2014-07-25
The headquarters of the Confucius Institute in Beijing, in a file photo.
ImagineChina
Once lauded as the jewel in the crown of China’s “soft power” cultural diplomacy, Confucius Institutes have sprung up at hundreds of colleges and teaching institutions around the world.
Partnering with local academic centers, their aim is to teach people to speak Chinese, as well as broadening people’s experience of Chinese culture in general.
But a recent warning from a group of U.S. professors suggests some 90 Confucius Institutes across the U.S. may also be seeking to instill in students the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s views.
“Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state,” the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote in a report issued in June.
“Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China,” it said.
It said such political agendas are typically allowed to flourish in U.S. colleges and universities, even when curriculum choices and academic debate are restricted as a result.
Confucius Institutes may appear at first glance to resemble the British Council, the Goethe Institut or the Alliance Franςaise, but their potential threat to academic freedom lies specifically in the fact that they base themselves out of universities, the AAUP said.
While their European counterparts are clearly aligned with “soft power” objectives and national agendas, they aren’t permitted to influence academic freedom in the countries where they operate, it said.
“Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities,” the group said.
It called on U.S. universities to break ties with Confucius Institutes unless they can renegotiate agreements to win back unilateral control of their curricula, staff hiring policies and choice of texts.
China’s state media has hit back at the report in defense of some 327 Confucius Institutes that currently operate in 93 countries and regions around the world.
“Such claims expose not so much communist propaganda as their own intolerance of exotic cultures and biased preconceived notions to smear and isolate the [Communist Party],” the official Xinhua news agency wrote in a June editorial.
