Peloni: A similar strategy has kept the Muslim Brotherhood active and influential in societies which have deemed them as being outlawed over the years, many times actually. Solving this problem is critical to ending foreign influence, and notably not just that of the Chinese, being weaponized and instituted to bring down Western society.
by Jennifer Richmond | The Hill | May 29, 2026
If students are learning Chinese in public schools, they could be using a curriculum shaped by the Chinese Communist Party.
In 2004, Beijing began to establish Confucius Institutes on American university campuses, which in turn partnered with K-12 public schools to establish roughly 500 Confucius Classrooms. A backlash on Capitol Hill led to the closure of nearly all the Confucius Institutes, leading most to assume that the problem had been solved.
But as the National Association of Scholars documented in a 2022 report, some of the institutes survived by changing their names or transferring their operations to third-party organizations with innocuous names. This is preserving Beijing’s influence over American students.
One successor group is the Center for Bridging Cultures, a K-12 education nonprofit based in Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital. The center helps bring teachers from China into American classrooms, organizes student and administrator exchange trips to China, and continues to operate as Alfred University’s Confucius Institute’s Confucius Classroom partner with the same Chinese government and university partnerships, according to K-12 public school documents.
It has not been identified previously as a Confucius successor, but the evidence is in the public domain.
To start, there is a connection in terms of personnel. The Center for Bridging Cultures was founded in 2021, amid the mass closure of campus-based Confucius Institutes. The executive director of the center is Gao Qing, the long-time director of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which the State Department described as “the de facto headquarters of the Confucius Institute network.”
In August 2020, the State Department designated the headquarters as a Chinese government foreign mission, calling it “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms.”
The picture is less clear as to whether there is a funding relationship. As a tax-exempt nonprofit, the Center for Bridging Cultures does not have to publicly disclose donors, although it does have to provide that information to the IRS in an annual filing known as a Form 990. Whereas Beijing acknowledged its funding of the old Confucius Institutes, the center does not publicly identify donors.
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