The Pentagon has designated cultural programs linked to China’s Confucius Institute as a national security threat, according to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He claims that the centers, which largely offer Chinese language courses on American college and university campuses, serve as a front for Beijing’s “propaganda” campaign – an allegation Chinese officials have previously denied.

In a video posted on Facebook on Friday, Hegseth said that while the US Congress had previously “banned” the Confucius Institutes from American educational institutions, they “came back disguised in new forms” and under new names.

Hegseth was apparently referring to several measures passed by Congress in recent years that stripped universities that hosted Confucius Institutes of federal funding. The pressure from the lawmakers has led to the closure of multiple centers on US soil.

According to Hegseth, over the past two months, the Department of War has “systematically dismantled” 80 new Chinese-backed cultural centers across 30 universities, adding “these sleeper organizations to our list of institutions that threaten our national security.”

The official alleged that the targeted entities had sought to “steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students,” but stopped short of providing any concrete evidence.

Back in 2020, the US Department of State designated Confucius Institutes as a “foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China,” requiring the institutions to regularly provide information regarding their Chinese personnel, recruitment, funding, and operations to the US government. The US Department of State characterized the China-funded cultural centers as “part of Beijing’s multifaceted propaganda efforts.”

Later that year, then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that the centers were working to recruit “spies and collaborators” at US colleges, and expressed hope that “we will get them all closed out.”

China’s Foreign Ministry at the time accused Pompeo of deliberately undermining cultural and educational exchanges “by discrediting Confucius Institutes… [out of] ideological bias and political expediency.”

Beijing urged Washington to “abandon the Cold War zero-sum mentality… [and to] stop interfering with normal people-to-people and cultural exchanges.”

Confucius Institutes have similarly come under government pressure in several other Western countries in recent years.

Last year, Australian media reported that six local universities had shut down Beijing-backed cultural centers amid government scrutiny, reducing the number of such entities in the country by half.

In 2020, several media outlets, including The Times, claimed that Sweden had become the first European nation to close all Confucius Institutes and related classrooms.