US authorities see them as “vehicles of the Chinese Communist Party’s global propaganda and malign influence.”
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has put a big fly in the ointment of bilateral US-China relations ahead of the planned meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the November APEC summit in San Francisco.
According to the agency, the number of Confucius Institutes operating in the United States and promoting Chinese language and culture has decreased significantly over the past four years, from 96 to 5. According to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, almost all the China-funded Confucius Institutes operating since 2019 in 44 American states have closed. According to agency experts, this indicates a deterioration in Washington-Beijing relations.
Recall that Trump administration officials-initiated attacks on the Confucius Institutes three years ago. Thus, in August 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the Institutes as “a foreign mission of the PRC” that “advance Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign” on U.S. educational institutions. The rationale for this designation was to enable American educators and school administrators to make informed decisions about whether to allow these Chinese Communist Party-backed organizations to operate.
The State Department said the United States wanted to ensure that students at U.S. institutions have access to Chinese language and culture programs free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies.
Shortly before, in February 2020, stricter registration rules were introduced for five Chinese state-run media in the United States: Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network (CGTN), People’s Daily and Hai Tian Development USA, which distributes the People’s Daily in the United States.
As a result, more than 60% of American colleges chose to abandon Confucius Institutes for fear of losing government support. The main reason for this was language in the US defense authorization bills in 2019 and 2021, which warned that educational institutions could lose federal funding if they retained these institutions. Today, agency experts predict that by 2024 the number of Confucius Institutes in the United States will be reduced to one or two.
Bakhtiar Urusov, political commentator, exclusively for the internet journal “New Eastern Outlook”.