China’s Affect Operation in US Schooling Was Supposed To Be Shut Down, However Did Closing the Confucius Institutes Solely Make It Stronger?

President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement in August that he’ll allow 600,000 Chinese students to attend U.S. universities—a major reversal in policy—is the latest example of how China’s influence operation in American higher education is shifting and adapting rather than receding. The controversial Confucius Institutes, Chinese government beachheads on American college and university campuses, may have largely shut down under U.S. government pressure, but the partnerships have quietly reemerged with new names and the same goals.

Asked about the Chinese student visas last month, Trump defended his reversal—allowing 600,000 Chinese students would more than double the population of Chinese students now studying in the United States—as a smart “business” move.

“It’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business,” he told Laura Ingraham of Fox News after she pressed him on China’s bad behavior, such as spying and stealing American technology. “One thing you don’t want—to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country, destroy our entire university and college system. I don’t want to do that.”

Trump’s vigorous defense of Chinese students comes despite his administration’s declared intention earlier this summer to “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students amid concerns about Chinese influence and Chinese students ultimately using their American schooling against the United States. Indeed, the president’s newfound business calculus may come with a heavy cost.

At their height, there were as many as 118 Confucius Institutes at American colleges and universities. The institutes’ primary role was to sponsor—and often fund—Chinese language and cultural courses on U.S. campuses. But when the U.S. government targeted the institutes in 2021 based on concerns they might act as espionage incubators, their doors were quietly closed across the country.

Then, in May of 2025, after the White House changed hands, further steps were taken when the House passed the DHS Restrictions on Confucius Institutes Act. But U.S. education remains far from immune to Chinese influence, and now the Chinese student population on American campuses is expected to double.

Even with the most well-endowed and elite American universities, Chinese money talks. Many universities have satellite campuses in China—a means to tap wealthy Chinese families for tuition income—including Duke, Johns Hopkins, New York University, the University of Michigan, and many others. In several instances, American universities have partnered with a Chinese institution known to have close ties to the Chinese military: one such partnership is between the University of Michigan, a premier U.S. public university, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s cybersecurity degree program, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “is located on a PLA information engineering base in Shanghai.” The PLA, or People’s Liberation Army, is the world’s largest military force.

Back in the United States, there are the Chinese Student and Scholar Associations (CSSA), which closely resemble the late Confucius Institutes. According to a letter several Republican senators sent to the Department of Justice in 2023, CSSAs—there are about 150 chapters in the United States—are employed by the Chinese government to advocate for its interests through what it calls “United Front” work, a strategy borrowed from the Soviet Union. China’s “United Front” uses a range of methods to influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to support Beijing’s preferred political narratives. The New York Times described how CSSAs are used to rally opposition to the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese government detests, when the Tibetan dissident is honored or invited to speak on campus.

CSSA groups often receive support and funding from Chinese embassies and consulates. On multiple occasions, representatives or proxies of these organizations have been accused of silencing and threatening students for speaking out against China.

China’s influence network in American academia is becoming more ambitious, as there are signs that Beijing is probing for opportunities in American K-12 schools.

With most investigations of Chinese influence centered on higher education, many Confucius Classrooms—the Confucius Institutes’ K-12 counterparts—remain in operation. How many of these classrooms are there? The numbers are elusive, as there has been a diligent effort to rebrand the classrooms without the “Confucius” moniker. Further, K-12 schools, which unlike universities don’t rely on federal grant funding, are under no obligation to publicly report these connections, and the information is frequently only obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests where possible.

There are also signs of a new approach to influencing elementary and high schools: just buy them.

This is where the Spring Education Group, a for-profit company buying up private schools across the United States, comes into the picture. Primavera Holdings in Hong Kong owns the Spring Education Group and previously owned the Princeton Review and Tutor.com. Primavera also has associations with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

Primavera Holdings made a rare appearance in the headlines when it purchased Tutor.com, which contracts with the U.S. military and many schools across the country to provide test prep and homework help.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in 2024, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) wrote, “While providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal data on users, such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions. As Chinese national security laws require companies to release confidential business and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.” Tutor.com denied that any students’ data would be shared with China, and today the Tutor.com website says that it is “U.S.-owned and operated” (How and if Primavera sold or divested from Tutor.com remains unclear).

While there has been some scrutiny around the Spring Education Group—which is still owned by Primavera—including a Florida Department of Education (FDOE) investigation into several schools, it has received less attention than Tutor.com and far less than the Confucius classrooms.

As a result of the FDOE probe, four schools owned by Spring Education Group were suspended from receiving school choice scholarships for having ties to the Chinese Communist Party via Primavera. Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) stated, “We will not put up with any attempt to influence students with a Communist ideology or allow Floridians’ tax dollars to go to schools that are connected to our foreign adversaries.”

An article in the New York Post reported that the founder of Primavera Holdings, Fred Hu, had “previously been named as a one-time senior member of the Chinese Communist Party.” Primavera and Spring Education Group both denied Hu is a member of the CCP. However, Hu has served as an adviser to the Chinese government on economic policy.

Spring Education Group, according to its website, has acquired at least 28 different school brands, often with several schools connected to each brand.  This includes at least one online school, several Montessori schools, and BASIS Independent Schools, which has been lauded for its top tier STEM programs. While the Montessori brand—a stalwart in early childhood education—is not trademarked, the BASIS private schools have become major players in the big city independent school scene.

The expansion of groups like Spring Education into the American educational landscape comes as American youth are increasingly open to far left socialist economic ideology, as evidenced by the election of Zohran Mamdani—whose core supporters were college educated young people—as New York City’s mayor. According to a study from the Buckley Institute, about half of university students now believe that socialism is a better ideology than capitalism.

Jennifer Richmond, an education adviser and China specialist, is the deputy director of Education and National Security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.