US government orders Confucius Institutes to register as foreign mission

The US State Department has designated a Chinese government-funded Mandarin-language programme as a foreign mission, expanding the scope of Chinese organisations operating in America that Washington regards as propaganda arms of Beijing.

Confucius Institutes in the US - an organisation managed by China's Ministry of Education, and which finances its programmes on American campuses - will need to register its personnel roster and property holdings with the State Department, a move authorised by the Foreign Missions Act of 1982 (FMA), David Stilwell, the assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said on Thursday.

"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," Stilwell said.

Stilwell likened the move to the department's new restrictions on journalists working at US bureaus for Chinese state media outlets. "This process that we've done so far with media and others has significantly improved visibility into what the [People's Republic of China's] state media is doing," he said.

He added that "these so-called journalists do in fact work for the Beijing ministry of propaganda", and that "In the same way, these activities of Confucius Institutes ... who work for the Communist Party cannot masquerade as benign academic institutions."

The order only applies to the Washington-based umbrella organisation, Confucius Institutes in the US. CIUS manages and funds programmes on US campuses, which are not subject to the order.

CIUS operates under the auspices of the Chinese Ministry of Education's Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban.

Confucius Institutes in the US did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the State Department's order.

About 75 Confucius Institutes are active on university campuses and elsewhere in the US. These programmes are not subject to the requirement to register, nor are students taking the institutes' Mandarin-language classes.

The US also has about 500 "Confucius Classrooms", which are conducted on levels from kindergarten through high school. These programmes are managed by Hanban through US universities that host Confucius Institutes.

Campuses hosting Confucius Institutes had been dropping the programmes well before Thursday's announcement, owing to scrutiny that had been intensifying for years.

At least 25 programmes have closed since the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published a 2017 report largely critical of the amount of control the Chinese government has over the selection of instructors and teaching materials used in CI classrooms.

A screen shot of the website for the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan, before the university decided not to renew the relationship in 2019. Photo: Confucius Institute alt=A screen shot of the website for the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan, before the university decided not to renew the relationship in 2019. Photo: Confucius Institute

Last year, for example, the University of Minnesota, San Francisco State University, the University of Oregon and Western Kentucky University all shuttered their CIUS programmes, after the passage of a clause in the 2019 US defence budget that no institutions receiving funding from the Pentagon can host a Confucius Institute.

The NAS report, "Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education", cited many examples of Hanban's control over teachers dispatched to host universities and agreements between Hanban and these schools to keep their contracts private.

Confucius Institute programmes "avoid Chinese political history and human rights abuses, portray Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China, and educate a generation of American students to know nothing more of China than the regime's official history", according to the report.

The NAS report added that "there is no positive proof that the institutes are also centres for Chinese espionage against the United States, but virtually every independent observer who has looked into them believes this to be the case".

The State Department's action against Confucius Institute comes amid a series of other initiatives to counter perceived Chinese influence operations and national security threats, including its "Clean Network" programme and the Justice Department's "China Initiative".

Clean Network involves coaxing other countries to ban Chinese vendors from their 5G networks, and urges US app stores to remove "untrusted" Chinese-owned apps - including the video-sharing TikTok app and the messaging app WeChat.

The China Initiative involves a strengthening of resources to investigate unlawful and covert efforts by Chinese entities to acquire US technology and data.

David Stilwell, assistant US Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said one issue driving the action was a lack of transparency by Chinese authorities. Photo: Reuters alt=David Stilwell, assistant US Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said one issue driving the action was a lack of transparency by Chinese authorities. Photo: Reuters

However, the registration orders for Confucius Institutes also concerns reciprocal access, another contentious issue that drives US actions against Beijing.

"This whole process ... reflects a larger effort by the US government and the Trump administration to get at through reciprocity and transparency," Stilwell said.

He cited "American corners" offered at US universities with campuses in China as an example of failed attempts at reciprocity because of obstacles by Chinese authorities.

"The trouble is ... they make access impossible for Chinese students to go talk to Americans ... and so again this supposedly reciprocal relationship is wildly out of balance," Stilwell said.

"Our goal is to get the other side to understand the importance of transparency and openness and sharing, but until that happens we're going to take steps to defend ourselves."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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