China’s Confucius Institutes: A ‘Mussolini Model’?

Who said the following? Students must “make progress both ideologically and politically, which means that they should study Marxism, current events and politics. Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul.”

No, this is not the Ivy League’s new Mission Statement. Yet. It comes from Chairman Mao’s 1957 essay, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.”

Mao’s insistence that students have correct political views has traveled across the Pacific. But not unnoticed. In 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before a Senate committee, declaring his intention to investigate the Communist-Chinese-Party-funded Confucius Institutes (CI’s) on American college campuses.

CI’s are ostensibly educational partnerships between the Chinese government and host schools in foreign countries. Their announced purpose is to teach language and culture.

But they are much more than that.

Professor Jonathan Lipman of Mount Holyoke College states the situation thus: “By peddling a product we want, namely Chinese language study, the Confucius Institutes bring the Chinese government into the American academy in powerful ways. The general pattern is very clear. They can say, ‘We’ll give you this money, you’ll have a Chinese program, and nobody will talk about Tibet.’” Tibet is one of the CI’s three “T-words” (Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen), which cannot be discussed at the Institutes, in violation of academic freedom.

In light of violations of academic freedom and transparency, Wray testified again in 2019, asserting that Confucius Institutes are “part of China’s soft power strategy and influence,” which “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

In announcing the Bureau’s planned probe into campuses with Confucius Institutes, Wray corroborated what higher-education researchers have warned of for some time: These Institutes are in reality not educational projects and have no business being associated with institutions of higher learning. They are propaganda centers planted on America’s campuses as part of China’s worldwide intelligence operations.

American colleges and universities depend for their existence on academic freedom and the transparency that supports it. Confucius Institutes have been shown to abuse academic freedom and to mock transparency. The contradiction between the two is stark.

It is thus heartening to see that roughly two dozen U.S. universities have moved to close their Confucius Institutes since 2014. In 2013, University of Chicago Emeritus Professor Marshall Sahlins penned an article “China U: Confucius Institutes censor political discussions and restrain the free exchange of ideas. Why, then, do American universities sponsor them?” He urged his university set an example by revoking its partnership. In 2014, the University of Chicago did just that, as did Penn State.

That said, there remain about 80 schools that continue their ill-advised “partnerships” with these propaganda organs of the Chinese Communist Party.

Joining in opposition to the Confucius Institutes’ existence on American soil are the National Executive Board of the College Democrats of America (along with 15 of its state presidents); the Executive Committee as well as the National Committee of the College Republican National Committee; as well as a number of other organizations, among them, Students for a Free Tibet; the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association; Students for Falun Gong, and a number of other organizations, all of which can be found by going to the website of the movement’s organizing body, the Athenai Institute.

And the American Association of University Professors—hardly a right-wing organization—called on universities in 2014 to drop their Confucius Institutes, as did the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The AAUP’s Report finds that “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”

Nor is this exodus restricted to American educators. This year, Sweden closed its last remaining Confucius Institute.

A 2014 Washington Post editorial argued that “academic freedom cannot have a price tag,” and urged that CI partnerships should be terminated if universities refused to publish the terms of their CI contracts.

However, too many American universities continue muzzled. According to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which has been keen to this threat for some time, as of May 1, there are a total of 86 Confucius Institutes in this country. “This includes six that are scheduled to close in summer 2020: the University of Maryland, New Mexico State University, the University of Missouri, the University of Arizona, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of California-Davis.” NAS also found seven Confucius Institutes at K-12 public school districts.

That roughly 80 universities have failed to safeguard their institutions’ avowed commitment to free speech against these propaganda efforts means either that (1) they lack the moral fiber required to defend American core values, or (2) they were never that hot about American values in the first place. On Option Two, consider the recent survey conducted by the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which found that 77 percent of colleges now use secret social media blacklists “to censor the public, in violation of the First Amendment.”

Or is it (3) all about the money? Mount Holyoke’s Lipman remarks, “In this economy, turning them [CIs] down has real costs.” NAS  reveals that the Chinese government “selects and pays the teachers, sends free textbooks, and offers upwards of $100,000 a year in annual funding” for the Institutes. Although universities “are supposed to match” China’s contributions, they “typically do so by volunteering classroom and office space. The result is that colleges can charge tuition for courses that are being funded—and whose content is largely being decided—by the Chinese government” (emphasis supplied).

NAS’s findings are supported by a study published in China Journal by Brookings Institution Fellow, David Shambaugh, who finds that the funding “is in fact laundered through the Ministry of Education.” Laundered from where? From the CCPPD’s [i.e., Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department’s] External Propaganda Department.” 

If you still wonder what the purpose of Confucius Institutes is, consider this assessment from someone who should know. Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, praised the Institutes as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”

Director Wray observed in his 2018 testimony that “the level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues.” Last week, Binghamton University, a public university in New York, became the poster child for naïveté, publishing a rebuff to a student who challenged its CI partnership. “The campus is confident that the concerns you raise in your email do not apply to Binghamton University’s Institute,” wrote the school’s attorney.

Simply put, “Move along; there’s nothing to see here.”

But the trend is moving along in the opposite direction, Binghamton’s assurances notwithstanding. There are a number of proposed remedies already circulating. In addition to sounding the alarm, NAS has called on schools that accept CI dollars to refund the same amount back to the federal government as well as enforcing federal transparency requirements on the Institutes.

These and like measures would be much to the good.

Better still, our national security requires that all remaining Confucius Institutes on American soil be shut down.

Immediately.