Four analysts on China-U.S. relations discussed June 21 a new report from the National Association of Scholars titled “After Confucius Institutes: China's Enduring Influence on American Higher Education.”
The report documents the new ways in which the Chinese government exerts undue influence on U.S. colleges and universities. The event was sponsored by The Heritage Foundation and co-hosted by the National Association of Scholars.
Discussing this issue were Rachelle Peterson, senior research fellow at the National Association of Scholars; Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation; Keith Whitaker, chairman of the National Association of Scholars; and Ian Oxnevad, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars.
Lohman said the institutes essentially were academic Trojan horses.
“These institutes were never the equivalent of The British Council or Alliance Francaise or The Goethe-Institut. They are instruments of Chinese national power,” he said. “They are essentially propaganda outlets. They‘re devoted to a mission that’s diametrically opposed to U.S. national interests and our values.”
Peterson, a co-author of "After Confucius Institutes," offered a few observations about Confucius Institutes, which are centers on college campuses teaching Chinese language and culture.
“They are funded by the Chinese government, which chooses and pays for the textbooks and also selects, trains and pays the Chinese nationals who come over to teach," she said. "Now, perhaps, everything looks reasonable and logical on the outside. But the U.S. did catch on to what the Chinese government was doing. In 2017, I wrote a report ‘Outsourced to China’ that examined Confucius Institutes in depth. And this came just at a time when others were starting to question as well.”
Peterson said multiple government agencies, including the State Department, the FBI and members of Congress, began to scrutinize Confucius Institutes. She said this was a policy victory for the United States as many Confucius Institutes closed.
There have been 118 such Chinese operations, with a high of 109 open at one time. But they have been closing in recent years, with just 14 left open. Victory? Not so fast, Peterson said.
“It's also a story of warning because, right now, the Chinese government is trying to sidestep those policies," she said. "In military terms this would be called an outflanking maneuver. The Chinese government is betting that if it takes away the name Confucius Institute and tweaks the structure of the program, no one will be the wiser, and realize that Chinese government influence remains alive and well on American higher education.”
In July 2020 the Chinese Ministry of Education changed the name of the Confucius Institute Headquarters, called Hanban, to the Ministry of Education Centre for Language Education and Cooperation, or CLEC.
Peterson said the Chinese International Education Foundation also was created. These two agencies are doing the same work as the Confucius Institutes were, just under a new name.
“We looked at all 118 Confucius Institutes that have ever existed in the United States, at least 28 of them that closed a Confucius Institute replaced it with something very similar, usually operated in partnership with CLEC,” Peterson said. “The single most popular reason that colleges and universities give when they close a Confucius Institute is that they're going to replace it with another Chinese partnership. The second most popular reason is U.S. public policy, which is almost certainly the actual driver of Confucius Institute closures.”
The study also compiled and released online a database of about 4,000 pages of documents regarding Confucius Institutes and their replacements, she said.
“You can browse our findings for about 80 colleges and universities and you can see for yourself the reasons that they give — both the reasons they give publicly and the reasons they give to their Chinese government sponsors as to why they are closing the Confucius Institute,” Peterson said. “The least-popular reason that colleges and universities give is that they are concerned about the Chinese government. Only five said that and most of them went out of their way to say they were concerned about Chinese government influence on other colleges and universities, but that their own university had been perfectly safe.”
Lohman said there was apparent positive side of Confucius Institutes.
”Many of them teach the Chinese language, and that's a good thing," he said. "I think we all recognize the need that students have access to Chinese language to be able to learn Chinese. That's a good thing. But they’re also used to control discourse on college campuses and beyond. I don‘t even think we know the full extent of the influence on local public school systems."
Lohman said this was a clear example of the power of a silent, hidden foe with the ability to do great harm.
“In my own view, the billions that the federal government spends on higher education probably does more harm than good,” he said. “But so long as we're going to spend it, let's ensure that schools that accept that funding do not also accept the cool embrace of that anaconda, which aims to smother freedom of speech, civil rights and civil society itself. Far from being a strategic masterstroke of Chinese soft power, I hope that Confucius Institutes become an example of how the American people, through their elected representatives, might yet save American higher education from itself.”
