OPINION:
In October, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had sharp words for “any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country. We’re done with that. No more and never again.”
The country Mr. Hegseth had in mind was China. He called out Beijing’s Confucius Institutes, which took root on more than 100 American campuses before a backlash forced most of them to close.
Yet as he noted, the closures did not eradicate the threat, which sought to return “disguised in new forms.”
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Mr. Hegseth’s recent focus remained on the new forms the threat has taken on campuses, but anyone concerned about foreign influence in education must broaden the aperture to include America’s K-12 classrooms. There, Confucius Institutes never stopped implementing Beijing’s soft power offensive.
It is not the Pentagon’s job to deal with this problem, but Congress and state and local government have important roles to play, as do parents.
In addition to their on-campus activities, Confucius Institutes often sponsored Confucius Classrooms at nearby public schools. A 2017 study identified 501 of these classrooms.
Why focus on K-12 schools, where there is no cutting-edge technology to pilfer? The answer is that this is where the seed is first planted, to quote China’s former propaganda minister, Liu Yunshan, in a 2010 People’s Daily article, for a “favorable international environment” for the Chinese Communist Party.
Last month, along with my colleagues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I published a report examining foreign influence in America’s K-12 schools, including the persistence of Confucius Classrooms. By partnering with Beijing, schools acquired the resources to fund and develop their Chinese language and culture programs and received help recruiting language teachers.
No school-by-school assessment has been conducted of how Confucius Classrooms weathered the closure of their Confucius Institute partners. A collection of nonprofits, some with direct ties to Beijing, began to assume responsibility for the Confucius Classrooms.
Take, for example, the Center for Bridging Cultures. Its director, Gao Qing, is the former head of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which the State Department described as “the de facto headquarters of the Confucius Institute Network.”
Center for Bridging Cultures’ mission is to preserve and expand the Chinese language and culture programs that were once part of various Confucius Institutes. Mr. Gao’s correspondence shows that he worked with Alfred University in western New York to assume responsibility for the classrooms that were once the purview of the school’s Confucius Institute.
From China’s perspective, Center for Bridging Cultures is the functional equivalent of a Confucius Institute. It is affiliated with the Beijing Language and Culture University, which lists the center as one of its “global institutes” alongside dozens that bear the Confucius name.
According to the university, Center for Bridging Cultures operates in 15 named U.S. states, “among others,” and works with “over fifty different schools and educational and cultural institutions.”
Another example is Kentucky-based BG Education Management Solutions, founded shortly after Western Kentucky University ended its partnership with Confucius. BG Education Management Solutions says it “supports 35 foreign language teachers across Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Louisiana, impacting more than 14,000 registered students.”
BG Education Management Solutions founder Terrill Martin ran the Confucius Institute at Western Kentucky University during its last five years on campus. In its filings with the Kentucky state government, BG Education Management Solutions lists “Confucius Institute of Western Kentucky” as one of the names under which it operates.
In New York, the China Institute of America is still collaborating with its former Confucius partner, East China Normal University. In April 2019, the China Institute erased mention of its Confucius Institute from its website and established the East China Normal University Center.
In 2023, the center launched a teacher certificate program, awarding joint credentials from the China Institute and East China Normal University to K-12 teachers who complete monthly cultural seminars led by its faculty. It is funded by the same Ministry of Education office that oversees the global Confucius Institute network.
One way to address this kind of foreign influence in K-12 classrooms is to promote transparency. Georgia, for example, has a new law requiring public schools to report foreign funding.
In Congress in December 2025, a bipartisan House majority passed the Transparency in Reporting of Adversarial Contributions to Education Act, or TRACE Act, which would ensure parents’ rights to request information about foreign funding and any conditions attached to it. The Senate has yet to take action on it.
Although transparency helps, the best way to protect classrooms from hostile foreign influences is to expand oversight to include the K-12 space, where the seeds of power are first sown. Then we must prohibit such funding in the first place.
• Jennifer Richmond, an education adviser and China specialist, is deputy director of education and national security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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