Chinese influence operations in American Education have focused primarily on Colleges and Universities. For example, after years of warnings, UNH ended its Confucius Institute in 2021 (UNH is still getting CCP grant money through 2024). But China has also invested millions in public schools.
Parents Defending Education has released a lengthy article with links and details tying hundreds of schools to Chinese money through Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms.
In March, Parents Defending Education uncovered that a nonprofit linked to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology had received more than $1 million in financial aid from Chinese government-affiliated entities over the course of a decade.1
Further research reveals the People’s Republic of China fostered relationships with American K-12 schools through grants, sister school partnerships, and other programming since at least 2009. Parents Defending Education tracked affiliations in 143 schools across 34 states and Washington, D.C.—and at least seven are still active. Financial exchanges between K-12 schools and the Chinese government range from a few thousand dollars to, in Thomas Jefferson High School’s case, more than a million dollars. Disturbingly, the Chinese government’s ties appear to target school districts near 20 American military bases. …
The Chinese government’s effort to forge ties with American schools through its Ministry of Education is one facet of the Chinese Communist Party’s broader soft-power strategy to influence policy in nations throughout the world. Expanding Confucius Classrooms in the United States has been a top priority for the Chinese government, the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found.3
The State Department designated Confucius Institutes a “foreign mission” of the Chinese Communist Party in 2020.4 As noted in the State Department’s report, these programs are funded in part by the Chinese government under guidance from the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, “the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas propaganda and influence operation.”
One of the operations assisting in this influence is the Asia Society which “tailor(s) Chinese culture and language immersion programs to U.S. school districts. They also collaborated on funding Confucius programs in universities and K-12 schools.” Asia Society gets lots of money from Asia, but also has support from “Open Society, the Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation,” as well as” the Confucius Classroom Network with funding support from the Chinese International Education Foundation, an organization created by Hanban.”
2021 seems to be when these influence-peddling operations began to get noticed and cut, which suggests to me either victory on the part of China or they’ve found another avenue for influence. Before that happened, Keene High School accepted 10,000.00 dollars from the Asia Society, which advances the CCP goals as noted above.
Chinese Language Learning. Useful when the conquerors get here. Locals can identify the dissidents. I’m kidding, sort of. It was one grant and only one public school that the researchers identified in N.H. But China doesn’t give money away without an agenda. They invest in their geo-political and economic priorities.
Maybe we need a few classes on that, hmm?
