China's Trojan Horses

U.S. Universities Shut Down Confucius Institutes

https://chinadigitaltimes.net

Amid rising concerns of curtailed academic freedoms, U.S. universities are increasingly closing down Confucius Institutes, which are Chinese government-funded centers offering Mandarin-language and "cultural" courses that at one point numbered over 100 in North America alone.
Samuel Brazys and Alexander Dukalskis, authors of a new AidData working paper on the topic, write in the Washington Post that the institutes have had limited success in improving China’s image abroad as part of a broader soft power campaign.
A year ago, a group of UMass Boston students, alumni, and professors asked to meet with the chancellor to discuss concerns that the campus’ Confucius Institute was promoting censorship and curtailing academic freedom.
Today, interim chancellor Katherine Newman cited nationwide concerns when announcing the university would be ending its 12 year relationship with the Institute. 
Instead, the university will pursue a partnership with Renmin University.
This closely follows closures at North Carolina State University and the University of Michigan.
At Commonwealth Magazine, Colman M. Herman reports:
The Chinese government says it promotes the Confucius Institutes throughout the US as tools for "cultural" exchange. 
The institute at UMass offered non-credit classes in Chinese language and culture, programs for UMass students to study in China, professional development programs for Chinese language teachers, and Chinese proficiency testing. 
UMass Boston paid the director’s $100,000 salary and provided office space, while China provided $250,000 and paid the salaries of four or five teachers.
[…] Others have expressed concern that the Confucius institutes are used by the Chinese government as outposts for espionage. 
The FBI has said that it monitors the activities of the institutes.
US Rep. Seth Moulton has also raised concerns publicly about the institutes and in a private discussion with Newman. 
On his Facebook page, Moulton said the intent of the Confucius Institutes is to “distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.”
Twelve other academic institutions, including the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Rhode Island, and Texas A&M, have severed ties with Confucius Institutes. 
Tufts University in Medford has said it will soon decide on whether to renew the school’s agreement with its Confucius Institute. [Source]
Cornell suspended exchange and research programs with Renmin University after it blacklisted and monitored over a dozen Renmin student labor activists.
The University of South Florida closed its 10-year old Confucius Institute on New Year’s Eve, citing declining enrollment in Chinese studies rather than national security concerns.
At The Tampa Bay Times, Howard Altman and Megan Reeves report:
USF said only 65 students total were enrolled in its four Chinese courses this fall, compared to 191 in spring 2014.
[…] However, university officials did concede that the national security concerns of U.S. government officials played a role in the decision — specifically when it comes to federal funding. 
In August, President Donald Trump signed the $717 billion 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. 
Inside is a provision that limits federal funding to colleges and universities with Chinese ties, and the provost said USF was unwilling to pass on those funds.
[…] USF World vice president Roger Brindley, whose division manages the university’s global partnerships, led the inquiry. 
It was started soon after U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio wrote letters to USF and four other Florida schools with Confucius Institutes in February, urging leaders to end their relationships with the Chinese government.
[…] The institutes are “cogs in a larger wheel” of effort by China to increase its global influence through the acquisition of science and technology, Giordano said. 
Having such a physical presence on campuses provides the Chinese government with the potential to gather data and intelligence “that can be leveraged for other agendas, whether economic and market or … national security.”
[…] “But there is no direct history of that,” Giordano said, adding that calls to close the institutes is more of a preventative measure than a response to any specific threat. [Source]
At Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden details the changing reasons as to why American universities are increasingly closing down the institutes:
[University of Chicago professor] Marshall Sahlins said he thinks the main reason for the closures is “pressure from the American right, including the National Association of Scholars [which issued a critical report of CIs in 2017], as well as lawmakers, and from security agencies of the U.S., notably the FBI: a coalition of political forces responding distantly to the developing Cold War with China — raising even older terrors such as Communism and the Yellow Peril — and proximately to drumbeat rumors that CIs are centers of espionage. 
Those that give other, face-saving reasons are probably protecting their academic cum financial relations to China, such their intake of tuition-paying mainland students.”
“Apparently the tide is beginning to turn, though for the wrong reasons,” Sahlins said. 
“As I said in my Inside Higher Ed op-ed last year, we are now in a pick-your-poison, lose-lose situation: either keep the CIs or allow the U.S. government to interfere in the curriculum — mimicking the Chinese [Communist] Party-State.”
[…] Other institutions that have announced closures of Confucius Institutes within the last 12 months include the Universities of Iowa, Michigan at Ann Arbor and Minnesota at Twin Cities and North Carolina State University. 
In addition to these institutions, Tufts University has charged a committee with reviewing its CI, and a decision on whether to renew the CI agreement when it expires in June has not been made yet pending receipt of the committee’s recommendations.
The recently announced closures follow on closures of the CIs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2017; Pennsylvania State University, in 2014; and the University of Chicago, where more than 100 faculty members had signed a petition calling for the closure in 2014. 
North of the border, in Ontario, McMaster University closed its CI in 2013 after a visiting instructor from China claimed the university was “giving legitimization to discrimination” because her contract with Hanban — the Chinese government entity that sponsors the institutes — prohibited her participation in the religious organization Falun Gong. [Source]
Concerns over China’s curtailing of academic freedoms have also been prevalent within China. 
In December, British academic publisher Taylor and Francis acquiesced to Chinese government requests and dropped over 80 journals from its China offerings due to “inappropriate” content. 
This followed the August 2017 saga of Cambridge University Press reversing its decision to hide from Chinese users 315 journal articles and 1,000 e-books covering the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, policies toward Tibetans and Uyghurs, Taiwan, and the Cultural Revolution.
This also coincided with the Association of Asian Studies receiving—and refusing to honor—similar censorship requests for articles also largely focused on Tibet and the Cultural Revolution.
Meanwhile in Africa, whose Confucius Institutes have been questioned for their ability to adequately train China-bound African scholars, Kenya will start teaching Mandarin to elementary school students in 2020, with the primary goal of increasing job competitiveness and deepening trade ties with China.
Additionally, the Chinese government is providing Uganda with textbooks and tutors for its new compulsory Mandarin courses, which are currently mandatory for the first two years of secondary school at 35 schools.
This follows South Africa’s decision to offer Mandarin in early 2016—despite strong resistance from teachers’ unions.

Chinese Propaganda

Beijing Is Pushing Hard To Influence U.S. Views Of China
By ROB SCHMITZ

Beijing is mounting an aggressive influence campaign targeting multiple levels of American society, according to a report published Thursday that is written by some of the top China experts in the U.S.
The working group that compiled the report includes scholars who for decades have agreed that as long as the U.S. continued to engage the People's Republic of China, the paths of both countries would eventually converge and that when they did, China's political system would become more transparent and its society more open.
However, as China's economy climbed to unprecedented heights, Xi Jinping has consolidated power, and in the eyes of the report's authors, the idea of convergence has been put to rest.

A different path
As Xi took office in 2013, China "began to take a very different path forward," says Orville Schell, a China scholar who co-chairs the working group that produced the 200-page report, "Chinese Influence and American Interests."
Schell says that prior to Xi, China's leaders viewed their country as in a state of transition, but since Xi's ascendancy, China is seen internally more as a country that has arrived in its own right.
"Then the whole idea of engagement took on a very different character," he says.
The report is sponsored by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, which Schell directs.
The publication comes amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China and just days before President Trump's planned meeting with Xi during the Group of 20 events in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week.
The report's authors assert that China's Communist Party has launched a campaign aimed at influencing the U.S. as part of a broader expansion of aggressive policies spearheaded by Xi.
"These policies not only seek to redefine China's place in the world as a global player," the report asserts, but also to advertise a "China Option" to the rest of the world as "a more efficient developmental model" in much the same way that the Soviet Union sought to present itself as a viable alternative to the West's liberal democracies during the Cold War.
Schell says that China's doing away with presidential term limits earlier this year, effectively clearing the way for Xi to rule indefinitely, became a metaphor for the leader's expansion of control and power both inside and outside China, firmly placing his country on a separate competing path with the U.S.

The scope of influence
The report examines eight sectors of American society that China's government is attempting to influence — including the U.S. Congress, local governments, universities and corporations. 

While nearly all examples cited have been widely covered by the media and academia, the report aims to add historical context to weave them together and to make concrete suggestions to the U.S. government and institutions on how to handle the growing threat.
One section of the report examines the large amounts of money China's government and Chinese individuals who are loyal to the Communist Party are investing into U.S. universities.
"[Very] often, that money will come not with any explicit prohibitions, but with implicit ones," says Schell.
"If you want to get more money, don't say this, don't say that. In other words," he says. 

As a result, China aims for "modulating and controlling what people say about it and how they view it."
China's government has, with the help of dozens of U.S. universities, established 110 Confucius Institutes on campuses throughout the United States. 

The institutes are forced to use Communist Party-approved materials "that promote PRC Chinese viewpoints, terminology and simplified characters; the avoidance of discussion on controversial topics such as Tibet, Tiananmen, East Turkestan, the Falun Gong, and human rights in American classrooms and programs," the report says.
Several U.S. universities, such as the University of Chicago and the Texas A&M system, have had second thoughts about the Confucius Institute and have closed their branches. 

The report suggests that U.S. institutions rewrite their contracts with their Chinese government partner by eliminating a clause that stipulates Confucius Institutes must operate according to China's laws.

China and Hollywood
Another section examines how Hollywood has come under the influence of Chinese investment and, as a result, now routinely makes films that portray China's government in a favorable light. 

Whereas in 1997, films such as Red Corner, Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun addressed topics the Chinese government deemed sensitive, now Hollywood studios are teaming up with Chinese partners to make films such as The Martian, a blockbuster hit backed by Chinese money in which the Chinese government saves the American protagonists.
"The rush of Chinese investment into the American film industry," the report concludes, "has raised legitimate concerns bout the industry's outright loss of independence."
Schell says after a year and a half of research, he and his team came to the conclusion "that the relationship between the U.S. and China when it comes to influence is not reciprocal," he says. 

"The open society of the United States gets used for Chinese purposes in myriad ways that are not available to Americans in China."
For example, American universities have not been granted the same access to China as Beijing has received and Chinese media is able to operate freely inside the U.S., while American journalists are severely restricted inside of China. 

The report's authors suggest that the visas of visiting Chinese scholars and journalists be redirected unless American scholars and journalists are able to operate with more freedom inside of China.
The report's solutions urge the U.S. government and society to be more transparent about their relationships with Chinese institutions, and when Beijing limits the rights of American institutions inside of China, the U.S. should consider doing the same to Chinese institutions on American soil.
It also urges Americans to act with integrity when Chinese state-sponsored actors try to coerce them or manipulate America's core principles. 

"Openness and freedom are fundamental elements of American democracy and intrinsic strengths of the United States and its way of life," the report concludes. 

"These values must be protected against corrosive actions by China and other countries."