The Pentagon has designated Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-funded cultural centers that were once common on American campuses, a threat to U.S. national security, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted on social media on Friday.
Mr. Hegseth said the institutes had kept operating after Congress restricted them, coming back under new names, and that over the past two months the department had shut down 80 of them at 30 universities, Al Jazeera reported. He said they had been added to the Pentagon’s list of institutions that threaten national security. He didn’t name the universities or the programs.
“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,” Mr. Hegseth said. He called them “sleeper organizations” and said the department had “systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations.”
The department’s own account from earlier in the week was narrower. On Oct. 19, it said reviews at 30 universities had led to more than 80 actions ending or limiting research partnerships that had been flagged, and that every school had finished its review and resolved those ties, The Epoch Times reported. It was not clear how many of those actions involved former Confucius Institutes and how many involved other foreign partners.
The audits started in August. They covered groups tied to rebranded Confucius Institutes and entities on a restricted list the Pentagon keeps under Section 1286 of the 2019 defense authorization law. That list was updated in July to 130 institutions in China, Russia and Iran, about 70 percent of them in China.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Representative John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who leads the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, welcomed the audit results and said universities had to do more to protect research paid for by taxpayers. “Americans’ tax dollars should never subsidize China’s military ambitions,” he said.
The first Confucius Institute opened on an American campus in 2004. By 2017 there were 118. They were run and financed by Hanban, an arm of China’s Education Ministry, and in 2009 Li Changchun, then the Communist Party’s propaganda chief, called them “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”
Washington spent years shrinking them. A 2018 defense law cut off Pentagon money to universities that hosted an institute, and many closed. In August 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center a foreign mission of China.
The 2021 defense bill went further, barring department funding to host schools unless they got a waiver. By 2023, fewer than five Confucius Institutes were left in the United States.