#US to declare Confucius Institute DC headquarters as foreign mission

Enlarge Image

Jane Lim, Director at the Confucius Institute teaches students at the Community College of Denver.
Denver Post via Getty Images

The Trump Administration will require the Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes to register their US headquarters as a foreign mission, the State Department announced Thursday.

The Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes operate 550 Chinese culture and language programs in colleges and universities, including 75 in the US. Last year, a Senate Intelligence subcommittee decried the institutes given that their funding come “with strings that can compromise academic freedom.”

The foreign mission designation will require the institute’s Washington DC headquarters, also known as the Confucius Institute US Center, declare all its personnel and property to US authorities. The move would allow US officials to have insight for the first time ever into their operations.

The institutes not only operate programs for college-aged students, they also have K-12 classroom instruction.

In a call with reporters Thursday announcing the move, Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell, who oversees East Asian and Pacific affairs, said, “We’re simply designating [the institute’s DC headquarters] as they are and are asking them to tell us what they’re up to.”

Stilwell went on to note that the administration was not kicking the 75 US-based institutes out of the US or shutting down the headquarters.

“We asked them to tell us what they’re doing here in the US, we’re not closing it. We’re simply designating them as what they are, as foreign missions.”

The senior State Department official compared the move to the restrictions imposed back in May on Chinese propaganda outlets operating in the US, arguing that that effort gave them “better visibility.”

“In the same way, these activities of Confucius Institutes…who work for the Communist Party cannot masquerade as benign academic institutions,” Stilwell said.

US officials had accused China at the time cracking down against free speech and suppressing information about the magnitude of the pandemic.

In a statement Thursday afternoon, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the institutes as “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms. Confucius Institutes are funded by the PRC and part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus.”

The nation’s top diplomat said the goal of these latest State Department efforts was to “ensure that American educators and school administrators can make informed choices about whether these CCP-backed programs should be allowed to continue.”

He goes on to say that the US wants to ensure that students on US campuses “have access to Chinese language and cultural offerings free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies.”

US-China relations have taken a nose dive since the start of this year, as the Communist nation has faced a wave of international scrutiny over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.