Beware the Confucius Institute Rebrand

C onfucius Institutes — once hailed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up” — are in free-fall. These CCP-sponsored centers, established on college campuses across America, have struggled to recover from being targeted by the Trump administration, which saw them as a national-security risk and pursued allegations that they’d been a party to visa fraud and failed to comply with federal transparency laws. But the Chinese government specializes in playing the long game, and now it is attempting to reboot its influence operations.

Confucius Institutes (CIs) bring Chinese nationals to college campuses, where they teach Chinese language and culture using Chinese government-approved materials. The Chinese Ministry of Education funds the CI program, using it as leverage to build additional relationships that benefit Beijing. Four years ago, Congress cut grant funding from colleges and universities that hosted Confucius Institutes. Then, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo probed CIs and the Department of Education cracked down on colleges’ failures to report foreign gifts. As a result, CIs began shutting down: Only 17 now remain out of an original 118, and three of those are scheduled to close later this year.

Still, the Chinese government is keen to see its investment pay off. As detailed in a new report I co-authored for the National Association of Scholars, many defunct CIs have quietly re-emerged. The report shows that most colleges and universities, upon closing a CI, open a similar replacement program, or else maintain or expand relationships with Chinese institutions that were previously involved in the closed CI.

The parallels between these new programs — call them Confucius Institutes 2.0 — and the original CIs are striking. Consider Western Michigan University, which engaged its former CI partner, Beijing Language and Culture University, in a new agreement “on cooperation of Chinese Language and Culture Programming.” This new partnership began on January 1, 2021, one day after the WMU’s CI closed. Just as Chinese sponsors did for the CI, so Beijing Language and Culture University is “responsible for providing curriculum” and choosing the books for the new program.

Some institutions launched new “sister university” relationships with their former CI partners. Others, such as Northern State University, secured continued funding from the Center for Language Exchange and Cooperation, the Chinese-government agency that funded Confucius Institutes. In some cases, the Chinese government anticipated the possibility that CIs might not last forever, and persuaded American universities to build into their CI contracts additional partnerships that could survive a CI closure.

Are these reconstituted Confucius Institutes any better than the original? They tend to avoid CIs’ more obvious mistakes, deleting, for instance, contractual language subjecting colleges to Chinese law. So in a sense, they may be worse than CIs, because their connection to the Chinese government is more hidden. There is no uniform name for these programs. They are more diverse than their predecessor CIs — though still pro-Beijing. And their funders aren’t generally public. (We filed records requests with 80-plus universities to find out about CIs’ funding sources, and have compiled the documents we received from these requests into a searchable online database.)

Across the United States, individual Confucius Institutes have executed the same strategy the Chinese government adopted: rebranding. Two years ago, China renamed the Hanban, the agency that launched Confucius Institutes, so as to “disperse . . . Western misinterpretation.” It became the Center for Language Exchange and Cooperation (CLEC), and was spun off the Chinese International Education Foundation (CIEF), which is technically a nonprofit, to run Confucius Institutes. Both CIEF and CLEC are funding practically the same thing, except CIEF funds “name brand” Confucius Institutes and CLEC funds the generically named programs that sprung up in the wake of the Trump administration’s crackdown and the mass closures of CIs that followed.

The Chinese government has fought hard to maintain the influence that CIs gave it on American campuses. It booked the National Press Club for an event defending CIs, launched a DirectTV series featuring American college presidents praising CIs; and mailed periodic missives advising American institutions on how to defend their CIs. Occasionally, it even issued threats to colleges and universities that considered closing their CIs. (Western Kentucky University, which transferred its CI to a local school district, remains embroiled in litigation over $3.2 million in penalties.)

Yet rebranding has become China’s dominant strategy, and its most effective. Confucius Institutes have effectively regenerated nationwide under new names, in a blatant effort to sidestep the federal crackdown that targeted them.

How should policymakers respond? To start, President Biden should enforce existing law. The Trump administration went after CIs for visa fraud and violations of transparency laws — efforts the Biden administration has abandoned. Contrary to most colleges’ assumptions, many of the laws enacted to target Confucius Institutes could be used against their successor institutions as well, if only the president would enforce them.

Congress should also make Chinese-government funding less attractive to colleges and universities by instituting a tax on Chinese gifts and contracts, capping the amount of Chinese funding universities may receive before jeopardizing their eligibility for federal funding, and prohibiting federal funding to colleges and universities that enter research partnerships with Chinese universities that have connections to China’s military.

What lawmakers should not do is start a game of political whack-a-mole, responding reactively to whatever Chinese-government programs pop up around the country. Confucius Institutes have adapted, and the CCP will continue to adapt them as the need arises. Beijing always aims to stay one step ahead of U.S. policymakers, so if they want to protect American higher education, U.S. policymakers will have to stay one step ahead of Beijing.