The US Defense Department has designated Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-funded cultural centers hosted on American university campuses, as a threat to US national security.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the move on Friday in a video posted on social media, saying the Pentagon had added the organizations to its list of institutions that threaten national security.

Washington has long accused the centers of serving as Chinese propaganda tools, and Hegseth claimed they had continued operating under new names and charters despite congressional restrictions.

He said the Pentagon has "systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations" over the past two months. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hegseth framed the move as a response to institutes reappearing in disguise after Congress restricted funding to universities that host them, calling the organizations "sleeper organizations."

"It turns out that 80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters, but with the same mission: to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students," Hegseth said in the video.

The designation is a notable escalation: it treats language-and-culture programs, funded by Beijing to teach Chinese, as entities on a Pentagon threat list rather than merely as campus controversies.

The announcement is surprising because it claims a renaissance of a network Washington believed it had largely shut down.

At the peak of federal scrutiny in mid-2020 there were 75 Confucius Institutes in the United States, 65 of them on university campuses, and dozens of American colleges subsequently closed their institutes.

The designation also arrives as US-China tensions run high, with Beijing's embassy declining to respond immediately, leaving the Pentagon's characterization and its claims of a disguised relaunch unanswered in the initial coverage.

Hegseth's video is the primary evidence offered so far, and outlets stress his language is an allegation.

The designations draw on a long record of federal concern: in 2020 the State Department designated the Confucius Institute US Center as a foreign mission of China, citing opacity and state direction, and a 2017 National Association of Scholars study found host universities' contracts were frequently secret and teaching materials omitted sensitive topics.

Arab News also cites a 2019 University College Dublin study finding a statistically significant pro-Beijing shift in local media coverage near institutes.

The crackdown is not purely American.

Firstpost reports that last year several Australian universities — including Melbourne, Queensland, Western Australia, UNSW and RMIT — shut down their Confucius Institutes, after reports China was allegedly using the centers to spy on students abroad and spread propaganda; Beijing insisted the centers are a "bridge reinforcing friendship."

Hegseth says the dismantling is already complete, but many questions remain. Congress previously restricted funding to universities welcoming the institutes, and the new threat-list designation gives federal agencies a further lever.

Expect universities, academic groups and possibly Beijing to press for specifics on which organizations were targeted, on what evidence, and whether ordinary language teaching will be caught in the sweep.