The China-backed Confucius Institute is rebranding to avoid public scrutiny into its work disseminating propaganda to thousands of American students.
United States government oversight and faculty pushback have curtailed the influence of the Confucius Institute, which has dwindled from 103 college branches in 2017 to just 51 today. But the propaganda program is not going away without a fight. Experts say that after host institutions shutter Confucius Institutes, some of the programs continue to operate by adopting new names.
The rebranding has allowed the Beijing-backed influence program to continue to shape the education of students from kindergartners to college students. According to a new report by the American Security Institute, more than 100 “Confucius classrooms” that cater to the K-12 system are now rebranded as the Asia Society Chinese Language Partner Network.
“Confucius Institutes are trying to repackage themselves—same old wine, brand new bottle,” Will Coggin, managing director of the American Security Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon.
The persistence of the Confucius Institute in the U.S. education system speaks to how difficult it is to convince American schools to sever ties with Chinese entities. Hanban, the Chinese Ministry of Education-backed group that runs the Confucius Institute, has spent more than $100 million to support the institutes in U.S. universities. Many universities fear that ending ties with the Confucius Institute will cause funding shortfalls and program cuts.
The Irish-born filmmaking couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinny have employed the medium of film to spotlight big stories and trends that establishment media either ignore or slant.
Their screenplays typically rely on transcripts of sworn witness testimony, such as in the anti-abortion feature “Gosnell: The Trial Of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” and the recent “ObamaGate: The Movie,” on the Trump-Russia collusion probe.
Now, in “My Son Hunter,” they will take on the censored story of “Biden family corruption” as revealed in the abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden.