Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) shared his opinion that Confucius Institutes on American college campuses are used by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on American students and to influence their academic experience.
"We all know the Chinese Communist Party covered up the existence and downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19, including ordering the destruction of laboratory samples and research regarding COVID-19 in January 2020 and silencing journalists, researchers and others who attempted to share information about China’s involvement in the origins of COVID-19, but we’re all supposed to believe they’re not promoting propaganda within American schools?” Nehls said in a statement provided to State Newswire.
A September 2022 update to a National Association of Scholars (NAS) report found more than a dozen active Confucius Institutes at schools in the U.S., including Stanford University, West Virginia University and the University of Akron. The report found 106 Confucius Institutes that have either closed or are in the process of closing. At least 28 of those had been replaced with a similar program, and at least 58 have maintained close ties with their former Confucius Institute partners.
The rebranding changed the name to the Chinese International Education Fund, formerly known as Hanban. The NAS report said this continues to allow the Chinese government and CCP to influence American higher education.
“These institutes are another way for the CCP to spread propaganda under the guise of teaching, interfere with free speech on U.S. campuses, and spy on our students. Confucius Institutes have no place in my home state of Texas or the rest of the country, and I firmly support their further shutdowns,” Nehls said in his statement.
Texas A&M University was one of the first universities to introduce a Confucius Institute on campus, the Austin Journal reported.
“Let’s be clear upfront. Most of these institutes, including the one at Texas A&M, have been shut down or renamed or merged with other more innocuous-sounding programs,” Michael Sullivan, publisher of Texas Scorecard and host of “Exposed,” a serial podcast, told the Austin Journal. “But how they started? Why? And the eagerness of school officials to embrace them. Well, that's all very revealing.”
Sullivan said an agreement between Texas A&M and Hanban in 2007 stated that the group would provide multimedia courseware and other teaching materials, supplementary materials and audiovisual materials authorized by the Jon Bond headquarters. The agreement authorized the use of the online courses offered by the Institute at Texas A&M,” he said. Sullivan called the Confucius Institute a “trojan horse” for the CCP to funnel information.
The University of Texas at Dallas set up a Confucius Institute in 2008, UT San Antonio in 2010 and Texas Southern University in 2012. They weren’t only intended to indoctrinate college students, but they dig deep into the U.S. educational culture, Sullivan said, the Austin Journal reported. Nehls said he supported shutting them down all over the country.
