The Debate Over Confucius Institutes

Beijing's Confucius Institute effort on American campuses has its ancestry in Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and perhaps other countries’ efforts to “do well by doing good” in American academia. It should not be viewed as uniquely insidious, in spite of China’s exceptionally rapid economic and strategic ascent in recent years. To view the CIs through the prism of a looming Chinese threat to the core elements of American national life, material, military, or moral, is a mistake.

Nowadays, Big China is indeed on a roll, publicly entertaining a “Chinese Dream” of national “rejuvenation,” but at the same time pondering how to be received by others as something more attractive than a gate crasher. The leadership’s steady concern, for the past decade or more, with Public Diplomacy—combined with its bulging coffers and the never-ending reminders of America's Wow Factor on the world stage (LeBron James, “Transformers,” Starbucks)—are leading Official China to grapple with the problem of what defines China for its own inhabitants and what defines China for everyone else on earth.

Lest we forget, China has a gigantic, marvelous cultural repertoire, worthy of world interest and respect. From the first Archaeological Exhibition to visit the U.S. in the 1970s, through the "China: Seven Thousand Years of Discovery" show that dazzled Americans in the 1980s, and ever since, China has quite properly found Americans eager to see and learn more about a wondrous civilization so different from their own.

Moreover,as Big China has gotten bigger on the world stage, learning about China has become a pressing goal for widening swathes of American students, teachers, and administrators.

At the core of that growing interest is the Chinese language itself. Happily for the U.S., there is a big market now for Chinese language study. Anyone who gets into it quickly realizes that Chinese language and Chinese culture are inseparable. We owe it to ourselves to start with the language when we can.

The problem is that, in any educational institution, language instruction costs money and competes for scarce resources. China's willingness to finance a Chinese language instruction worldwide, speaks to that financial need, at least at many less prestigious schools.

On its face, I would argue that expansion of Chinese language instruction in America is a good thing, and that it should be welcomed. If a school can't do it alone, the language-instruction resources made available by a CI should be utilized, assuming that the instructors are competent to teach American students and willing to adhere to a set of commitments to ethically responsible classroom behavior.

These requirements should include a stated commitment to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and a signed commitment not to use any academic threats or pressures against those of divergent political or ethical opinions.

Such clear affirmations of academic freedom should be specified in each school’s agreement with Hanban, the Chinese agency sponsoring Confucius Institutes. If Hanban cannot accept such stipulations, then there should be no agreement. The responsibility for determining that these commitments are being upheld should reside solely in the hands of the host institution.

That said, I favor giving CIs the benefit of the doubt, until specific problems arise at individual institutions. If serious (not spurious or frivolous) complaintsabout the behavior of a CI teacher should arise, the matter should be investigated and handled by the host institution, whose sovereignty should be stipulated and agreed to with the Hanban. Ideally, Hanban would not try to derail such investigations; any threats to pull support would have to be rejected.

I have long felt that a formless fear of a nameless "China Tide" lurks below the surface of the American discourse on China. Noxious emanations from China seem to threaten Americans in their daily lives and in their homes, or to offend their sensibilities: contaminated pet food or doctored medicines; fear of growing throngs of Gucci-gobbling tourists; fear of Chinese workers making what we once made for ourselves; legions of geeky, malevolent cyber-invaders.

For most Americans, China's political system is not a pretty sight, and we would not want it established, or propagated, in our own environment. Should an individual Confucius Institute pursue those goals in the U.S., we would rightly and urgently tell the CI's to go elsewhere.

But that, if I understand it correctly, is not what the CIs are doing. If the CIs are teaching Chinese language effectively to legions of young Americans who would otherwise not have an opportunity to experience that language and to begin to touch China's cultural environment through language, I say good on them. If a CI, or a CI instructor, oversteps the line, host schools should step in, address the problem and push the “reset” button without erasing the whole CI file. To treat the whole CI phenomenon as another alarming surge of the nameless China Tide strikes me as itself an implicit denial, not a defense, of American liberal traditions Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty, but summary or pre-emptive administrative action is something else again.

Finally, for the sake of discussion, I hope others, including working academics, might comment on how subjects involving deeply (but not universally) held religious or poltical beliefs, at any number of American educational institutions operated and funded by religious organizations or religio-political organizations, are treated. The issues raised in this discussion, paradoxically, may turn out not to be solely about China after all.

I have misgivings about Confucius Institutes (hereafter CIs) and hope U.C. Irvine never gets one.  But I may not have much say in this.  Administrators don’t always consult with China studies scholars when trying to decide whether to sign on the dotted line—nor consult with us about terms, which can vary widely.  Moreover, when picking an American director for a CI to share leadership duties with a Beijing-appointed counterpart, U.S. administrators don’t necessarily choose China specialists. Along with more frequently noted worries (that a CI might lobby to prevent a visit by the Dalai Lama or the holding of a workshop on a taboo topic, etc.), these things make me uncomfortable about the CI phenomenon.

Let me be clear, though: there are China specialists I know and respect who had a say in the deals struck to bring CIs to their campuses.  I have friends in the field who are local directors and who assert—and I believe them—that they’ve seen no evidence of ham-handed or even subtle efforts by their Chinese counterpart to interfere with routine or even envelope-pushing activities. Their experiences suggest that visions of CIs as one-size-fits-all entities that are part of a carefully orchestrated nefarious conspiracy are problematic.

An anecdote of my own has similar implications. Some time ago, I found out, but not until just before giving a talk, that the local CI was my visit’s sponsor.  I was annoyed and tweaked my planned lecture to show it. In my new opening, I said that since a CI was sponsoring the event, a few words on Confucius were in order. I found it odd, I said, that China’s ruling party had excoriated Confucius when Mao Zedong headed the country, yet now named institutes in his honor.  The official line on history was still that Mao was better than his anti-Communist rival Chiang Kai-shek, I continued, but the present veneration of Confucius as a national saint fit better with Chiang's worldview than with Mao's.

Was the Beijing-appointed head of the CI outraged? No, she wasn’t even miffed.  She said she loved the talk and I'd be welcome to come back and speak again any time.

So, CIs need not be problematic, if the right terms are struck and held to.  But remember: good terms only lead to good things if both sides make good on their promises. And institutions have to be ready to sever all ties with a CI that interferes with core academic values, even if doing so means losing CI funds and risking the flow of other revenue streams with ties to Beijing.

Is this important? Yes. It’s easy to get addicted to any sort of funding in tough budgetary times. And two words remind us that Beijing sometimes pretends that old promises were never made or if made don’t need to be honored: “Hong” and “Kong.”  The recent White Paper on the city should be mandatory reading for anyone considering saying “yes” to a CI.

Why does Columbia University have a Confucius Institute? It is well-staffed with departments and programs on China, including language, where I studied it in the mid-1950s. Here in London, at the London School of Economics, where the director has evaded proper debate on its CI, for years students interested in China have walked down the road to the School of Oriental and African studies to learn Chinese. Whether Chinese has a magnificent culture or not is neither here nor there. What is both here and there is that Beijing threatens, usually sucessfully, those who disobey its commands. Even the Norwegians agreed to snub, or "sacrifice," an official visit from the Dalai Lama to keep on some sort of unexplained good terms.

As Perry Link notes in his contribution to this forum, as part of the Tiananmen Initiative Project I launched last fall to encourage commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the massacre, I wrote to over 200 Confucius Institute directors. “On behalf of an international group of China scholars and others, I am writing to ask that your Confucius Institute mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of liu si with a public event such as a lecture, a teach-in, a roundtable discussion or the like that addresses the relevant historical and contemporary issues. In The Analects (2:24) Confucius himself said, “Not to act when justice commands, that is cowardice.” We appeal to your conscience and sense of justice to act with courage.” With the exception of one positive message, the lack of any other response suggests that expediency and cowardice rather than conscience and justice are the hallmarks of the CIs. Not surprising in view of their provenance and the role they play in China's cultural diplomacy.

A confession. In 2007, without having given the matter sufficient thought, I myself, then an associate director of the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana, shared responsibility for a successful application to the Hanban to establish a Confucius Institute at my university, a typically underfunded state university with a woefully inadequate Asian Studies program. Our institutional poverty rather than our greed motivated us. We pledged to ourselves to brook no interference from Beijing in what we did. As far as I am aware, there has been none except, of course, in terms of the recruitment criteria for teachers in China itself that preclude any who would function as anything other than mouthpieces of the Chinese state.

What I failed to consider at the time, though I should have known better, was what might be called the side effects of the seemingly benign CI medicine that Beijing prescribed for the financial deficiency disease from which my institution suffered. Of course, as others have noted, there is the inherent danger of self-censorship, which may or may not even operate at a conscious level. Just as important is that the CIs function to conceal the ugly features of a repressive regime whose relentless depredations against its own people as well as its increasingly truculent international behavior require no recitation to readers of this website.

Chinese culture and language are undoubtedly magnificent contributions to world culture. Yet there are surely other ways than accepting handouts from Beijing to bring them to our students and our fellow citizens. Russia, too, has a great culture and language. Yet would we have blithely accepted Pushkin Institutes on our campuses funded by the murderous Stalinist autocracy? King Sejong of the Joseon Dynasty was a great figure in Korean history and culture. Would we accept King Sejong Institutes on our campuses funded by the tyrannical regime in Pyongyang?

There are better ways to partake of China's cultural heritage than to sacrifice our integrity.

I have not had any first-hand experience with Confucius Institutes, but I have been on what some might call the other side of the relationship. From summer 2001 to April 2003, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer who taught English and Western culture at a small teachers' college in Fuling, a small industrial city in Southern China.

I was one of approximately 80 new Volunteers in China that year. My training, conducted in the Sichuanese city of Leshan by a team mostly comprising current or former Volunteers and Chinese nationals, did not dwell much on political questions. When it did, I recall it focusing on how to avoid offending our Chinese hosts. That included being extremely cautious when discussing the "three T's": Tibet, Tiananmen, and Taiwan. (I remember being told nothing about how we were to speak of the United States, although we were encouraged generally to comport ourselves in a way that didn't bring shame on our country.)

The advice about Chinese sensibilities was almost certainly well-meaning, and practical, at least in a narrow sense. A clumsy, premature lurch into such sensitive topics by a new Volunteer (one after all sent by U.S. authorities) would only have alienated our hosts. One colleague told me how he had attempted to discuss the 2001 Hainan spy plane incident in an earlier semester by highlighting how well the downed Americans seemed to be getting on with their Chinese minders. He said the atmosphere in the classroom quickly turned toxic; some students began to cry, others stood to denounce him, and still others walked out. They thought he was depicting China as weak. He told me he never taught that group again. It was hard to put that anecdote out of my mind as I planned my own lessons.

Authorities in Fuling also seemed aware of what might go "wrong." Peace Corps trainers told us to assume we were monitored. I formed some warm friendships with some of my students, who were scarcely younger than I, and in my second year they told me the Communist Party Secretary at the school had warned students to stay away from the foreign teachers, advice many of them cheerfully ignored. Near the end of our stay, the dean of our English department introduced me and my fellow Volunteers to a friendly, portly man from the local Public Security Bureau, who the dean said had been keeping tabs on us. This wasn't an effort to intimidate; odd as it sounds, I think it was meant to showcase the pains our hosts had taken to handle us carefully and to keep us safe.

I don't know what specific instructions CI instructors receive before they touch down in the United States, but I would not be surprised if it were couched in similar terms. I would bet they are asked to focus on keeping dialogue "constructive" and "positive" and to avoid letting students or colleagues be "disrespectful." As we debate the relative value of Confucius institutes, one acute question is at what point laudable cross-cultural sensitivity becomes a self-serving acceptance (or promotion) of a particular political status quo. If there is simply no room at all for respectful criticism or even friendly discussion of a certain question, that indicates the topic has been too severely ring-fenced. In such a case, American educators do no service by observing existing boundaries. They may tell themselves they are being sensitive, or practical, but they're really just caving in. And their students—Americans, Chinese, and everyone else—probably notice.

Right now, the most important relationship in the world is between the U.S. and China. Like any relationship, it won't blossom if both parties play it entirely "safe." I think people respect tough questions, at least coming from those with an awareness of the other's culture and life experience. Since we are playing host to Confucius Institutes, and not the other way around, I think it's fair to ask staff members there to engage topics that are important to the students whom they purportedly serve. If a CI instructor happens to hold a view in line with Beijing's, the instructor should at least advance an argument. (I note the absence of anyone from a CI in this particular thread.) I told my students in China they were free to ask me any question at all, and they often asked very pointed questions about American life. Confucius Institutes should be held to the same standard.

From time to time, we should be able to tell our friends what they don't want to hear. If we can't, perhaps they're not our friends after all.

First, any increase in the teaching of Mandarin Chinese in schools is a positive. And we all benefit from greater understanding of Chinese culture and history (as long as the bad is taught with the good).

The questions for our schools and our society are whether Confucius Institutes (CI) are the only vehicle available to achieve these goals, and whether the price a school pays to accept a CI is too high.

The anecdotal evidence suggests that there can be a negative effect on free and open academic discourse, as evidenced by the American Association of University Professors' letter. CIs may overtly suppress discussion of topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Communist government, such as Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen: the contract of a Toronto college instructor barred her from discussing the Falun Gong, for instance. CIs may exert undue influence on university decisions: in 2009, North Carolina State disinvited the Dalai Lama after the school’s CI complained. The presence of CIs may result in self-censorship by the school.

In our own investigation, in 2011 the International Campaign for Tibet (while not identifying our Tibet connection) requested resource materials on Tibet from a Confucius Institute at a university in the Washington, D.C. region. Instead of scholarly materials published by credible American authors (not to speak of Tibetan writers) what we received were books and DVDs giving the Chinese narrative on Tibet published by China Intercontinental Press, which is described by a Chinese government-run website as operating "under the authority of the State Council Information Office...whose main function is to produce propaganda products."

Academic freedom is a cherished value in democratic and scientifically productive societies. Given the stakes involved, investigation into the effect of CIs on such freedom is warranted.

Robert Kapp and Jeffrey Wasserstrom are right on the need for requirements on CI operations. They should be clear and uniform across the nation. The associations representing the university presidents and university professors, with relevant stakeholder input from other academic, policy and advocacy communities, should collaborate to create CI standards.

But since universities are self-interested entities who have made themselves financially dependent on CIs, it is appropriate to apply the oversight lever of Congress. Relevant committees should investigate whether the terms of CIs' agreements with universities result in reduced academic discourse and freedom of speech on topics such as Tibet, and whether such agreements or practices violate any laws in relation to publicly-funded universities.

But the problem with Confucius Institutes cannot be remedied by transparency and good governance. No democratic country can ignore their insidiousness, active or potential. CIs should respect the universal value of freedom of expression. If universities instead degrade these values to suit the CI, then they should be forced to find another way to teach Chinese language and culture.

The arguments against the Confucius Institutes are eloquent and impassioned. But let’s try a thought experiment in a different direction.

Let’s cast our minds back some 60 years to the United States in the mid-50s: Senator McCarthy was rampant and Professor Napthali Lewis had his Fulbright grant yanked because his wife—yes, his wife, not even he himself—refused to say if she were a Communist. Senator Fulbright himself said Communists should not be grant holders!

Today, most of us view Fulbright grants as “soft power” of the softest and most benign kind. Freedom from pressure is supposedly assured by an independent presidentially-appointed commission (though one might wonder how truly free from political pressure any commission appointed by a president, whether Chinese or American, can be). Sixty years ago, that freedom from pressure was not in any way assured, and, in fact, in some cases the pressure was overt and bowed to.

Should the Fulbrights have been killed off or shunned in 1954 because of that? Should universities and faculties have refused to participate?

Or should they have worked steadily to change society and the Fulbrights until they became what they are today—which is, one hopes, still just a way-station to further improvement in both.

America’s road from 1954 to 2014 has been long and sometimes fraught. China’s changes too in those 60 years have been breathtaking, of course, and yet Chinese society is still not yet where some of us might want or expect it to be.

By all means, universities must be completely transparent and vocal about the Institutes’ funding agreements and any pressures, subtle or overt. Universities must encourage vigorous debate and teach-ins about Tiananmen and Tibet and Falun Gong even if these aren’t held at the Institutes themselves. The debates will resonate; the transparency will have an effect. It just might not be tomorrow.

I wasn’t alive to experience the America of 1954; I won’t be alive to see the China of 2074. But I want to have some small influence on that journey, and I believe active, moral, transparent engagement is much preferable to punitive shunning.

We may find China’s early acts of soft power to be clumsy or even abhorrent, but we should remember that these are early steps, and with engagement will come change and understanding on all sides.

In the interests of my own transparency I should say that I advise CCTV News Content, the news agency arm of China’s state broadcaster. While some might see this as compromising my objectivity, I see it as practicing what I preach: my advice, whether taken or not, is always consonant with my personal values around freedom of expression and freedom of the press. And, in time, I hope it will have an effect.

The simplest solution: take the Confucius Institutes out of the universities, or take the government out of the Confucius Institutes.

These are nothing like the Goethe Institute or Alliance Francaise or the Cervantes Institute. Those are standalone organizations. They stand or fall on their own merit.

Confucius Institutes borrow the legitimacy of their partner universities. They cloak what they do—whether it's propaganda or not—in the camouflage of their host university. To a typical student, they appear like just another branch of American academia.

Make no mistake, these are organs of the government and therefore organs of the Communist Party, answerable to the dictates of the party. Why pretend they're anything else?

[Editor’s note: The following comment first appeared on a private listserv and is reprinted with the author’s permission] CIs come in many forms. For smaller colleges with no budget for teaching the Chinese language, a CI seems a good trade-off with the purpose of serving one's students and their future career opportunities. For some elite institutions, they feel they can make a deal in which the PRC will not dare to interfere because the CCP wants the prestige of the association. For my university, which turned down a CI, it was (a) inconceivable that our faculty be hired by any entity other than our own faculty acting on a merit basis and (b) it was undesirable for a university with serious programs in Taiwan studies and in Tibetan studies to give the CCP government, whose representatives have often intervened to get universities to be anti Dalai Lama and which claims that the nation of Taiwan is part of the PRC, leverage over academic programs. Besides, why would we want amateurs hired by the CCP to teach our students Chinese language and culture when our own faculty already does a great job?

Overall, the CI issue looks much less serious (and much less ideologically charged) from a European perspective. CIs appear rather marginal even in language training and even more so in public debate about China. Strikingly, the profile of their activities and events tends to vary strongly from place to place: from very stale or passive to surprisingly open-minded and colorful.

Through a former colleague who advised Hanban, I was told how chaotic their internal set-up is and how dissatisfied political leaders are with the CIs' lack of positive impact abroad. There even was talk that the whole Hanban and CI set-up will have to be overhauled since some decision-makers now perceive CIs as a misguided initiative of the previous Hu-Wen administration (2002-2012). I cannot verify all this inside talk. But a serious internal debate seems to have started around Hanban's functions and efforts.

As to Germany (which pursues rather broad-based economic, diplomatic, scientific and cultural relations with China) CIs cannot be seen as a success here since they create only an extremely limited public impact and are seen with quite some general distrust within most universities and also in society (educational and cultural circles, the media) at large. However, the overtones of great power rivalry with China (or cold war allusions) that appear to drive parts of the U.S. debate about CIs, are mostly missing in Europe and Germany.