American academic leaders need to take “a hard look” at Chinese state-backed educational programs, State Department officials said while identifying the Confucius Institute U.S. Center as a foreign mission.
“The United States wants to ensure that students on U.S. campuses have access to Chinese language and cultural offerings free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday.
That designation is a victory for lawmakers and China hawks who have denounced the programs over the last two years. The designation stops short of denouncing each individual language-training program in the country, but the branding of the parent entity in Washington, D.C., is the latest example of the State Department branding Chinese entities as nontraditional platforms for Beijing’s attempt to exert influence in the U.S.
“We ask that universities take a hard look at what’s going on on their own campuses and address them factually and objectively,” State Department assistant secretary David Stilwell, the lead official for East Asia, told reporters Thursday. “The activities at the actual universities are not necessarily impacted, except for the point that we’re making … that what these folks are doing has other attributes other than studying Chinese — there is maybe a propagandizing messaging aspect that people want we just want them to be aware of.”
State Department officials have slapped the same “foreign missions” label on nine Chinese state-run media outlets in recent months, a decision that drew retaliatory expulsions of American journalists from Beijing. Chinese officials have less room to retaliate over the Confucius Institute U.S. Center designation, Stilwell suggested, because the communist government already has curtailed similar American university outreach to the Chinese people.
“They make access impossible for Chinese students to go talk to Americans about these things,” Stilwell said. “Our goal is to get the other side to understand the importance of transparency and openness and sharing, but until that happens, we’re going to take steps to defend ourselves.”
The Confucius Institutes have been a target of congressional opposition over the last two years, as wariness of Chinese intelligence and influence operations spiked in Washington. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio told universities in his home state of Florida that the Confucius Institutes are “instructed to only teach versions of Chinese history, culture, or current events that are explicitly approved by the Chinese Government and Communist Party.”
Those offerings have strategic value for Beijing, according to a subsequent bipartisan Senate investigation last year. “Through Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government is attempting to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat,” the Senate investigators assessed.
China supports roughly “500 Confucius classrooms” in the U.S. and dozens of programs at American colleges and universities, according to Stilwell. “We’re simply calling these things what they are: these are arms of the Chinese Communist Party.”
