American Colleges Hosted an Important Part of China’s Propaganda Set-Up. Now They’re Bailing Out.

Congress has demanded more scrutiny of Confucius Institutes.
By DAN SPINELLI

The patron saint of China's propaganda machine

When the University of Minnesota established a Confucius Institute, or center for Chinese language learning, in September 2008, it quickly turned into one of China’s overseas success stories. 

With its efforts to promote the study of Chinese among students “from preschool to 12th grade,” the Minnesota center won plaudits from Hanban, a Chinese government organization that oversees the institutes and China’s other international language partnerships. 

Three years after its opening, the Minnesota outpost was named a Confucius Institute of the Year and between 2014 and 2018, China contributed more than $1.2 million toward the Minnesota center’s operation, according to a report in the Minnesota Daily student newspaper.
In June, the university will cut ties with Hanban, and Minnesota’s Confucius Institute will close. University officials cited a desire to refocus “our China-related activities through a strengthened and enhanced China Center,” spokesperson Katrinna Dodge said in an email to Mother Jones. 

In doing this, Minnesota joins the ranks of roughly a dozen other American colleges that have abandoned their partnerships with Hanban amid increasing criticism of Beijing’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to free speech. 

“Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China,” the American Association of University Professors concluded in a 2014 report, which said the centers “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”
Beijing first imported Confucius Institutes to American universities in 2004, offering generous subsidies and even staff, but the centers have attracted controversy from the start. 

As retired Communist Party bigwig Li Changchun once said, these institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

Marshall Sahlins, a University of Chicago anthropologist, called them “academic malware” with propaganda objectives “as old as the imperial era.” 

Many scholars and lawmakers wanted nothing to do with the institutes, which use an authoritarian government’s money to bankroll hundreds of classes and programs at colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. 

Now, as tensions between the US and China have increased, the White House, lawmakers from both parties, and the intelligence community have singled out Confucius Institutes as a nefarious symbol of China’s creeping influence.
In a January Senate hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China posed a threat “more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive, and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of.” 

He acknowledged last year that federal agents had targeted some Confucius Institutes with “appropriate investigative steps” over concerns of improper Chinese influence. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last month that would require Confucius Institutes to register with the Justice Department as foreign agents, which quickly gained bipartisan support, and the most recent defense appropriations bill restricts schools with Confucius Institutes from receiving Pentagon language grants. “
“Foreign governments should not be funding student organizations on the campuses of democratic societies,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who examined Chinese influence in American higher education for a November report. 

“And certainly not the foreign government of authoritarian countries.”
In addition to citing concerns about transparency and censorship, lawmakers have also identified a glaring discrepancy between the freedoms afforded to Confucius Institutes in the United States and China’s crackdown on a similar slate of American-run centers abroad. 

In February, a bipartisan report from the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations identified “over 80 instances in the past four years” in which China interfered with State Department efforts to set up and access “American Cultural Centers” at Chinese universities. 

The US chose to stop funding the program last year amid continuing obstacles put in place by China. 

The report also noted that “nearly 70 percent” of US schools neglected to report Hanban contributions to the Department of Education, despite a requirement that postsecondary institutions report foreign gifts above a certain threshold.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the subcommittee’s top Democrat, released a statement with the report that compared China’s influence activities with Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. 

“Given what our country experienced during the 2016 election and what we’re preparing to grapple with in 2020,” he said, “it is critical that we be vigilant in combatting foreign efforts to influence American public opinion.”
Diamond does not consider Confucius Institutes a security issue on par with China’s increasing surveillance of its own citizens or its widespread theft of intellectual property, but he argues that unless contracts with Hanban are made public, and assurances put in place to ensure American law governs the centers, the agreements “should be terminated.” 

Gao Qing, a Chinese agent who directed George Mason University’s Confucius Institute and now runs a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that advocates for these centers nationwide, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Confucius Institutes are meant to offer “apolitical educational programs” and not “engage with any political activity and do not teach politics and policies.”
Confucius, the ancient philosopher whose teachings fell out of favor after the Communist Revolution, became the perfect symbol for China’s renaissance when fifteen years ago, government officials formed a Chinese language-learning center in Seoul. 

More than a century after China ceded control of the Korean peninsula to Japan—and with it, wider influence over the Asia-Pacific region—Beijing was mounting a comeback in its own backyard. 

Who better to adorn the name of its signature foreign influence project than Confucius, a philosopher with a name much easier to market overseas than Marx or Mao.
In the United States, interest in learning Chinese had been rising, but a shortage of qualified instructors left school administrators searching for help. 

By 2008, only 3 percent of elementary schools with language programs taught Chinese. 

After planting roots in South Korea, in 2004, Chinese officials unveiled their first US outpost at the University of Maryland. 

Between 1991 and 1994, Annapolis had slashed funding for state universities by nearly 20 percent, resulting in dramatic cuts at College Park, the University of Maryland’s flagship site. 

Administrators eliminated eight departments and 23 degree programs, according to the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news site, so an infusion of Chinese funding looked even more appealing. 

But some faculty members became uncomfortable with the arrangement. 

David Prager Branner, then an associate professor of Chinese, told Mother Jones the agreement to accept funding from the Chinese government constituted a “betrayal of the University’s primary obligation: cultivating young minds and teaching them to cultivate themselves.”
“I imagine the prestige of having the first such Institute in the United States, plus generous (as we were told) funding, more than made up in their minds for the failure to apply normal academic standards,” he wrote in an email. 

He noted that the influx of new instructors with their Hanban-approved textbook “were not even vetted by the University’s own Chinese language faculty.” 

In an email to Mother Jones, a Maryland spokeswoman sent a statement from Donna Wiseman, the university’s Confucius Institute director: “As part of our partnership with Hanban, we are responsible for making decisions about the programs we offer to the community and the extracurricular activities we coordinate on campus.”“
The partnership is a tricky one, as administrators at the College of William and Mary discovered when the Dalai Lama received an invitation to speak on campus seven years ago. 

As the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, whose land has been under China’s control for centuries, the Dalai Lama is considered a “wolf in monk’s robes” by the Chinese government. 

His appearance at any American university would upset Chinese officials, but especially so at William and Mary, which months earlier had established its own Confucius Institute. 

Ahead of the visit, a university administrator flew to Beijing and briefed Hanban leaders as part of what two knowledgeable sources described as a tense, difficult conversation that included pushback from Chinese officials. 

Nonetheless, the visit went on as planned and the university’s Confucius Institute remains in operation with continuing support from Hanban.
The dust-up was awkward, but ultimately inconsequential for the university. 

Occasional controversies over transparency and improper influence, experts say, largely depend on administrators’ care in reviewing contracts and removing any questionable language from their agreements. 

Qing says Confucius Institutes “affirm the primacy of US law,” but Hanban’s website includes a set of bylaws that several administrators around the country found concerning. 

One line implies that Chinese law, with its noticeably weaker free speech protections, would ultimately govern Confucius Institutes on US soil. 

A current Confucius Institute director at an American college, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the partnership, said this part of the agreement had “to be watered down” for his school to participate. 

The Chinese officials did not object, he said, and seemed almost to expect the pushback. 

“Some of these nuances take time to learn,” he told Mother Jones. 

“Somebody may, without realizing it, sign the template thinking that’s the way to go forward.”

When George Washington University was first considering whether to form a Confucius Institute, faculty members were put off by a provision in Hanban’s generic agreement that its partners respect the “One China” principle which maintains that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China. 

The US formally adopted this policy in 1979, but the provision still concerned administrators who interpreted it as a backdoor way to stifle academic discourse about Taiwan. 

The university ultimately agreed to a contract, years later, when the provision was no longer required.
A common criticism lodged against Hanban is the secrecy of its contracts. 

“At most Institutes, the terms of agreement are hidden,” a report from the conservative National Association of Scholars found in 2017. 

The key to keeping institutes free of undue influence, several administrators and experts reiterated, involves vetting the contracts more rigorously. 

No matter how innocuous a single institute may be, now that President Trump’s foreign policy has appeared to settle on an adversarial approach to Beijing, it is likely that they will become increasingly isolated. 

Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the most persistent critics of China in Congress, expressed a growing Washington consensus when he asked during a Senate hearing this year whether China had become “the most significant counterintelligence threat this nation has faced, perhaps in its history but certainly in the last quarter century.”

Crimes In The Name Of Confucius

How China Infiltrated U.S. Classrooms

Chinese subversion machine has continued its forward march on college campuses across the United States

By ETHAN EPSTEIN

Last year, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement to great fanfare: The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history. 

The Confucius Institute would “help students be better equipped to succeed in an increasingly globalized world,” says Nancy Gutierrez, UNC Charlotte’s dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and “broaden the University’s outreach and support for language instruction and cultural opportunities in the Charlotte community,” according to a press release.
But the Confucius Institutes’ goals are a little less wholesome and edifying than they sound—and this is by the Chinese government’s own account. 

A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: “The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad,” Li Changchun said. 

“It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”
Li, it now seems, was right to exult. 

More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. 

Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually, and they have only been bolstered by growing interest in China among American college students.
Yet along with their growth have come consistent questions about whether the institutes belong on campuses that profess to promote free inquiry. 

Confucius Institutes teach a very particular, Beijing-approved version of Chinese culture and history: one that ignores concerns over human rights, and teaches that Taiwan and Tibet indisputably belong to Mainland China. 

Take it from the aforementioned Li, who also said in 2009 that Confucius Institutes are an “important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

The centers have led to a climate of self-censorship on campuses that play host to them.
Despite years of these critiques—including a recent outcry at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the shuttering of Confucius Institutes at two of the nation’s top research universities—they’re still growing in number in the United States, albeit at a slower clip than a few years ago. Several opened on American campuses last year. 

And vanishingly few schools have rethought the institutes and closed them, suggesting that once they’re implanted, they’re entrenched. 

At several campuses, they’re actually expanding their footprints with bigger facilities and new courses. 

I contacted more than a half-dozen Confucius Institutes, and several officials said in interviews that they’re not looking back. (Others declined to comment or simply ignored me, further suggesting a commitment to keeping the Institutes going. The Chinese Embassy in Washington also did not respond to a request to comment by publication time.)
That so many universities have welcomed the Confucius Institute with open arms points to another disturbing trend in American higher education: an alarming willingness to accept money at the expense of principles that universities are ostensibly devoted to upholding. 

At a time when universities are as willing as ever to shield their charges from controversial viewpoints, some nonetheless welcome foreign, communist propaganda—if the price is right.

***

“Coordinate the efforts of overseas and domestic propaganda, [and] further create a favorable international environment for us,” Chinese minister of propaganda Liu Yunshan exhorted his compatriots in a 2010 People’s Daily article. 

“With regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out international propaganda battles against issuers such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights and Falun Gong... We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”
Liu’s orders have been heeded. 

The first Confucius Institute opened in South Korea in 2004. 

They quickly spread to Japan, Australia, Canada and Europe. 

The United States, China’s biggest geopolitical rival, has been a particular focus: Fully 40 percent of Confucius Institutes are stateside. 

In addition to the Institutes at universities, Hanban also operates hundreds of so-called Confucius Classrooms in primary and secondary schools. 

The public school system of Chicago, for example, has outsourced its Chinese program to Confucius Classrooms.
Beijing treats this project seriously, as evidenced by who runs the show. 

Hanban (shorthand for the ruling body of the Office of Chinese Language Council International, a branch of the Ministry of Education) is classified technically as a nonprofit agency, but it is dominated by Communist Chinese officialdom. 

Representatives from 12 top state agencies—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Press and Publishing Administration, a propaganda bureau—sit on its executive council. 

Hanban’s director general is on the Chinese state council, the 35-member board that basically runs the country.
Hanban has been shrewd in compelling universities to host Confucius Institutes. 

Marshall Sahlins, a retired University of Chicago anthropologist and author of the 2014 pamphlet Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware, reports that each Confucius Institute comes with “$100,000 in start up costs provided by Hanban, with annual payments of the like over a five-year period, and instruction subsidized as well, including the air fares and salaries of the teachers provided from China... Hanban also agrees to send textbooks, videos, and other classroom materials for these courses—materials that are often welcome in institutions without an important China studies program of their own.” 

And each Confucius Institute typically partners with a Chinese university.
They’re kind of like restaurant franchises: Open the kit, and you’re in business. 

American universities can continue to collect full tuition from their students while essentially outsourcing instruction in Chinese. 

In other words, it’s free money for the schools. 

At many (though not all) Confucius-hosting campuses, students can receive course credit for classes completed at the institute.
But the institutes go to some length to obscure their political purpose. 

There’s the name, for example: Most Americans associate Confucius with wisdom, or cutesy aphorisms. 

It’s likely the centers would be less successful were they called Mao Institutes. 

The Institutes also offer a plethora of “fun” classes—not for academic credit, and often open to members of the general public—in subjects like dumpling making and tai chi.
The Chinese teachers are thoroughly vetted by Hanban.

They “must have a strong sense of mission, glory, and responsibility and be conscientious and meticulous in [their] work,” Hanban says. 

They’re also explicitly instructed to toe Beijing’s line on controversial political questions. 

There can be no discussion whatsoever of human rights in China, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. 

Should a student raise an uncomfortable question about, say, the political status of Tibet, Hanban’s instructors are ordered to refocus the discussion on, say, Tibet’s natural beauty or indigenous cultural practices (which, ironically, Beijing has spent decades stamping out).
Matteo Mecacci of the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet requested a sampling of the Institute’s course materials from a D.C. area university several years ago. 

“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,” he wrote in Foreign Policy,“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.’”
One student I spoke to—a junior at the University of Kentucky, which is home to a Confucius Institute—recalls attending a Confucius event at which another student, who was considering studying abroad in China, asked about the air pollution there. 

The response from the Confucius faculty was that the reports of pollution were “misinformation promoted in the U.S. media.” 

The student says Confucius faculty also “glorified and glossed over” negative aspects of Chinese culture and politics. 

Another student, a Kentucky senior who has taken classes at the same Confucius Institute, agrees that the institute “promotes an overly rosy picture of Chinese culture,” though, the student adds, “I don’t think it’s a problem for students to take advantage of [Confucius Institute] resources as long as they view the institute with a critical eye and round out their perspective on China with other experiences and points of view.”
Meanwhile, if Hanban’s instructors are not adequately vetted back home, there can be trouble. Consider the case of Sonia Zhao. 

Zhao, a Chinese national, was dispatched by Hanban to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2011 to teach Chinese language. 

She’s also a practitioner of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-tinged spiritual movement that Beijing despises as a threat to its authority. 

Zhao quit a year into her tenure, arguing that McMaster University was “giving legitimization to discrimination.” 

That’s because, in order to secure her employment with Hanban, Zhao said she was forced to disguise her fealty to Falun Gong. 

Her employment contract with Hanban explicitly stated that she was “not allowed to join illegal organizations such as Falun Gong,” she said. 

This kind of open religious discrimination is illegal in Canada, as it would be in the United States. 

McMaster University, in light of this disclosure, subsequently shuttered its Confucius Institute in 2013, citing the institute’s “hiring practices.”
Self-censorship has become an issue as well. 

In 2008, a court in Israel found that Tel Aviv University, home to a Confucius Institute, had illegitimately closed an art exhibition on Falun Gong because of Chinese government pressure. 

A year later, North Carolina State University, host to a Confucius Institute, scuttled a planned appearance by the Dalai Lama for fear of Chinese backlash: The director of the Institute warned NC State officials that such a visit could hurt “strong relationships we were developing with China.” A few years later, similar events transpired at the University of Sydney in Australia, which drew heat from members of the Parliament of Australia.

***

In recent weeks, I contracted administrators at several universities with Confucius Institutes, primarily ones that had opened recently, and none expressed regret or indeed much concern. 

The George Washington University, the private university nestled in the heart of the nation’s capital, has hosted a Confucius Institute for several years. 

The institute’s founding director, Peg Barratt, says her university’s “eyes were open” when GW opened its center in in 2013. 

“We were aware there was some controversy” surrounding Confucius Institutes when other universities opened theirs, she told me. 

“Some [other universities] had internal censorship,” she readily acknowledges. 

Nonetheless, she says the Institutes are innocuous, modeled, she argues, on European cultural institutes like the British Council, Goethe Institute and Alliance Française. 

Of course, not only are Great Britain, Germany and France not communist regimes, but those institutes are standalone enterprises, not on college campuses.
Western Kentucky University, where the Confucius Institute is expanding—it just moved into a new building—also defends its partnership. 

Terrill Martin, director of the Institute, told me, “I don’t believe the Confucius Institute program is controversial at all. I just believe that people don’t understand, don’t ask the right questions and make a lot of unfounded assumptions about the program, based on the failures of a few.”
Nancy Gutierrez, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says the institute there will fill an unmet need. 

“We made the decision to host a [Confucius Institute] because we believe that this partnership will allow us to expand understanding of Chinese culture very broadly—for community members and for our students,” she says. 

In other words, Hanban can provide resources that UNC presently can’t. 

Gutierrez also says, “A faculty advisory committee will provide the intellectual guidance … ensuring that we are guided by principles of academic freedom.” 

And she notes that Confucius Institute courses will not offer academic credit at UNC Charlotte—at least not yet. 

The same is true at Western Kentucky University.
Eric Einspruch, who chairs Portland State University’s Confucius Institute, also defends it: The Confucius Institute simply offers “noncredit Chinese courses, cultural programs of interest to the community, and faculty-initiated scholarly activity,” he says. 

But even the Institute’s innocuous-seeming language courses have come in for criticism. 

They only teach simplified characters, which are used on Mainland China but not in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore, estranging language learners from Chinese texts produced anywhere but the Mainland.
One institution that bucked the trend was the University of Chicago. 

The school opened a Confucius Institute in 2010, which quickly proved controversial. 

To Bruce Lincoln, a now-retired religion professor at Chicago who then served on the faculty senate, the Confucius Institute represented the “subcontracting [of the] educational mission” in the United States—a “hostile takeover of U.S. higher education by a foreign power,” as he told me. (Prior to his battle against the Confucius Institute, Lincoln was involved in another fight at the University of Chicago, against the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute, which would have been largely funded by conservative donors. That too represented a subcontracting of the education mission, he believes—in this case, the “corporatization of universities.”)
When Hanban’s contract came up for renewal in 2014, Lincoln, along with Marshall Sahlins, led a petition drive, which garnered the support of more than 100 other faculty members, demanding that the contract be canceled. (There was very little student involvement, Lincoln says.) 

That year, the University of Chicago booted the Institute because of academic freedom concerns. Chicago’s move won praise from outlets as ideologically diverse as Forbes and the New York Review of Books. 

Shockingly few universities have followed Chicago’s lead, though, Penn State being one notable exception; it also closed its institute in 2014, as well.
Many of those universities who maintain Confucius Institutes appear to go to great lengths to shield them from criticism. 

Last year, Rachelle Peterson, a scholar at the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, released a thorough report about Confucius Institutes for the National Association of Scholars, a right-leaning academic organization. 

At the heart of Peterson’s report were 12 case studies of Confucius Institutes at New York and New Jersey universities. 

Over the course of her reporting, Peterson says, “There were a lot of unanswered emails, a lot of unanswered phone calls” (an experience shared by this journalist). 

When she did manage to set up interviews with Confucius Institute staff, they were often canceled at the last minute, like those at the University of Albany and the University of Binghamton. 

Another time, when she managed to secure an interview with a Confucius Institute staff member, he insisted that the meeting “happen in a basement … not in his office.” 

He seemed afraid of being caught, she says.
The most disturbing event transpired at Alfred University in upstate New York. 

There, Peterson, says, she had “called the Confucius Institute, spoken to a teacher … and received permission to sit in on [a class].” 

As she observed the Chinese-language class, she recalls, the provost of the university charged into the classroom, interrupting the lesson. 

He ordered her removal from the classroom and told her she had to leave the campus immediately. Two security guards swiftly escorted her off campus. (Alfred University did not respond to a request for comment asking to confirm or deny Peterson’s account.)
Today, there are signs of a nascent, if isolated, backlash. 

Just last month, a group of students and alumni from UMass Boston, home of the Bay State’s only Confucius Institute, wrote a letter to the school’s chancellor expressing deep concern that the university is “unwittingly assisting the Chinese government to promote censorship abroad, while undermining human rights and academic freedom.” 

The UMass group requested a meeting with the chancellor to discuss their concerns, but according to Lhadon Tethong, a pro-Tibet activist who helped spearhead the letter, that request has yet to be answered. (A spokesperson for the university told the Boston Globe that the institute has succeeded in promoting “the mutual understanding of language and culture.”)
The National Association of Scholars suggests universities shutter their Confucius Institutes. 
But such counsel is hardly limited the ideological right. 

The American Association of University Professors, America’s leading professorial guild, also recommended in 2014 that “that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated,” so that the universities have unilateral control over the curriculum and faculty, Confucius faculty have the same rights of free inquiry as their fellow teachers, and contracts between Hanban and the partner universities are made public.
Nonetheless, none of the schools I contacted said that they had any plans to shutter or reform their institutes.

***

Instead, Confucius Institutes continue their forward march.
In 2015, they opened at Tufts University, New Jersey City University, Southern Utah University and Northern State University in South Dakota.
In 2016, Savannah State University added one.
And last year, in addition to UNC-Charlotte, Transylvania University in Kentucky is launching a new branch.
Gutierrez of UNC concedes that, when her school announced it would open one earlier last year, many faculty members were concerned and “raised serious questions.”
But the structure the school developed—so as not allowing courses to be taken for credit—allayed such fears, she says.
Confucius Classrooms, for younger students, are also ascendant these days: In October, local media reported that three new ones would be planted in Texas public schools, and UMass Boston is helping develop them at schools in Massachusetts, including the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where a Confucius Classroom just launched.
At scores of universities, meanwhile, the institutes are expanding both physically and programmatically.
New courses and scholarships at existing ones are announced all the time.
And they’re growing rapidly overseas, particularly these days in Africa, where China has been aggressively expanding its footprint in recent years.
Lincoln, of the University of Chicago, says the institutes have proved successful, in a sense, because Hanban offers a “cheap way to teach classes that [otherwise] wouldn’t have been taught.”
Public universities have suffered punishing funding cuts over the past decade: “A decade since the Great Recession hit, state spending on public colleges and universities remains well below historic levels, despite recent increases,” reads a recent report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
According to the Center, adjusting for inflation, public spending on community colleges and universities was about $9 billion below 2008 levels in 2017.
It’s unsurprising, then, that many institutes have sprung up at public universities, or that a huge amount of growth occurred from 2010 to 2012, when budgets were particularly hard hit.
But those conditions could return: President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget would also severely slash funding for universities, likely pushing more schools to outsource programs.
The Economist, meanwhile, estimates that China is spending $10 billion a year to promote its image abroad through efforts like cultural festivals, foreign media (think of those China Daily inserts that are slipped into the Washington Post) and educational exchanges.
Confucius Institutes are a vital part of this mission.
It’s not hard to envision how they might work, for example, by one day weakening Americans’ loyalty to Taiwan.
It seems that Beijing probed, and found a weakness: money. 
It may be intellectually indefensible for universities to host Confucius Institutes, but at a time of reduced funding, it makes eminent sense.
How ironic that the ostensibly communist Chinese seem to understand financial imperatives better than we Yankees do.

U.S. Chinese Fifth Column

Chinese Propaganda in American Higher Education
By Rachelle Peterson

China offers an increasingly lucrative market for American universities. 

It is the leading source of foreign students—who pay full tuition, unlike American students at in-state institutions—and provides more than a third of all international students in the United States. 

China is also home to fourteen American universities’ overseas campuses, many of which the Chinese government helped construct. (Six of them recently reported making money or projecting net revenue in the near future.)
These deepening relationships aren’t necessarily bad, though China has a history of pressing its influence to entrench its international power. 

Another form of Chinese investment in American higher education is more suspect: Confucius Institutes.
Confucius Institutes are campus centers dedicated to teaching and promoting Chinese language and culture. 

Generously funded by China, they offer universities pre-paid teachers and textbooks, along with operating funds. 

Currently, 103 American universities have accepted China’s offer—but at a great price.
I’ve just completed a major study of Confucius Institutes (CIs) in the United States, focusing on case studies of the twelve CIs located in New York and New Jersey. 

I found that Confucius Institutes threaten the autonomy of American universities, jeopardize the intellectual freedom of professors and students and give the Chinese government unparalleled access to American college students. 

Colleges and universities should close their Confucius Institutes, and federal and local governments should exercise oversight.
Confucius Institutes outsource the college classroom to a foreign government. 

They are directly linked to the Chinese government, which exercises authority over hiring decisions, curriculum choices and syllabi. 

The Hanban, an agency within the Chinese Ministry of Education, authorizes the creation of Confucius Institutes and requires universities to seek its approval on all programs and courses. Though an American professor or administrator directs each local Confucius Institute, he or she is constrained to hire teachers from a slate of candidates put forward by the Hanban. 

The Hanban also chooses the textbooks. 

No other nation has such direct control over what American students learn about its history and culture.
Under such supervision by China, Confucius Institutes present a whitewashed version of Chinese political history and current events. 

As taught at CIs, the Chinese government never jails religious minorities, no Tibetans self-immolate to protest China’s insistence on claiming Tibet as a province, no Falun Gong followers have their organs harvested and Tiananmen Square is only a tourist attraction, not the site of the 1989 massacre of democracy demonstrators. 

Embarrassing episodes in the history of the Communist nation simply do not come up.
When I visited Confucius Institutes, I asked staff how they would handle questions about Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and other matters the Chinese regime deems sensitive. 

Most said they could not answer such questions from students—ostensibly because they were “off-topic” or outside the purview of Confucius Institutes. 

In one clarifying comment, the Chinese director of New Jersey City University’s Confucius Institute told me how she might handle an in-class discussion of Tiananmen Square: “I would show a photograph and point out the beautiful architecture.”
China has occasionally admitted its interest in using Confucius Institutes to develop its soft power abroad. 

In 2009, Li Changchun, then the head of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, called Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

A new documentary, In the Name of Confucius, by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Doris Liu, showcases footage of Chinese bureaucrats discussing what they hope to accomplish through Confucius Institutes. 

The director general of Confucius Institutes Headquarters, Xu Lin, brags on Chinese television that her office has set up Confucius Institutes so that top-tier institutions “work for us.”
In what ways might American universities “work for” the Chinese government? 

Their positions of power and prestige in American culture lend China a veneer of respectability. Other nations send teachers abroad, too—France has the Alliance Française, Germany the Goethe-Institut, and Spain the Cervantes Institute. 

But these nations operate independent nonprofits in separate offices and market extracurricular courses. 

China alone locates its Institutes at college campuses, where they can feed off the colleges’ reputation and offer classes that count for college credit.
But the college classroom is a place for academic debate, not foreign propaganda. 

Colleges and universities should close their Confucius Institutes—whatever the financial perks China may offer. 

It is in principle inappropriate and in practice harmful to intellectual freedom. 

The Chinese government has no place in American higher education.

U.S. Chinese Fifth Column

American Universities Are Welcoming China’s Trojan Horse
By Rachelle Peterson

China is spending an enormous amount of money trying to build goodwill overseas by building schools. 

By itself, that’s not unusual. 

Many nations send teachers abroad as a form of cultural and linguistic diplomacy: the Alliance Française for French, the Goethe-Institut for German, the Instituto Cervantes for Spanish, and the British Council for English.
China’s Confucius Institutes sound similar enough to these Western institutions. 

But their activities are far more pernicious. 

Though the Confucius Institutes present themselves as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, it would be more accurate to think of them as a way for China to subvert American higher education. 

And, without greater vigilance by American universities, this is precisely what they will accomplish.
Confucius Institutes operate in a fundamentally different way than their Western counterparts. Whereas Germany, France, Spain, and Britain erect their own stand-alone institutes that offer extracurricular courses, China insists on planting its Confucius Institutes inside existing colleges and universities. 

China has poured plenty of money into this effort; although Confucius Institutes only started operating in 2004, China now has 513 of them worldwide, plus another 1,074 Confucius Classrooms located in primary and secondary schools. 

That’s far more than the Goethe-Institut’s 159 schools or even the Alliance Française’s 850 outfits. And this investment is heavily targeted at the United States, which is home to more Confucius Institutes and Classrooms than any other nation — 39 percent of the total. 

And Western universities, for their part, have eagerly seized on the opportunities offered by Confucius Institutes.
But those opportunities come with plenty of strings attached. 

I’ve just completed a two-year research report on 12 Confucius Institutes in New York and New Jersey. 

I found that Confucius Institutes operate as central nodes in the deepening relationship between China and Western universities — many of which are dependent on full-tuition-paying Chinese students and desperate for funding for humanities programs. 

But Confucius Institutes also serve as a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn, and pressuring American professors to censor themselves.
These problems haven’t gone unnoticed. 

So far two American universities — the University of Chicago and Penn State — have closed their Confucius Institutes. 

They’ve been joined by Stockholm University, France’s Lyon University, and McMaster University in Canada, among others. 

McMaster took this step after a Confucius Institute teacher filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal alleging the university was complicit in discriminatory hiring practices, which forbade practitioners of the religious movement Falun Gong.
It is time for more colleges and universities to follow suit. 

Confucius Institutes have no place on campus.
Confucius Institutes are directly tied to the Chinese government. 

The Hanban (a Chinese abbreviation for the “Office of Chinese Language Council International”), inside the Ministry of Education, oversees all Confucius Institutes worldwide. 

The Hanban’s governing council is made up of the heads of 12 Chinese government ministries — including the State Press and Publications Administration (which handles state-run media and propaganda) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

The Hanban “dispatches” teachers and textbooks from China and requires universities to get its approval on all course offerings and extracurricular programs.
Imagine colleges and universities requesting permission from the U.S. government before finalizing course syllabi. 

Few if any American universities would accept such an imposition, but more than 100 are perfectly willing to cede that piece of autonomy to Beijing.
The contractual language the Hanban pushes on universities poses a more substantive threat to academic autonomy. 

The Confucius Institute constitution requires all universities to avoid “tarnish[ing] the reputation of the Confucius Institutes” — an offense punishable by revocation of the contract, immediate loss of all Hanban funds, and potential unspecified “legal action.” 

I examined eight signed contracts between American universities and the Hanban, all eight of which duplicate this language almost verbatim.
The breadth of the definition of “tarnish” is unclear. 

Would a vote by the faculty senate raising concerns about their university’s Confucius Institute count as sufficient harm to the Hanban to justify intervention from China? 

And it seems implausible that China could claim legal jurisdiction over part of a campus within another nation. 

I asked college and university administrators about these contractual requirements and never got a clear answer. 

It is clear they aren’t sure exactly what the Hanban expects of them when it comes to guarding its reputation. 

But China’s funding for Confucius Institutes is generous, and universities err on the side of respecting Hanban’s preferences.
The siting of the institutes inside college campuses, where their courses can often be taken for university credit, poses its own threat to academic integrity. 

Universities with Confucius Institutes essentially outsource their courses to China. 

Western universities diminish their own prestige by allowing the Chinese government to freeload off it. 

No other nation enjoys such direct access to a foreign classroom. 

Branches of the Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut have no relationship to college and university credit-bearing courses and are thus made to earn their own reputations.
American colleges should also consider the values being promulgated through the Confucius Institutes’ teaching. 

The institutes have a history of presenting a whitewashed version of China. 

In its less guarded moments, the Chinese government has even admitted this intent. 

In 2009, Li Changchun, then the head of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party and a member of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, called the Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.” 

The Confucius Institutes themselves acknowledge their role in China’s “publicity” efforts — though fail to note that in Chinese, “publicity” and “propaganda” are the same word.
The Chinese government tries to avoid touchy subjects by forbidding Confucius Institutes from discussing politics, history, and economics. 

It instructs staff to focus on themes that promote amity towards China: “enhancing understanding of the Chinese language and culture,” “deepening friendly relationships with other nations,” and developing programs that “construct a harmonious world.” 

None of these is necessarily deleterious, but taken together they leave students with a remarkably incomplete view of China. 

Frank discussion of Tibetan immolations or the labor camp system in China, for instance, is not likely to “deepen friendly relationships” between China and other countries.
The Chinese government is prepared for the fact that touchy subjects will still come up, via questions from students in class. 

For instance, Confucius Institute teachers report training from the Hanban in how to handle questions about Taiwan and Tibet; they are supposed to change the subject or, failing that, represent both as undisputed territories of China. 

The Hanban’s official maps, like all mainland cartography, depict Taiwan as a province; at a meeting of the European Association for Chinese Studies, the Confucius Institutes’ international director, Xu Lin, had all the pages from Taiwanese institutions torn out of the conference program. 

The Chinese director at the New Jersey City University Confucius Institute told me that her stock answer to questions about Tiananmen Square was to “show a photograph and point out the beautiful architecture.”
University professors told me of the pressure they felt to avoid offending China. 

Administrators feared jeopardizing the Hanban’s funding stream. 

A State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany professor found that all faculty office doors had been stripped of banners referencing Taiwan the day of a site visit by Hanban officials. 

Another professor within the SUNY system, who requested anonymity, said he would jeopardize his job if he were to question openly his university’s Confucius Institute: “This is my career and livelihood on the line.” 

Many others reported fear of losing visas to visit and conduct research in China.
The Hanban also asks Confucius Institutes to “not contravene” both local and Chinese law — with no official guidance on how to handle discrepancies between the two. 

That leaves staff uncertain of where the line lies — and erring on the side of caution. 

Every Confucius Institute contract I examined required such an adherence to Chinese law, or adherence to the Confucius Institute constitution, which itself requires all Confucius Institutes to follow Chinese law.
This lack of clarity echoes China’s own laws on speech, which American scholar Perry Link has aptly described as an “anaconda in the chandelier.” 

Chinese censorship operates like a dangerous snake suspended overhead, quiet and still, its very presence nudging passersby to move beyond its reach. 

Chinese law doesn’t spell out exactly what citizens can and can’t say; the law is vague and the enforcement selective. 

People censor themselves in an effort to avoid the anaconda — and the zone of allowed speech is gray and ever-shifting. 

In recent years in China, it has been getting narrower. 

Universities must ask if that’s something they want to get a foothold in the United States.
Confucius Institutes export the fear of speaking freely around the world. 

They permit a foreign government intimate influence over college classrooms. 

It’s time to kick them off campus.

Chinese Fifth Column: Wolves In Cultural Robes

National Association of Scholars calls on universities to close their Confucius Institutes. 

By Elizabeth Redden 

More than 100 American colleges and universities house Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural teaching funded and staffed in part with instructors screened by a Chinese government-affiliated entity known as Hanban.
The Confucius Institutes may seem to many to be benign outposts offering cultural events programming and noncredit courses in introductory Chinese, calligraphy or Tai Chi, but for nearly as long as the Confucius Institutes have been around -- more than 10 years now -- they’ve been controversial.
Advocates for the institutes say they’ve brought welcome new resources for Chinese language study and study abroad at a time when financial support for the humanities has been shrinking, while critics question whether American universities sacrifice academic freedom and autonomy in hosting the Chinese government-backed institutes, which in some cases are involved in delivering for-credit classes.
Many Confucius Institutes are also involved in teaching or teacher training for local K-12 schools.
One U.S.-based Confucius Institute, at the University of Chicago, closed in 2014 after more than 100 faculty signed a petition that cited, among other things, concerns that Hanban's role in the hiring and training of teachers “subjects the university’s academic program to the political constraints on free speech and belief that are specific to the People’s Republic of China.”
Ontario's McMaster University closed its Confucius Institute a year earlier after a former instructor filed a complaint alleging that the university was “giving legitimization to discrimination” because her contract with Hanban prohibited her participation in the spiritual practice Falun Gong.
Over the years, Confucius Institutes have been dogged by allegations that they self-censor when it comes to sensitive subjects in China such as Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong.
In 2014, organizers of a Chinese studies conference in Europe accused Hanban, a sponsor of the conference, of outright censorship of conference materials related to Taiwan.
The latest take on this contentious topic, a 183-page report on Confucius Institutes from the National Association of Scholars, by the author’s account finds reasons for concern.
The report, which examines hiring policies, course offerings and textbooks, funding structures, academic freedom protections, and what the author describes as “formal and informal speech codes” at 12 Confucius Institutes in New Jersey and New York, concludes that “to a large extent, universities have made improper concessions that jeopardize academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Sometimes these concessions are official and in writing; more often they operate as implicit policies.”
The report from NAS recommends that universities close their Confucius Institutes. 
“Confucius Institutes permit an agency of a foreign government to have access to university courses, and on principle that is a university function,” Rachelle Peterson, the author of the report, said in an interview. “Institutions should have full control over who they hire, over what they teach, and Confucius Institutes basically act like class-in-a-box kits that come ready-made for universities to use.”
Short of closing the institutes -- NAS’s primary recommendation -- the report makes a series of recommendations for changes that faculty and administrators should push for.
Those recommendations include: increased transparency and public disclosure of contractual and funding agreements, and the renegotiation of contracts “to remove constraints against ‘tarnishing the reputation’ of the Hanban” and “to clarify that legal disputes should be settled only in the jurisdiction of the host institution (in our cases, American courts).”
Other recommendations in the report call on universities to “cease outsourcing for-credit courses to the Hanban,” to “formally ask the Hanban if its hiring process complies with American nondiscrimination policies,” and to “require that all Confucius Institutes offer at least one public lecture or class each year on topics that are important to Chinese history but are currently neglected, such as the Tiananmen Square protests or the Dalai Lama’s views on Tibet.”
NAS, which promotes liberal arts-style education and intellectual freedom, is perceived by the left as something of a contrarian scholarly organization with a politically conservative bent, though the organization maintains it has no partisan affiliation (its website quotes the organization’s president, Peter Wood, saying, “Both the left and the right produce their share of intellectual obtuseness. The NAS is not a partner with either”).
Much of the prior criticism of the institutes has come from pro-China scholars.
While NAS may be an organization that prides itself on “challenging campus orthodoxies,” on Confucius Institutes its recommendations are to a large extent in step with that of the American Association of University Professors. 
In 2014, the AAUP came out with a statement “recommending that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated so that

• (1) the university has unilateral control, consistent with principles articulated in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, over all academic matters, including recruitment of teachers, determination of curriculum and choice of texts; 
• (2) the university affords Confucius Institute teachers the same academic freedom rights, as defined in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that it affords all other faculty in the university; and 
• (3) the university-Hanban agreement is made available to all members of the university community.”

One theme of the NAS report is the lack of transparency on the part of the universities in the sample. 
Although NAS’s researcher obtained contracts through Freedom of Information Act requests for eight public universities in her sample -- as well as an unsigned draft contract shared by one private university -- Peterson found what she called “significant resistance” on the part of many university officials to answer questions about their Confucius Institutes. 
She reported that only two of the 12 Confucius Institute directors in her sample consented to interviews.
 

China's Fifth Column
The most secretive institution was Alfred University, a private institution located about 80 miles south of Rochester, N.Y. She writes that Alfred's provost personally ejected her partway through a Confucius Institute class she'd received advance permission from the instructor to observe.
Reached by phone, the instructor of the class, Lanfang “Haley” Gao, referred questions to the university.
Alfred's provost, Rick Stephens, said he asked Peterson to leave the class and escorted her to her car after receiving worried messages from students about a strange person in the class.
Peterson disputed this.
She said Gao gave her permission over the phone to observe her class and that she identified herself clearly.
"I asked Professor Gao two questions:
1) if classes were open to members of the public to visit and
2) if I could visit her class as a researcher from the National Association of Scholars doing some research on Confucius Institutes.
"She answered yes to both questions.
"I arrived at the class early, having located it with the help of another person for whom I did not get a name (this person spoke limited English, and told me as much).
"When Professor Gao arrived I introduced myself as Rachelle Peterson from the National Association of Scholars, and mentioned again that we had spoken by phone about the possibility of my visiting her class.
"She did not object to my presence at the beginning of class or ask me to leave, or in any other way indicate that I misunderstood our phone call regarding my proposed visit."

The NAS report includes detailed looks at the governance, leadership and funding agreements for the institutes, which are managed by the host American universities in conjunction with Chinese partner universities.
The financial terms vary somewhat, but various contracts obtained by Peterson -- and shared with Inside Higher Ed -- show that Hanban typically commits to provide around $150,000 in start-up funding for the institutes, followed by annual sustaining operating grants (generally, Peterson found, in the $100,000 range), plus 3,000 volumes of textbooks and teaching materials. 
Hanban also commits to pay for the salaries and airfares of the Chinese language teachers it sends. The American host university is expected to match Hanban's support, a requirement that Peterson reports is typically met through in-kind contributions such as office and classroom space and faculty/staff time.
The NAS report includes an extended discussion of the content and quality of Hanban-supplied textbooks.
It also raises concerns about Hanban’s role in prescreening Chinese language teachers -- Peterson writes that universities select instructors from a pool of candidates proposed by the Chinese partner university or Hanban -- and the relationship of those instructors to the American host university at which they teach.
“No teachers within Confucius Institutes are hired as employees of the host university with standard protections for academic freedom,” Peterson writes.
“Most are hired by, paid by and report to the Hanban, which reserves the right to remove teachers who violate Chinese law -- including speech codes. Hanban provides teachers with stock answers to questions it wishes to avoid. When we asked Chinese teachers and directors what they would say to a student who asked about Tiananmen Square, several replied that they would talk about the square’s historic architecture.”
The report continues, “We also found that professors within the university felt pressured to self-censor. Those affiliated with the Confucius Institute sensed the need to maintain a friendly relationship with the Hanban. Those outside the Confucius Institute felt pressure from the university -- most immediately from their department -- to protect the Confucius Institute’s 'reputation'.”