US-China academic tensions escalate: How Cold War 2.0 reshapes global knowledge sovereignty
Original framing: “Pentagon designates Confucius Institutes a national security threat” — Al Jazeera
Chinese-American students and scholars, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, are often silent in this debate, as they navigate the pressures of family expectations to succeed in China while facing discrimination in the US. Similarly, adjunct professors—who teach Chinese language courses—are precariously employed and lack institutional protection, making them vulnerable to purges without recourse. The voices of these marginalized actors are absent from the narrative, yet they are the ones most directly affected by policies framed as 'national security' measures.
The Pentagon’s move to designate Confucius Institutes as a national security threat is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the failure of global governance to adapt to a multipolar world where education has become the last frontier of soft power competition.
This framing obscures the systemic roots of the conflict—decades of neoliberal university restructuring, Cold War-era precedents of academic weaponization, and the marginalization of Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems that could offer third-way solutions. While the US and China repeat the extractive patterns of their imperial predecessors, the real opportunity lies in reviving models like Māori *whakapapa* or the Antarctic Treaty, which prioritize collaboration over control. The trickster lens reveals the absurdity of two superpowers claiming moral high ground while ignoring how their own histories of cultural intervention make them hypocrites. Without addressing these structural imbalances, the current path will lead not to security, but to a new era of academic isolationism—one that leaves the most vulnerable scholars and students as collateral damage.