Tufts University (USA) announced Wednesday (March 17) that it is closing its Confucius Institute.
The private university in Medford, Massachusetts, near Boston, said in a statement on its Confucius Institute Web page that the agreement with the Confucius Institute will not be renewed after it expires in September this year.
The Confucius Institute at Tufts University is a partnership between Tufts and China’s Beijing Normal University that hosts noncredit programs and activities to teach Chinese language and Culture. A statement issued by Tufts University officials said, “The Confucius Institute at Tufts University has made a valuable contribution to Chinese language and cultural learning at Tufts and has helped foster the important relationship between Tufts and BNU.”
The Confucius Institute is an overseas cultural expansion program funded by the Chinese government. Communist Party leaders have described the Confucius Institutes as a success in increasing China’s cultural soft power and as an “important part of the Communist Party’s larger outreach pattern.”
The expansion of Confucius Institutes has raised concerns and controversy in the United States and other Western countries. Critics say the Chinese Communist government is exporting ideology through the Confucius Institutes and imposing long-arm censorship on U.S. campuses by interfering with teaching materials and topics, as well as spying on students and teachers critical of Beijing.
A report in The Boston Globe cited weekly protests by Tibetans, Uighurs, Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, as well as other activists, outside the Confucius Institute at Tufts University and the residence of the Tufts president.
Last September, the Trump administration designated the Confucius Institute’s U.S. center as a foreign mission. Some members of Congress are also highly concerned about the Confucius Institute.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts has been urging the state’s universities to close their Confucius Institutes for years. The University of Massachusetts Boston closed its Confucius Institute in 2019.
In March, the Senate unanimously passed the Concerns Over Nations Funding University Campus Institutes in the United States Act, a bill known by its The bill is referred to as the CONFUCIUS Act after its acronym in English.
The Act requires Confucius Institutes established on U.S. campuses to protect academic freedom and prohibit the enforcement of any foreign laws, and grants full control over the content and employment of Education and activities to the U.S. institutions where they are located. The bill prohibits federal funding for institutions that establish Confucius Institutes and do not comply with these requirements.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator John Kennedy, said, “The Confucius Institute is under the control of the Chinese Communist Party for everything but its name.”
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