The Pentagon recently designated China’s Confucius Institutes as national security threats. The Department of War’s decision is the right one, but more work remains to combat the Chinese Communist Party’s extensive influence on American soil.
The CCP’s operations in the United States are as vast as they are pernicious.
In his Oct. 23 remarks announcing the designation, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called Confucius Institutes “Chinese government-backed propaganda cultural programs.” Hegseth warned that they were acting as “sleeper” cells and infiltrating American universities in nearly every state.
In 2018, Congress restricted federal funding to schools that housed Confucius Institutes. The effort was seemingly a success. The number of Confucius Institutes at colleges dropped sharply, from more than 100 to a mere five by 2023, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
But the Institutes didn’t disappear; they rebranded.
“They came back in disguised forms,” Hegseth observed. “It turns out that 80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities have 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.”
The CCP decried Hegseth’s remarks. Xinhua, Beijing’s state news agency, called the national security label “an absurd overreach.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said it opposed the “smearing and stigmatization” of Confucius Institutes. Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun called it “vilification,” and claimed that educational and cultural exchanges promoted mutual understanding between the two nations.
But Confucius Institutes don’t exist to promote good relations between the U.S. and China. Rather, they exist to advance the CCP’s ambition to supplant the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower. The Institutes are part of Beijing’s strategy.
As the State Department noted in 2020, China partially funds “these programs under guidance from the CCP’s United Front Work Department.”
The United Front is the tip of the CCP’s spear. Yet its history and mission are largely unknown to the public. Indeed, its very concept is foreign to how the West in general, and the U.S., in particular, wage war.
In 1938, Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese communist regime, declared that “the united front, armed struggle, and Party building are the Chinese Communist Party’s three ‘magic weapons.’”
A little more than a decade later, Mao and his CCP won the bloody Chinese Civil War and installed communist rule over the most populous nation in the world. The United Front was key to their success.
In 1949, for example, a CCP operative named Fu Dongju convinced her own father, a Chinese Nationalist general, to surrender the prized city of Beijing to his communist opponents. This infamous example neatly illustrates both the extent and sophistication of Chinese influence and subversion operations. The level of patience, subtlety, and most importantly emphasis placed on subversion is utterly alien to the West.
As David Shedd and Andrew Badger detailed in their book on Chinese espionage, The Great Heist, “Chinese operatives also tend to place much greater emphasis on developing personal rapport than Western officers typically do” and “years are spent cultivating the relationship with a source.”
China “uses United Front work to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” of the CCP, a 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission observed.
The United Front Work Department, the agency responsible for coordinating these influence operations, seeks both to manage potential opposition groups within China and to direct what it euphemistically calls “overseas Chinese work.”
The CCP has long used China’s ancient history and rich culture as a selling point. In many respects, the Confucius Institutes are the perfect embodiment of this tactic. The objective is to prey on the enemy’s interests while simultaneously appearing innocuous.
United Front work fell out of favor in the latter decades of Mao’s rule. Xi Jinping, inarguably China’s most powerful ruler in decades, has revived it since taking power in 2012.
Xi elevated the role that it plays in the CCP’s strategic thinking. Xi convened the first-ever central conference on United Front work in 2015. As the analyst Alex Joske observed in his 2022 book on CCP influence operations, Spies and Lies: “The UFWD itself has undergone its largest reforms and expansions in decades, subsuming three smaller agencies and receiving official blessing to manage China’s ethnic, religious and diaspora affairs.”
Joske is also careful to note that while the UFWD has received increased attention from some Western observers, it is by no means the only CCP entity that devotes itself to influence operations and subversion. Many, but by no means all, are premised on cultural exchanges, think tanks, academia, and the media.
UNEXPECTED SPLIT IN THE CAUCASUS THREATENS US INTERESTS
Similarly, the Confucius Institutes are one of many entities and initiatives linked to the UFWD. All constitute a threat to the American way of life.
To fight back, U.S. policymakers must be proactive in their approach, and the American public itself must understand that the CCP has been waging a war against the West for decades.
Sean Durns is the director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at Capital Research Center.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
