University shutting its Confucius Institute after US House panel raises concerns with Pentagon
- Alfred University in upstate New York, which has a defence contract for hypersonic missile research, was facing a deadline to end ties to the programme
- House select committee on China does not say if Alfred also ended its partnership with Chinese University of Geosciences
A university in upstate New York will shut its Confucius Institute weeks after a US congressional committee initiated a review into its Pentagon contract worth millions of dollars for hypersonic missile research.
Alfred University will be closing its Confucius Institute, effective June 30, according to Mark Danes, the vice-president for marketing and communications at Alfred University.
“While our community has benefited from the cultural programming provided by the Confucius Institute that we have operated since 2008, current geopolitical concerns regarding China make it difficult to continue to run it,” Danes told the South China Morning Post on Friday.
On Wednesday, a lawyer for Alfred notified Representative Mike Gallagher – chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – of the closing, noting that though the university “does not engage in classified research, it has for multiple years engaged with the Department of Commerce and the FBI to strengthen its export control policies and processes”.
On May 31, Gallagher had written to US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and the university president Mark Zupan, asking how Alfred received a five-year contract worth US$13.5 million a year earlier despite continuing to host a Confucius Institute.