Over the past several years, Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes have received scrutiny from legislators and the broader public over their agreements with U.S. colleges to teach Chinese language and culture to students across the country.



U.S. intelligence agencies have labeled Confucius Institutes as threats because of their associations with the Chinese Communist Party, according to reports obtained by the Washington Free Beacon last year.



"The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached' funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light," the unclassified portion of the report reads. "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."

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Last year, Congress responded to these fears by passing a bill, first introduced by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, restricting Department of Defense funding for Chinese language learning from colleges that host Confucius Institutes. President Donald Trump signed that legislation into law.



Despite legislative efforts, 91 Confucius Institutes remain across the country, according to data supplied by the National Association of Scholars. While a majority of the institutes are hosted on college campuses, a handful of the institutions are at K-12 schools.



Since 2014, 22 Confucius Institutes have closed their doors.



This map displays the locations of the 91 open institutes and the 22 closed locations. The open institutes are represented with an orange marker; closed institutes are represented by red.



"The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached' funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light"

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