Hegseth announces dismantling of Chinese ‘sleeper organizations’ at universities

The Pentagon has dismantled 80 Chinese “propaganda cells” at colleges and universities across the United States in the past two months, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Friday.In a video posted to X, Hegseth talked about “Confucius Institutes” at American higher education institutions, saying that although Congress has acted to restrict the Chinese-backed organizations, similar organizations continued to emerge under new names. Hegseth called them “Chinese government-backed propaganda cultural programs” and said the War Department designated them threats to national security.“Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country,” Hegseth said. “We’re done with that. No more, never again. To these universities, I say, just like the Department of War, stay vigilant. Don’t allow these influences to come back in.” Confucius Institutes are Chinese cultural and language institutions that teach Mandarin classes and other workshops at U.S. universities. They are funded by the communist government of China, leading China hawks to raise serious concerns for years about the influence they can have on American students and the potential for industrial espionage at some of the country’s leading research universities.After Congress restricted federal funding from schools with these programs in 2018, almost all of the Confucius Institutes closed, according to the Government Accountability Office.However, Hegseth said since Congress cracked down on the programs, they have popped up under different monikers, leading to the War Department taking action.“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. So, at the Department of War, within the last two months, we have systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations,” Hegseth said.IRAN, CHINA, AND CUBA ARE DIRECTING PROTESTS INSIDE AMERICAHe did not specify which universities still had the programs before the department stepped in.Hegseth related the crackdown to his mission to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the Pentagon, declaring his department “gender-neutral, colorblind, and merit-based.”