In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez responds to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s designation of Confucius Institutes as a threat to national security – the culmination of a years-long campaign that has seen the number of institutes at US universities fall from around 100 to fewer than five.
Noting that Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the US itself all promote their languages and cultures abroad, Carlos argues that the war on Confucius Institutes is a form of cultural decoupling, rooted in the long tradition of McCarthyism – which was itself born in the hysteria over the “loss of China” – and designed to sever the ties of language, culture and friendship between young people in the West and China. But it is a losing battle: young Americans are increasingly discovering China for themselves.
It appears the Pentagon has finally won its long war on Mandarin lessons and calligraphy classes.
On 23 October, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced in a video posted on social media that his department had added Confucius Institutes to its list of institutions that threaten US national security. Describing them as “sleeper organisations” operating “under disguise of US universities”, Hegseth claimed 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”. Over the past two months, he said, the Pentagon had “systematically dismantled every single one of these organisations”.
It remains unclear how classes in Chinese language, tai chi and calligraphy, Lunar New Year celebrations and the occasional dumpling-making workshop are threatening anyone’s national security. Hegseth offered no evidence of intellectual property being stolen or minds being “infiltrated”.
A campaign years in the making
The designation is the culmination of a campaign that has been running for the best part of a decade. In 2018, Congress barred Pentagon funding for Chinese language programmes at universities that hosted Confucius Institutes. In 2020, the Trump administration designated them as a “foreign mission” – a label it had already applied to Xinhua, CGTN and People’s Daily. Under sustained pressure from federal agencies, members of Congress and state politicians – and with federal research funding explicitly at stake – universities closed their institutes one after another. According to the US Government Accountability Office, the number of Confucius Institutes at US universities has fallen from around 100 in 2019 to fewer than five.
Not content with this, the Pentagon in August this year ordered 30 universities to review their relationships with Chinese institutions, on pain of losing future federal research funding. On 19 October it declared that the universities had “fully mitigated” their relationships with the Chinese research institutions on its so-called “1286 list” – an official government blacklist of foreign academic and research institutions, mostly in China, Russia and Iran, that the Pentagon deems a threat to US national security interests.
China’s Ministry of Commerce has, justifiably, called on the US to “immediately stop its erroneous practice of taking discriminatory and restrictive measures” against Chinese research institutions, noting that such actions “essentially coerce US research institutions into ‘taking sides’”.
Every country promotes its culture
China is far from unique in promoting its language and culture abroad. Britain has the British Council, France the Alliance Française, Germany the Goethe-Institut, Spain the Instituto Cervantes, Italy the Società Dante Alighieri, Portugal the Instituto Camões. The US State Department itself runs hundreds of “American Spaces” around the world, alongside the Fulbright programme and a vast network of exchange schemes explicitly designed to cultivate favourable views of the United States.
Only when China engages in promoting its language, culture and millennia-old traditions does it become an example of “infiltration”.
What is it that Confucius Institutes were supposedly infiltrating into the minds of US students? Some knowledge of the Chinese language; some understanding of Chinese history, philosophy and culture; perhaps some sense that China is not an enemy. That, for the architects of a New Cold War, is the problem.
The ghost of Senator McCarthy
The attack on Confucius Institutes is part of a wider campaign against China and Chinese people.
The China Initiative, launched by the Department of Justice in 2018 – ostensibly to combat economic espionage – became notorious for stoking discrimination and racial profiling. In March 2025, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party demanded that universities hand over personal information about Chinese students, including their names, addresses and academic records. Several states have passed laws barring Chinese citizens from buying land. And a press campaign has targeted members of the Democratic Socialists of America for having visited China.
This campaign combines an anticommunist “red scare” with an anti-Asian “yellow peril”. China being both a communist-led state and a nation of non-white people, today’s witch-hunters can draw on multiple layers of 20th-century propaganda – and on the specific repertoire of McCarthyism. Hegseth’s talk of “sleeper organisations” seeking to “infiltrate the minds of American students” could have been lifted from J Edgar Hoover, who described communism as “a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic”, against which “a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation”.
China was present at the birth of McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy first made his name by attacking the officials he held responsible for the “loss of China” to communism in 1949, and the State Department’s “China hands” – the diplomats who had reported accurately on the strength of the Communist Party and the rottenness of the Kuomintang – were driven out of government. Chinese students were treated as suspects. The diplomat Ji Chaozhu, then a student at Harvard, recalled that in 1950 “some of the more accomplished overseas Chinese students, engaged in technical research as part of their doctorates, had been called in for interviews about their politics.” The rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, a founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was stripped of his security clearance, held under house arrest for five years and then deported – whereupon he became the father of China’s space programme.
The historian Gerald Horne describes the Red Scare as the “handmaiden of the Cold War”. Its purpose, as Ellen Schrecker puts it, was to ensure that it was “no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty”. It accompanied a process of decoupling: turning the socialist countries from ideological competitors into mortal enemies, and criminalising constructive engagement with them.
The war on Confucius Institutes is cultural decoupling of a very similar kind – severing the ties of language, culture and friendship that might make young people in the West less willing to accept a programme of hybrid warfare; of containment and encirclement.
The irony is that this campaign is being waged by an administration that never tires of proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its hostility to “cancel culture” on campus. Meanwhile, as Chen Hong of East China Normal University notes, “a US that refuses to understand China will only sink deeper into cognitive isolation and strategic miscalculation”. The world’s second-largest economy, its leading manufacturing power and the largest trading partner of most of the world’s countries is not a subject about which ignorance is some kind of strategic asset.
Contrast this with China’s active promotion of people-to-people relations. In September 2026, President Xi Jinping invited 100,000 young Americans to visit China over the course of five years for study and exchanges, in order to strengthen mutual understanding and friendship.
A losing battle
The good news is that the US government is fighting a losing battle. Young people in the US increasingly despise their government’s wars, its complicity in genocide in Gaza and its indifference to their own living standards, and are increasingly appreciative of China’s role in promoting peace, its leadership in tackling climate change, and its commitment to improving the lives of ordinary people. Millions of them have discovered Chinese culture, technology and urban development through social media, and the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon suggests that crass McCarthyism is failing to take root.
