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state, stating in a letter addressed to their state’s universities that these organizations
“are a threat to our nation’s security by serving as a platform for China’s intelligence
collection and political agenda.” They added that, “We have a responsibility to uphold
our American values of free expression, and to do whatever is necessary to counter any
behavior that poses a threat to our democracy.” The Texas A&M system complied with
this request by ordering the closure of all CIs.12 Then, in August 2018, the University
of North Florida announced the closure of its CI.13

Similar calls have been made in other states, and the 2019 National Defense
Authorization Act restricts Department of Defense language study funding if a
university hosts a Confucius Institute.14 Several other universities (including Dickinson
State University in Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton
University) that had been contemplated opening CIs, have now decided not to do so.
At the same time, Columbia University (and elsewhere) has come under criticism, more
for lack of transparency than for its specific violative activities.15 That said, the majority
of CIs have so far carried out their mission of language and cultural education without
controversy.

In 2014, both the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) called on universities to
terminate CIs unless their agreements with Hanban were renegotiated to provide for
total transparency and compliance with norms of academic freedom.16 In 2017, the
National Association of Scholars (NAS), a politically conservative nonprofit advocacy
group,17 undertook an exhaustive study of CIs in the United States and produced a
183-page report.18 Echoing the AAUP’s recommendations, the NAS urged closing all
CIs on the basis of four areas of concern: a restriction of intellectual freedom; lack
of transparency; “entanglement” (with Chinese party–controlled institutions); and
worries about them being used for Chinese “soft power” or pro-PRC propaganda.

In addition to the above concerns, some have argued that the fact that CI language
programs exclusively use PRC textbooks with “simplified” (or mainland-style) Chinese
characters biases the contribution CIs make to Chinese language instruction on
American campuses. In our view, this is not a serious problem, since students should
learn this vocabulary and this form of written characters, so long as the university
also provides the opportunity for students to learn traditional “complex” characters
(used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and many diaspora communities) and to learn
non-mainland vocabulary. A review of the entire set of Hanban textbooks used by CIs
undertaken for this report finds they contain no overt political content. Only in one
of six levels of textbook was there a single lesson on US-China relations, and it was a
speech by former president Barack Obama, in which he asserted that the United States
does not seek to “contain” China. Nor have we found any evidence of interference by

Universities

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