Pentagon Designates Confucius Institutes a National Security Threat

The US Defense Department has designated Confucius Institutes, the Chinese funded cultural and language centers hosted on university campuses, as a threat to national security, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Friday in a video posted on social media, Reuters reported.

Hegseth said the institutes had been added to the Pentagon list of institutions that threaten US national security. Washington has long accused the centers of serving as Chinese propaganda tools, and Congress and past administrations have taken repeated steps to restrict them.

Eighty groups at 30 universities

"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.

Over the past two months, the Defense Department has "systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations," he said. Hegseth did not specify which universities had hosted the groups before the department acted, the Washington Examiner reported.

"Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country," Hegseth said. "We are done with that. No more, never again." He told universities to stay vigilant and not allow these groups to come back.

In the same video, Hegseth linked the campus crackdown to his wider effort to remove diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the Pentagon. He described the department under his leadership as gender-neutral, colorblind and merit-based, the Washington Examiner reported. The video did not name the universities involved or say what would happen if a similar program opened again.

A long-running fight over the centers

Confucius Institutes teach Mandarin classes and run cultural workshops at US universities. They are funded by the government of China. Critics in Washington have argued for years that the centers give Beijing influence over American students and a possible route to research secrets at leading research universities, the Washington Examiner reported.

Congress restricted federal funding for schools with these programs in 2018, and almost all of the Confucius Institutes in the United States closed after that, according to the Government Accountability Office. Hegseth said the organizations later returned under different names and charters, and that this return is what led his department to act over the past two months.

The designation was announced by video. The Pentagon did not publish a list of the 80 groups or the 30 universities in the accounts of the announcement reported on Friday.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.