The US State Department last month designated the Chinese Confucius Institutes as “Foreign Missions.” According to the State Department announcement:
Confucius Institutes are clearly sponsored by Beijing: Confucius Institutes (CIs) are organizations primarily located on U.S. college and university campuses that push out skewed Chinese language and cultural training for U.S. students as part of Beijing’s multifaceted propaganda efforts. The PRC government partially funds these programs, under guidance from the CCP’s United Front Work Department. On August 13, 2020, the Department of State designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center (CIUS), which serves as the Washington D.C.-based de facto headquarters of the Confucius Institute network, as a foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China. The opacity of this organization and its state-directed nature are the driving reasons behind this designation. This action will not close the CIUS, nor will it require U.S. colleges or universities to close individual Confucius Institutes. Instead, designating the CIUS as a foreign mission will ensure much needed transparency by requiring the CIUS to regularly provide information to the State Department about PRC citizen personnel, recruiting, funding, and operations in the United States. With greater transparency, educational institutions can make more informed choices about the influence being exerted on their campuses and whether and how these Beijing-backed programs should continue to teach their students.
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The State Department defines a Foreign Mission as follows:
The Foreign Missions Act defines the term “foreign mission” as any mission or entity in the United States which is involved in the diplomatic, consular, or other activities that are substantially owned or effectively controlled by:
A foreign government, or
An organization representing a territory or political entity which has been granted diplomatic or other official privileges and immunities under the laws of the United States or which engages in some aspect of the conduct of the international affairs of such territory or political entity, including any real property of such a mission.
Criticism of the Confucian Institutes comes largely from a collection of conservative think tanks as well as from the FBI. According to the conservative National Association of Scholars:
Hanban, the CCP agency overseeing Confucius Institutes, currently holds a remarkable level of control over the institutes’ curricula and faculty. Consequently, CIs function more as propaganda outlets and less as the “linguistic and cultural centers” they purport to be. CIs routinely sweep Chinese political history and human rights abuses under the rug; they speak of Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China; they frequently recruit card-carrying members of the CCP to instruct courses; and, as Peterson puts it, they teach “a generation of American students to know nothing more of China than the regime’s official history.” As of now, the Hanban simply has to throw large sums of money at college and university administrations to coerce compliance.
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In 2018, the FBI director Christopher Wray testified before a US Senate panel:
We do share concerns about the Confucius institutes,” Wray responded. “We’ve been watching that development for a while. It’s just one of many tools that they take advantage of. We have seen some decrease recently in their own enthusiasm and commitment to that particular program, but it is something that we’re watching warily and in certain instances have developed appropriate investigative steps.”
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The Institutes do also have their defenders. For example, according to Inside Higher Ed, a prominent US academic has said:
Marshall Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015), a book critical of CIs, 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.”
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The GIOR reported earlier on the awarding of what was described as a” meaningless” academic qualification to a Hong King businessman tied to Chinese authorities.
Confucian Institutes are public educational partnerships between colleges and universities in China and colleges and universities in other countries. In 2019, Inside Higher Ed described Confucian Institutes as follows:
The Confucius Institutes have long been controversial. The centers vary somewhat across different campuses, but they typically offer some combination of Mandarin language classes, cultural programming and outreach to K‑12 schools and the community more broadly. They are staffed in part with visiting teachers from China and funded by the Chinese government, with matching resources provided by the host institution. The number of U.S. universities hosting the institutes increased rapidly after the first was established at the University of Maryland College Park in 2004, growing to more than 90 at the peak.
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