—as a foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). At the time, the State Department cited the opacity and state-directed nature of CIUS, requiring it to submit regular reports detailing its personnel, recruitment, funding, and operational footprints in the US.
According to the State Department’s 2020 findings, Confucius Institutes were historically parented and directly financed by the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), an organization affiliated with Beijing’s Ministry of Education, and operated under the political guidance and heavy oversight of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department. US officials highlighted that as early as 2009, CCP Politburo Standing Committee member Li Changchun explicitly described Confucius Institutes as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.”
Academic freedom, censorship, and local influence
Federal scrutiny of Confucius Institutes has centered on allegations of censorship, intellectual property risks, and foreign influence over American academic life:
Self-Censorship and Curriculum Control: A 2017 study by the National Association of Scholars revealed that contracts between host universities and CIs were frequently kept secret, host schools were offered financial incentives to avoid criticizing Beijing, and teaching materials omitted sensitive historical topics, notably human rights abuses.
Direct Pressure on Host Schools: In 2018, a keynote speaker at Savannah State University had a reference to Taiwan deleted from her biography at the explicit request of the university’s CI co-director.
Impact on Public Discourse: A 2019 study by researchers from University College Dublin, cited in the State Department’s review, found that the establishment of a Confucius Institute led to a statistically significant pro-Beijing shift in local media coverage within the surrounding area.
Faculty Integrity Warnings: As early as 2014, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) formally warned that the institutes served Beijing’s political agenda and directly compromised the integrity and independence of higher education.
At the peak of federal scrutiny in mid-2020, there were 75 Confucius Institutes active in the United States — 65 hosted directly on university campuses — alongside roughly 500 affiliated Confucius Classrooms in K-12 school districts. In the years following the State Department’s foreign mission designation, dozens of American colleges chose to shut down their institutes, mirroring similar closures and regulatory mandates across Sweden, Germany, and India.