US Colleges Shut Nearly All China-Funded Confucius Institutes

Nearly all Confucian Institutes, Chinese-language centers once found throughout the U.S., have closed in the country, according to a government watchdog.

The institutes have been under intensifying scrutiny in recent years as Washington and Beijing feud over a range of issues, including trade, human rights, and the arrest of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. Congress restricted federal funds to schools that host Confucius Institutes, and the State Department designated their de facto headquarters a foreign mission of the Chinese government.

The number of Confucius Institutes at partnered American university and college campuses has dropped from around 100 to under five, according to a report published this week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report cited the "potential loss of federal funding" as by far the greatest factor in the closures, with 61 percent of the nearly 100 colleges and universities surveyed saying this contributed to their decision to a "great extent," and 14 percent saying it affected their choice to "some extent."

Meanwhile, government pressure played a significant role in 32 percent of closures, concern for reputation in 14 percent, financial concerns in 15 percent, and concerns over Chinese government policies in 5 percent.

Confucius Institutes fell under the spotlight due to rising concern the Chinese government, which jointly funds them along with host schools, was using the centers to introduce Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology into the classroom.

"Confucius Institutes, which are directed by Beijing, have plagued college campuses in our nation with the CCP's propaganda. There is no reason why the [Department of Defense] should support these institutes," Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in a June statement announcing a bill he was introducing to close a loophole in prior legislation restricting Department of Defense funding from schools still partnering with the language centers.

Though the number of institutes bearing the name of Confucius have dwindled to almost nothing, Chinese officials have in some cases reportedly adopted the strategy of reopening the centers under new names.

"In no cases are we sufficiently confident to classify any university as having fully closed its Confucius Institute," the National Association of Scholars wrote in a June 2022 report on its investigation of Confucius Institutes closures.

Many universities "continue to have relationships, of varying types, with Chinese partner institutions," Kimberly Gianopoulos, director of International Affairs and Trade at GAO, told Newsweek.

Many of the colleges that closed their Confucius Institutes still maintain relationships with the Chinese universities they partnered with to open their institutes, with some American schools still offering Chinese language and cultural programming "comparable to what the Confucius Institutes offered," she added.

Gianopoulos said that Department of Defense officials are in the process of identifying programs such as these that no longer bear the Confucius Institute name but still meet the criteria for being denied Defense Department funding.

However, some experts have said the context of the language centers is more complicated than politically charged rhetoric in Washington suggests.

"Did the teachers of the Confucius Institutes promote CCP rhetoric? Yes. Did unilaterally demonizing them also limit opportunities for connections that could have been genuine? Also yes. Therefore, closing the institutes has had both positive and negative impacts, Adrienne Wu, a research associate at Global Taiwan Institute, told Newsweek.

Wu said that more important than focusing exclusively on the language centers is closely reviewing sources of Chinese funding for university programs and determining their impact. Not all funding from China is necessarily bad, she added, but faculty should be trained on the potential negative affects, "such as cultivating an environment of self-censorship or unintentionally parroting CCP rhetoric."

Rubio's office and the Chinese International Education Foundation, which runs Confucius Institutes, had not responded to Newsweek's request for comment by publication time.

The crackdown on Confucian Institutes has caught on in other Western countries as well.

When current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was positioning himself to succeed former Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year, he claimed he would shut down all 30 of the institutes operating in the U.K.

The vacancy left by the shuttered centers is a soft power opportunity for Chinese-speaking Taiwan—a rarity given the large disparity between the countries' economic resources and geopolitical reach.

In September, U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution urging higher education institutions to consider getting on board with the U.S.-Taiwan Education Initiative, jointly funded by Washington and Taipei, which hope it will foster Chinese language study with programs in democratic Taiwan.

Wu said she believes the U.S-Taiwan Education Initiative has been useful strategically and shown "impressive growth" so far.

One of these programs, the Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning (TCML), is seeking to expand its presence globally, having established 35 sites in the U.S., two each in Germany, France, and the U.K., and single centers in Ireland, Sweden, Hungary, and Austria.

Unlike Confucian Institutes, TCML instructors are not hired out of China and are thus not beholden to that country's authorities. Also setting them apart is that they teach the traditional Chinese characters still used by Taiwanese instead of the simplified script used in China.

Updated: 08:00 EST 11/4/23 with comments from Adrienne Wu and Kimberly Gianopoulos