Chinese officials are targeting American students as early as kindergarten to influence public opinion through a well-funded and subtle program, a bipartisan Senate subcommittee investigation revealed.
“We learned that schools in the United States — from kindergarten to college — have provided a level of access to the Chinese government that the Chinese government has refused to provide to the United States,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs panel that conducted the investigation, said Wednesday.
The programs, known as Confucius Institutes, are part of a $2 billion campaign worldwide by Chinese government officials to manage foreign perceptions of the Communist regime. The United States is the chief target of those programs, as Beijing “has directly provided over $158 million in funding” to American schools to finance 100 U.S.-based institutes, “the most of any country,” according to the report.
“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 report said.
Auditors with the Government Accountability Office identified Confucius Institutes in 44 states, the first of which was founded at the University of Maryland in 2005. Some states have several institutes.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., urged four universities in his home state and a high school to cancel their Confucius programs last year. The southeast Florida high school is one of 519 secondary education programs that Beijing is funding in parallel to the college-level Confucius Institutes.
In these programs, the teachers conduct “cultural and language classes at pre-schools, kindergartners, and middle schools, high schools,” according to a subcommittee investigator. But the instructors take care to avoid mention of controversial subjects such as the Communist crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
The institutes are staffed by directors and teachers pledged to “conscientiously safeguard [the] national interests” of China in coordination with Chinese Embassy officials in the U.S.
American intelligence and national security officials have cited such operations as an example of how Beijing is waging “a cold war” against the United States, as a senior CIA official put it last year, often through unconventional means. “The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether it’s professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year.
Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the investigation subcommittee’s top Democrat, noted Wednesday that “there is no evidence that these institutes are a center for Chinese espionage efforts,” but subcommittee investigators who were not authorized to speak publicly emphasized the opacity of the Confucius Institutes. Chinese officials have abused a program that provides visas to academic researchers in order to secure entry to the United States for Confucius Institute teachers. “The exchange visitors were using a research scholar visa to teach K-12 schools at the Confucius classrooms,” a subcommittee investigator said.
U.S. government ignorance about the breadth of the program makes it difficult to monitor for potential espionage threats.
“We don’t say anything about whether or not they’re platforms for espionage — traditional collection or nontraditional collection,” the investigator said. “We asked the State Department basically to give us a list of all Confucius Institute teachers, researchers, directors here in the U.S. and State told us that they actually don’t collect information specifically pertaining to Confucius Institutes. So they don’t actually know how many teachers are here, or where they are, that are linked to Confucius Institutes — which gave us some pause.”
The value that Beijing places on the program can be inferred not only from the money spent on the institutes, but also their hostility to U.S. diplomatic efforts to establish analogous partnerships with universities in China.
“In all, the State Department documented over 80 instances in the past four years where the Chinese government directly interfered with U.S. diplomacy efforts in China,” the report says.
Confucius Institute officials in the United States might face eventual pressure to register as foreign agents with the Justice Department, investigators said, but they declined to preview any immediate enforcement actions.
“Absent full transparency regarding how Confucius Institutes operate and full reciprocity for U.S. cultural outreach efforts on college campuses in China, Confucius Institutes should not continue in the United States,” Portman said.
