Here are the Chinese 'propaganda' centers currently operating in the US

Dozens of Chinese “propaganda” centers still operate across the United States, even as U.S. lawmakers debate how to hold the communist country accountable for withholding information about the coronavirus, which originated in China’s Wuhan province.

For years, Campus Reform has reported on the number of Confucius Institutes on U.S. college campuses. Funded by the communist regime, these centers are marketed as Chinese language and culture centers. However, U.S. intelligence officials have warned that these centers are little more than “propaganda” arms of the communist country. 

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Even the former Chinese propaganda minister,  Liu Yushan, wrote in a 2010 article for Chinese-state media, “With regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out international propaganda battles against issuers such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights and Falun Gong. … We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes,” Politico reported in 2018.

While China and the U.S. disagree on most things, this appears to be one area in which officials from both countries share opinions.

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FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2018 congressional hearing when asked about Confucius Institutes on college campuses, “The level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues. They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere. But they’re taking advantage of it.”

CIA reports obtained by The Washington Free Beacon further revealed, “The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light. It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

While legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018 resulted in about a dozen U.S. colleges shuttering Confucius Institutes on campus, those closures were largely the result of their loss of funding, rather than concerns for the country’s national security. 

And now, nearly two years after that legislation became law, more than 75 Confucius Institutes are still in operation in the U.S., most of them on college campuses. From Maine to Florida to Kansas to California, these centers claim to educate American students about Chinese language and culture, and administrators who run the campuses on which they operate appear to believe the same country that claims to have fewer coronavirus deaths than the U.S, despite its population being more than three times the size of the U.S. population. 

Based on data from the National Association of Scholars, along with records maintained by Campus Reform, the interactive map below shows the locations where Confucius Institutes still operate. Hover your cursor over each dot to reveal the name of each college or school that currently hosts one of these centers. 

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