China Pushes Back After Pentagon Calls Confucius Institutes a Security Threat
Beijing called the designation an “absurd overreach” on Monday, three days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the campus centers had been added to a Pentagon threat list.
China pushed back on Monday against the Pentagon's decision to call Confucius Institutes a threat to American national security. Beijing said the move smeared educational exchanges and stoked anti-China sentiment ahead of the midterm elections.
The response came three days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the designation in a video posted on social media. He said the Chinese-funded campus centers had been added to the Pentagon's list of institutions that threaten national security.
“Educational exchanges between China and the US are mutually beneficial and help deepen mutual understanding,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Monday, according to Reuters. He said China opposes what he called the smearing and stigmatization of the institutes.
China's official Xinhua news agency went further on Sunday. It called the national security label “an absurd overreach” and said it exposed what it described as some American politicians' warped threat perceptions and dangerous political calculus ahead of the midterm elections on Nov. 3.
What Hegseth said
Hegseth said the institutes had returned to American campuses under new names. He alleged that 80 new “propaganda cells” had appeared across 30 universities, using different names and charters but with the same mission.
“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,” he said.
He said the Defense Department had “systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations” over the past two months. The video did not name the universities involved, and no published Pentagon directive laying out the designation has surfaced.
Washington has long accused Confucius Institutes of serving as propaganda tools for Beijing. Beijing has long described them as language and cultural exchange programs.
A program that had already shrunk
Confucius Institutes are Chinese-funded language and cultural centers hosted on university campuses abroad. At their height, they numbered more than 100 at American colleges and universities.
That number fell sharply after Congress restricted Defense Department funding for universities that hosted the institutes, in the fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Acts. In August 2020, the State Department designated the Confucius Institute US Center a foreign mission of China.
By 2023, fewer than five Confucius Institutes remained at American universities, according to the Government Accountability Office. The office found that schools most often cited the possible loss of federal funding, and pressure from government and congressional officials, as reasons for closing them.
What the new designation changes in practice is not yet clear. Hegseth's announcement did not spell out new funding cuts, contractual bans, or other penalties tied to the threat list.
For now, the two sides agree on little beyond the fact of the designation itself. Washington says it is closing a back door for Chinese influence on campus. Beijing says it is closing a door for exchange.
