The Department of War has officially designated China-backed Confucius Institutes at American universities as national security threats, Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday.
“Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country. We’re done with that; no more; and never again,” Hegseth said in a video announcement.
Confucius Institutes are billed as cultural exchange programs on U.S. college campuses, funded and arranged by the Chinese International Education Foundation, an organization affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. Critics have long scrutinized them as front groups advancing CCP propaganda and espionage.
Congress moved to shut down U.S.-based Confucius Institutes in recent years, but Hegseth said the operations simply came back “disguised in new forms.” He compared the reappearance of these “Chinese government-backed propaganda cultural programs” to Pentagon bureaucrats rebranding DEI ideology under new names after it was supposedly eliminated.
Hegseth said 80 new propaganda cells had sprung up across 30 universities, each using different names and charters but sharing the same mission: “to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students.” He said all of those cells have been “systematically dismantled” over the past two months.
The entities are now included on the Department of War’s list of institutions that threaten national security, known as the 1286 list after the section of a 2019 law requiring the restrictions. According to The Washington Times, any U.S. university or research institute that collaborates with a listed entity will lose all defense funding.
A Pentagon official told the Times the crackdown stemmed from a recent agency audit of 30 universities and their ties to organizations on the 1286 list. Schools included in that audit were Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University, and others.
Hegseth closed his announcement by urging American colleges to “stay vigilant” and not “allow these influences to come back in.”
