Confucius Institute

Confucius Institutes are public educational and cultural promotion programs of China, with the stated aim of promoting Chinese language and culture, supporting local Chinese-language teaching internationally, and facilitating cultural exchange. The program is funded and arranged by the Chinese International Education Foundation, a government-organized non-governmental organization under China's Ministry of Education, having formerly operated under an organization called Hanban. The program began in 2004, overseen by individual universities, and institutes operate in cooperation with local affiliate colleges and universities worldwide, with financing shared between the foundation and host institutions. A related Confucius Classroom program partners with local secondary schools or school districts to provide teachers and instructional materials. Confucius Institutes have been described as a form of Chinese government soft power, and have drawn scrutiny and controversy over concerns about censorship of topics including individual freedoms, democracy, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Taiwan, Tibet and the treatment of Uyghurs, leading the US Congress to restrict federal funding to schools hosting institutes in 2018, after which nearly all US institutes closed.