Of all the forces in the world opposed to the values Columbia University ostensibly cherishes—free speech, human rights, liberalism, academic freedom, respect for dissent—the most powerful must be the Chinese Communist Party. How peculiar, then, that Columbia invites an organ of the Chinese Communist Party to operate on its campus and trade on the good name of Columbia University.
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This is the scandal of Columbia’s “Confucius Institute,” which is not just a modest outfit for promoting the study of Chinese language and culture. Confucius Institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up,” Chinese Politburo member Li Changchun said in 2009. Mr. Li would know, as he was China’s propaganda chief at the time. And Columbia has had its own Confucius Institute since 2013.
In The Current’s Spring 2017 issue, Leeza Hirt raised questions about the general lack of information on campus about the Confucius Institute’s work. More than 100 other American universities have Confucius Institutes of their own, and many have faced public controversy over the illiberal practices that often come with this Made-in-Beijing product: discriminatory hiring practices, curriculum control, censorship, dishonest academic instruction and more. Columbia has so far been spared such trouble. But by hosting a Confucius Institute on campus, Columbia legitimates the entire Confucius program—which constitutes a betrayal of liberal values and a gift to China’s authoritarian government.
Columbia’s Confucius Institute, like all the others, operates under the Office of Chinese Language Council International—known by its abbreviation, Hanban. This state agency is chaired by China’s Vice Premier Liu Yandong. The University of Chicago’s Marshall Sahlins summarized Hanban’s influence on American campuses in The Nation:
In larger universities hosting CIs, Hanban assumes responsibility for a portion of the total Chinese curriculum. In the more numerous smaller hosts, most or all of the instruction in Chinese language and culture is under its control. Hanban has the right to supply the teachers, textbooks and curriculums of the courses in its charge; it also names the Chinese co-directors of the local Confucius Institutes. Research projects on China undertaken by scholars with Hanban funds are approved by Beijing. The teachers appointed by Hanban, together with the academic and extracurricular programs of the CIs, are periodically evaluated and approved by Beijing, and host universities are required to accept Beijing’s supervision and assessments of CI activities.
In 2014, over a hundred University of Chicago professors successfully petitioned the administration to shutter its Confucius Institute, citing a lack of administration supervision over hiring faculty. Canada’s McMaster University similarly closed its Confucius Institute after a professor was forced to hide her membership in the Falun Gong religious sect that is banned in China.
Though Columbia offers Hanban much in the form of a reputational boost, it gets little in return. According to Columbia Political Science Professor Andrew Nathan, “We have a gigantic Chinese language instruction program that’s outstanding and among the very best, so we don’t need the Confucius Institute. We’ve had for many decades such a Chinese language instruction program. And we also have one of the best Chinese libraries, so we don’t need them.” Other schools do not have that leverage, Nathan—who cannot visit China because of his criticisms of its ruling Communist Party—explained in a phone interview. “For an institution that is barely scraping by with its Chinese language program or doesn’t have one that the Confucius Institute supports, then it’s a very different picture. I think that’s where the risk lies.”
Sahlins explains that Hanban “has signed agreements that grant exceptions to [its] dictates, but usually only when it has wanted to enlist a prestigious university, such as Stanford or Chicago, in the worldwide CI project.” Columbia is another such university.
Hanban’s pursuit of prestige may explain the Columbia Confucius Institute’s anomalous features, as compared to others around the United States. In exchange for being able to list Columbia as a partner, Hanban does not need to exert control over hiring practices and curricula. Language instruction is a central Confucius mission on most campuses. Not so at Columbia, where Chinese language instruction remains under the auspices of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC). In fact, the CI here does not offer any classes, and no faculty members work under it except for its director, Professor Lening Liu (though it is notable that Liu heads both the Confucius Institute and EALAC’s Chinese Language Program).
Of the more than a hundred Confucius Institutes in the United States, Columbia’s is one of two without a website (the other is at West Virginia University). Its mission statement—“to promote research and education of Chinese culture, Chinese language pedagogy, and modern China,” as Liu told me—is not printed anywhere online.
Liu says Columbia negotiated greater autonomy for its Confucius Institute. “Usually you would have a China-side director from the partnering university in China, and we rejected that,” he said. “We said we don’t want a director from China—he cannot direct our Columbia campus. You can have a coordinator or a go-between person, but no, we don’t want any official on the Columbia campus.”
According to Liu, a visiting scholar from Renmin University of China helps the Institute with logistical matters, but he does not have a seat on the steering committee that reviews grant applications, unlike at other schools where the China-side director can have a say in appropriating funds and overseeing grant requests. Whether any Confucius Institute can truly be autonomous remains a question—Liu said every grant request sent to Hanban by the Columbia steering committee has been accepted, but none has dealt with the issues the Chinese government seeks to suppress, namely the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uighurs of Xinjiang.
On campuses other than Columbia, Confucius Institutes are often a university’s sole means for any substantive Chinese culture and language education. And on what terms? Hanban policy mandates that its programming “shall not contravene concerning the laws and regulations of China.” This would mean refusing to hire members of the repressed Falun Gong religious sect, and refusing any program that promotes, say, the Dalai Lama, or that casts the Communist Party in a bad light.
There are also non-disclosure clauses in contracts between universities and Hanban, raising questions about whether universities “are ceding undue control to a foreign government,” as journalist Richard Bernstein recently noted in the New York Review of Books. Columbia’s Andrew Nathan added, “I probably would have said we should not accept the secrecy stipulation that is normally part of those contracts.”
Nathan points to Columbia’s brand strength as a reason for the Confucius Institute’s small footprint in Morningside Heights. “Columbia’s Confucius Institute can afford to be much more academically honest than is the case at some less powerful universities,” he said. “I think it’s quite possible that our Confucius Institute is honoring academic standards.” That said, he would have liked to have been consulted in the negotiations that began in 2008. “I was not involved in any such conversation, and I think I should’ve been,” he said. “Somebody like me”—a China critic—“should have been involved in that conversation.”
Robbie Barnett, Director of Columbia’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program, thinks the Confucius Institute has “extremely problematic origins politically,” but he was pleased with its academic integrity when he recently worked with them for the first time. Barnett helped invite Mongolian professors for an event arranged by his colleague, Gray Tuttle.
“When I was asked to be part of this event, I did ask the organizers if they thought that this would lead to any problems from the Confucius Institute for the people I was inviting,” Barnett said in a phone call. “The Confucius Institute at Columbia replied [to the organizers] saying they didn’t want to know who was being asked, there’s no reason for telling them who was being asked or to ask permission, and the conference should invite whomever it thought was appropriate. … That was from Liu.”
Barnett weighs the distinction between the Confucius Institutes’ practices and their purpose. “They may not be going wrong anywhere. That doesn’t mean they’re a good design. There’s a difference between the conception of them, which is very problematic, since they’re inserted within the universities and have controls over various aspects of them from the outside,” but ultimately they need to be assessed “on a case-by-case basis.” Different universities have different relationships with Hanban, so “the question isn’t, is it a terrible concept? It is a pretty bad concept. But it might have some implementations that are quite good, as well as it could have some that are bad,” he added.
What about Germany’s Goethe Institute or the UK’s British Council? Those exist off campus, Nathan notes, and have no control over curricula and faculty. “But when they get integrated into a university instructional curriculum then I think there is something inherently wrong with it,” he said. Sahlins and Bernstein agree, both drawing a distinction between universities’ frequent partnerships with foreign-funded organizations and giving those organizations decision-making positions within the university.
Academic and cultural exchange with China is valuable, and it existed at Columbia before the Confucius Institute arrived in 2013. But contrary to its claim of fostering mutual understanding, Hanban appears to be an export service for Chinese government propaganda. China’s then-Minister of Education, whose department oversees Hanban, swore in 2015 to “never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes.” So much for an exchange.
And just last month, China’s Education Ministry mandated that a party secretary be given a seat on the board of trustees and made vice-chancellor at joint venture universities funded by foreign institutions. This comes as Premier Xi Jinping increases the Communist Party’s political control throughout the country, having declared at the 19th Party Congress in October, “Government, military, society and schools—north, south, east and west—the party is leader of all.” It is unclear what effect, if any, this directive will have on Columbia’s Global Center in Beijing.
Columbia should not allow its name to be used to launder Hanban’s reputation, even if Columbia remains immune from some of the illiberal tactics of Confucius Institutes elsewhere. By maintaining its partnership with Hanban, Columbia’s administration is lending legitimacy to the Chinese government’s efforts to propagandize and mislead American students about China’s past, present and future.
//Dore Feith is a senior in Columbia College and Politics Editor of The Current. He can be reached at dlf2133@columbia.edu.
