China's Influence in U.S. Public Schools: What We Know, What We Don't

Concerns have been raised that the Chinese state is influencing the American education system by offering millions of dollars in funding to public schools, amid growing fears about its impact on the U.S.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday, stakeholders claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was using soft power to sway U.S. institutions—including some private schools as well as public schools—posing a national security threat.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's superintendent of public instruction, who previously served as the state's secretary of education, alleged that the Confucius Classrooms program—run by the Confucius Institutes, a Chinese government-sponsored educational entity—sought to "undermine" the U.S., and called on Congress to "pass a law to ban schools from accepting money from hostile foreign governments."

Responding to Walters' claims that Tulsa Public Schools had received funding from the Chinese government and "maintains an active connection with the CCP," a spokesperson for the school district told local channel News On 6: "The district takes no funds from the Chinese government and has no Confucius Classroom programs in its schools."

Newsweek approached the Chinese International Education Foundation, which operates the Confucius Institutes, via email for comment on Wednesday.

Nicole Neily, president of the Parents Defending Education (PDE) grassroots organization, told lawmakers that their research suggested that in the past ten years, more than $17 million had been given to 143 school districts by the Confucius Classrooms initiative, across 34 states and the District of Columbia.

She said that this funding had impacted 182 schools, some of which were identified as being near 20 U.S. military bases, including Fort Knox and Nellis Air Force Base.

The testimony comes at a time of heightened sensitivity in the U.S. towards China amid a cooling of relations between the two nations, fueled by the appearance of a spy balloon over America earlier in the year and an ongoing trade war.

National security fears were also raised over the purchase of a parcel of land 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force base in North Dakota by the Binzhou-headquartered Fufeng Group, where the company hoped to build a wet corn milling plant. Since then, questions have been raised about a mysteriously-owned company that has been able to buy land bordering Travis Air Force Base in California.

The Chinese state has been accused of stealing American agricultural innovations, and House Republicans alleged that Chinese "military personnel" were being inserted into the U.S. through the southern land border with Mexico—which experts previously told Newsweek would be a "pretty easy" way to do so.

Many Confucius Institutes in the U.S. have shut down in the last few years. The institutes, which state they aim to promote Chinese language and culture, were described by the Trump administration in 2020 as entities "advancing Beijing's global propaganda and malign influence campaign."

Of around 120 institutes that were set up across the U.S., only 30 remained open as of 2021, the University of Southern California U.S.-China Institute said at the time.

According to a 2022 report by the National Association of Scholars, Confucius Classrooms are "a smaller version" of the institutes, which teach Chinese language but also subjects "like history or economics that the Chinese government may have a special interest in."

It said that though a majority of the Confucius Institutes had been closed down, Confucius Classrooms "frequently survive the closure of their sponsoring [Confucius Institute]."

In a July investigation, PDE said that Chinese government money was funneled into non-profits including Confucius Institutes, which then disbursed those funds to K-12 schools. In one case, it claimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia "received more than $1 million in financial aid from Chinese government-affiliated entities over the course of a decade."

While Republican lawmakers appeared to largely agree with the testimony—the GOP House Committee Chair Aaron Bean arguing "CCP influence is rampant in American classrooms"—Democrats questioned whether Chinese institutions were being unduly targeted with criticism.

Raul Grijalva, a congressman for Arizona, noted that there were many other institutions that influenced the education system, picking out conservative content producer PragerU, which recently came under fire for offering a sanitized view of American slavery.

Walters retorted that PragerU "promote[s] American values without indoctrination," to which Grijalva responded: "So much for consistency."

While the Confucius Institutes are accused of links to the Chinese state, it remains unclear how many are active in the U.S., and whether their educational funding was having a demonstrable malign influence on the American education system.

America is not the only nation to be grappling with how to treat Confucius Institutes. After pledging to close the U.K.'s 30 institutes in 2022, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak backtracked in May this year as his government sought to thaw relations with China, prompting criticism from China-sceptic politicians in his party.

At the weekend, the Mail on Sunday reported that the U.K. Home Office was seeking to bar foreign educators from acquiring visas to teach Mandarin through the Confucius Institutes.