Chinese cultural centers within U.S. universities known as Confucius Institutes, which became infamous for stealing intellectual property and spreading communist propaganda, are now being designated by the Pentagon as national security threats and are being systematically dismantled, according to a Department of War announcement.

Beijing started Confucius Institutes in 2004 as a way to infiltrate higher education in dozens of countries across the globe. Outwardly presented as centers devoted to teaching college students about Chinese history and traditions, the institutes are “mostly staffed and funded by an agency of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education — the Office of Chinese Languages Council International, or Hanban,” as noted by the Heritage Foundation. The centers are therefore dedicated to spreading pro-China propaganda and are strictly forbidden from discussing “sensitive” topics such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and its multitude of human rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs, Christians, and a host of other religious and ethnic minorities.

At one point, the centers enrolled over nine million students at 525 institutes in 146 countries, including at over 100 U.S. universities, including Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, and George Washington. In addition, Confucius Classrooms operate in an estimated 500 K-12 schools, including Broward County Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, and Houston Independent School District.

But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well as professors, soon began raising the alarm about the centers, observing that they inhibit the intellectual freedom that should be present on campuses, with one University of Chicago professor calling the institutes “‘academic malware’ injected into the university system.” As a result, over 100 of the centers under the Confucius Institute name have been closed after Congress threatened to pull federal funding from universities that had them.

Nevertheless, numerous centers have reappeared under different names. On Friday, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth stated that the centers continue to operate as “sleeper” cells within American universities. “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,” he remarked.

To address the issue, Hegseth announced that the institutes would be designated as national security threats and added to the Pentagon’s blacklist of threatening activities, known as the 1286 list. He further stated that the Pentagon has “systematically dismantled” all new Chinese centers by threatening to pull funding from universities that have hosted the centers. This resulted from an audit of 30 U.S. universities, according to a Pentagon official.

Among the universities that disbanded their Chinese centers were Oklahoma State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of South Carolina, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, and Virginia Tech. “Rather than settling for minimum compliance, these institutions took bold, self-initiated steps to protect their labs, faculty, and intellectual property from foreign exploitation,” remarked Assistant Defense Secretary for Science and Technology Joseph Jewell.

Still, a number of the centers likely continue to operate under different names. A 2023 report from the National Association of Scholars found that at least 28 colleges “have replaced their Confucius Institute with a similar program, and at least 58 have maintained close relationships with their former Confucius Institute partner.” In addition, five of the centers transferred their operations to a different hosting organization.

“Confucius Institutes are generally small operations and, at first glance, innocuous-looking,” Gordon Chang, an author and distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, told The Washington Stand. “They are, however, extremely important to China’s Communist Party, which is why the Chinese regime has spent so much effort making sure they remain on campuses, albeit in rebranded forms. By their mere presence, they remind college administrators of China’s importance to their institutions. These institutions, therefore, either effectively prohibit or actively discourage on-campus activities that offend the Communist Party.”

Chang went on to maintain that “our society is being overwhelmed by the Chinese regime. The regime uses every point of contact to take us down, so it is absolutely essential for us to cut links until we can manage the situation.”

“By the way, we must also eliminate the hundreds of Confucius Classrooms in our secondary schools,” he added. “At one point, there were about 520 of them. Apparently, most are still in operation, in one form or another.”