Pentagon adds Confucius Institutes to its list of US national security threats

The US Department of Defense has added the Confucius Institutes to its list of organisations that pose a threat to the country's national security.

The Confucius Institutes are cultural centres attached to foreign universities, opened and funded since 2004 by the Chinese government. They teach the Chinese language, run cultural programmes and organise exchanges. For many years the American authorities have accused them of spreading Chinese propaganda. In mid-2020 there were 75 such institutes operating in the United States, of which 65 were located directly on university campuses. In addition, some 500 so-called Confucius Classrooms functioned at American schools. On 13 August 2020 the State Department designated the Washington-based Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which coordinated the entire network, a foreign mission of China. This status obliged the organisation to report to the authorities in the same way as the embassy of a foreign state.

The US Congress restricted the institutes' work through defence budget legislation. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019, in section 1286, obliged the Pentagon to maintain a list of foreign organisations whose cooperation poses a threat to national security. This register became known as the "1286 list". The act for fiscal year 2021 forbade the Pentagon to fund universities hosting Confucius Institutes unless the university had obtained a special waiver. As a result, most such institutes in America closed or changed their names between 2019 and 2022.

Hegseth declared that after Congress's ban the institutes carried on under other signboards, and called them "sleeper organisations". According to him, 80 new structures appeared at 30 universities under different names and with different charters, yet retained their former purpose: to steal intellectual property and to influence the minds of American students. The Secretary reported that over the past two months the Pentagon had eliminated all of these organisations. Earlier the Pentagon had audited 30 universities and their ties with organisations on the "1286 list", and that audit led to the termination or restriction of more than 80 research partnerships.

The official Xinhua agency called the Pentagon's decision an absurd overreach of authority and accused American politicians of stoking anti-Chinese sentiment on the eve of the midterm elections to Congress. Chen Hong, director of the Institute of Area Studies at East China Normal University, stated that Washington is troubled less by security than by the fact that Americans form their own picture of China through direct cultural contacts