Under the guise of happy-future-together culture-sharing, Confucius Institutes have been and are—sometimes under different names these days—a means of spreading Chinese Communist Party propaganda within American schools.
Many reports have documented that this is the main function of the institutes. In 2022, Stanford’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions concluded that even with little monitoring by the Party, teachers sent to staff overseas Confucius Institutes “exhibit a high degree of political compliance while working abroad either by disseminating the political views of the CCP or censoring discussions around politically sensitive topics….
“Even those teachers who foster open discussion on controversial topics such as Taiwan do so in order to persuade others that the CCP’s position is correct, not to stimulate genuine debate.”
Influence Watch reports that “Confucius chapters have been engulfed in controversy due to allegations that the institutes suppress academic freedom at U.S. universities, actively cancel or censor events and teaching materials that are counter to the Chinese government’s interests, are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and disseminate Chinese propaganda across the United States.”
Despite the actions taken against the institutes in recent years, many still exist, or at least did until recently. The Department of War reports that it has acted to end many that survived previous efforts to get rid of them.
Hegseth’s announcement
In video published October 23, 2026 by the Department of War’s YouTube channel, Secretary Pete Hegseth compares the battle against Confucius Institutes to the battle against DEI policies (affirmative-action-times-twelve policies) which had infected the military. And he says that the Confucius Institutes which had lingered in many universities are now gone from 30 of them.
“When I took office, one thing we knew was that the cancer of DEI, it was going to be difficult to kill here in the Department of War. You see, instead of complying, promoters of this ideology just tried to rebrand it and thought they would be safe. Now, we were on to it and not going to let that happen on our watch. We ripped it out of the Department of War root and branch. We are gender-neutral, color-blind, and merit-based.
“Today, in a similar example, I want to tell you about Confucius Institutes.
“These Chinese government-backed propaganda ‘cultural programs’ had infiltrated our nation’s universities in almost every state. Now, thankfully, Congress banned them a few years ago, these Confucius Institutes, but they came back disguised in new forms, just like DEI does. Just call it a different name.
“Well, the Department of War has taken action to stop this as well. We added these sleeper organizations to our list of institutions that threaten our national security. It turns out that 80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters, but with the same mission, to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students.
“So at the Department of War, within the last two months we have systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations…. Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country. We’re done with that. No more and never again. To these universities, I say, just like the Department of War, stay vigilant. Don’t allow these influences to come back in.”
Audits
Military Times reports that in August, the War Department had “ordered 30 private and state universities to review their ties with foreign institutions listed under Section 1286 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which seeks to restrict nations like China and Russia from gaining access to American research and technology. Failure to comply could have resulted in a cutoff of federal research funding.”
On October 19, 2026, the Department announced “the successful completion of its initial research security audits of 30 universities. All 30 universities have fully mitigated identified relationships with foreign entities of concern included on the most recent NDAA Section 1286 list, published in July 2026. Overall, the audits resulted in more than 80 termination-related actions across the 30 universities. These actions included the termination of relationships with entities on the NDAA Section 1286 list, as well as precautionary terminations involving entities not specifically identified on the list.”
The October 19 press release mentioned only seven of the thirty universities, those that “went above and beyond” in their eagerness to terminate relationships “with entities on the NDAA Section 1286 list” and to implement “significant mitigation measures to safeguard research: Oklahoma State, Penn State, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of South Carolina, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, and Virginia Tech.”
Armed Forces Press notes that the Pentagon has also “not yet released a list of the entities that it said it had dismantled.” It’s 30 schools, Hegseth says, but 80 “termination-related actions.”
So one thing that remains unclear is which of these ended entities were indeed some form of Confucius Institute and which were some other kind of organization focusing perhaps on academic collaborations and theft of intellectual property. Confucius Institutes have not generally been associated with IP theft or espionage, although of course different CCP-guided organizations on a campus might work with each other.
Also see:
Department of War: Video: “The War Department has Designated Confucius Institutes a Threat to our National Security”
Warbrief: “The Pentagon vs Confucius Institutes: Inside the Campus Crackdown”
“No public case has directly tied a US Confucius Institute to espionage…. The documented record supports the premise that successor programs exist; it does not support the specific 80-program, 30-university claim, which rests entirely on Hegseth’s video.”
