In a video posted to social media Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon has designated Confucius Institutes – the Chinese government-backed cultural centers that once thrived on American college campuses – as a threat to national security, Reuters reported.
A few years ago Congress banned the Confucius Institutes, which Washington has long accused of being Chinese propaganda tools. But just as DEI programs have re-branded themselves to continue their work at universities, so too have the Confucius Institutes come back under new names, said the Secretary of War. They “came back disguised in new forms, just like DEI does, just called a different name,” Hegseth said. The Pentagon added these “sleeper organizations” to its list of institutions that threaten U.S. national security, he said.
“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 using the leverage that we have here at the War Department,” Hegseth said in the video. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately return Reuters’ request for comment on the matter.
The video compares this to how the Pentagon removed DEI from the Department of War. “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. We ripped it out of the Department of War root and branch,” Hegseth said. The Confucius Institutes followed a similar pattern, he said.
To any country seeking to pilfer our most innovative ideas or turn the youth of our country against it, Hegseth said, “We’re done with that. No more and never again.” And to the universities of the US, he said, “Stay vigilant. Don’t allow these influences to come back in.”
The announcement follows a Pentagon research security sweep that was completed this week. In August the department ordered 30 universities to audit their relationships with foreign entities on the Section 1286 list of research security concerns. Section 1286 lists Chinese, Russian, and Iranian entities that the Pentagon deems a risk to the U.S.-funded research conducted at the universities that receive Pentagon funding for fundamental research. More than 80 termination-related actions, including some that were considered precautionary and applied to entities not on Section 1286, were taken across the 30 universities as a result of the audits, according to the Pentagon, DefenseScoop reported Monday. Georgetown, MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and University of California at Berkeley, San Diego, and Los Angeles campuses were among the 30 schools audited by the Pentagon.
Pentagon rules prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to fund fundamental research that includes collaboration with entities on the most recent version of Section 1286, and that prohibition applies to university grants and contracts, according to the Pentagon’s website. While the department has not said whether any of the 30 schools audited will lose funding as a result of the audits, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said in a statement accompanying the completion of the audits, “Institutions that fail to meet research security standards are on notice: taxpayer dollars will not support institutions whose partnerships put the American warfighter or the Nation’s technological advantage at risk.”
It is not clear whether the 80 propaganda cells that Hegseth described and the 80- plus groups of which the Pentagon terminated relationships as a result of the audits are one and the same. The Pentagon has not yet released a list of the entities that it said it had dismantled.
