Congressional Hearing Sounds the Alarm on Chinese Communist Influence in K-12 Classrooms

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A congressional hearing was held about the Chinese Communist Party using Mandarin language programs to influence America’s K-12 classrooms.

A congressional hearing sounded the alarm about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) using Mandarin language programs to spread communist ideology and grow its soft power in Americaโ€™s K-12 classrooms.

Confucius Classrooms, the K-12 version of Confucius Institutes (CI) in universities, are language programs for which the CCP provides funding and controls curriculum and teacher vetting. In August 2020, the State Department designated the CI programโ€™s D.C.-based headquarters as a โ€œforeign missionโ€ of China based on its โ€œskewed Chinese language and cultural training for U.S. students as part of Beijingโ€™s multifaceted propaganda effortsโ€ and that the CI language programs were under guidance from the CCPโ€™s United Front Work Department, the leading agency in charge of influence operations.

โ€œ[The CCP] are not paying for these books because they want us to learn,โ€ Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, said at the Tuesday hearing organized by the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education under the House Education Committee.

In his view, the two nations are in an โ€œasymmetric information warfareโ€ in which the CCP takes advantage of Americaโ€™s open society. The CCP-backed language programs play an integral role in shaping American public opinion to not worry about the threat of the Peopleโ€™s Republic of China, Mr. Gonzalez wrote (pdf) as early as 2015.

โ€œWe should learn Mandarin. I studied Mandarin myself and Japanese and Korean. This is not what this is about. This is about a foreign party, a Communist Party-run country that is trying to influence how we think and how we act,โ€ he added.

Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education (PDE), a parent activist group, urged lawmakers to create a law to mandate foreign investment disclosure in K-12 schools, a requirement currently applicable to higher education institutes only. She further recommended a minimum disclosure threshold of $10,000, much lower than the $250,000 required for colleges.

Byย Terri Wu

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