MCLC: more on Confucius Institutes (3,4,5,6)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: nathaniel isaacson <nathaniel.isaacson at gmail.com>
Subject: more on Confucius Institutes (3)
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As an academic who is at one of the institutions that has ended up
appearing in more than one of these articles, I have seen that there are
many perils. In many respects, I see parallels to doing business in China
- a small program will likely be pushed around, and CI may rapidly take
over aspects of Chinese studies that ought to be run by an Asian Studies
program. A school with the scholars and funding to do without the CI (e.g.
Stanford) has an easier time because there is less sense that critical
funding will be lost.

While our CI did apparently chase off a visit from the Dalai Lama, they
have also funded a TA for lower level classes, and put more funding into
already existing Chinese classrooms throughout the state. This means that
instead of teaching 'ni hao' all day long, I have a pretty good crop of
students looking for advanced-level language classes, and that cohort is
expected to grow quickly. Once they are out of the CI classroom and into
mine, no one is monitoring what is discussed.

We would be wise to remember that Asian Studies owes plenty to the Cold
War (who here hasn't gotten Title 6 funding?), and that mentality
persists. I'd love to be in an ivory tower, but to some degree my job
exists in order to train people to represent our economic and strategic
interests. At the same time, academics in other programs are similarly
compromised by the combination of a lack of state funding and the influx
of private money. My econ department looks much worse, and this is
home-grown:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_maye
r?currentPage=all   We have the same person de-funding the state
university system, while he buys out our economics program to promote his
version of winner-take-all capitalism.

Finally, I also have to say that as a grad student, I saw what good can
come out of the CI. I have spent two summers in Shanghai at the Fudan
Institute for Advanced Study In Social Sciences doing a translation
seminar, and had some of the most frank and interesting conversations
there that I have ever had regarding contemporary Chinese politics and
education.  The Hanban can pay to fly me to Shanghai, put me up in a hotel
for six weeks, bring in senior American and Chinese scholars, and fund me
as a graduate teaching assistant. They have also helped produce a
generation of high school Chinese speakers that will soon populate my
classroom. Until the Tea Party decides to do the same I'm stuck with the
Hanban, and when compared to people like Art Pope, the Hanban doesn't look
quite as nefarious.

~Nathaniel Isaacson

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From: Bill Goldman <billgoldman at mac.com>
Subject: more on Confucius Institutes (4)

Sean Macdonald wrote:

"Spreading national culture is hardly some kind of nefarious plan
of attack for global domination."

What is "national culture" when the producers of culture are radically
un-free to produce it as they wish? The issue here, surely, is not that
those evil Chinese are seeking to spread their national culture, but that
their totalitarian government is determined to define, control and
restrict artists and 'cultural producers' -- and to spread their
insistence on what constitutes Chinese national culture and what does not,
throughout the world.

They would not and do not, just for one example, allow the books of the
only Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gao Xingjian, to be
sold, in Chinese, in his own country, nor is he allowed to visit China
(which he had to leave to save his own life and freedom). They even spread
the disinformation that he is "not really Chinese". Indeed, none of my MA
English class at the University of Science and Technology Beijing (whose
major and Masters was English Literature) had even heard of Gao; nor did
they believe that China had ever won the Nobel for Literature, till they
went and did some research.

Such is the effectiveness of the Chinese government's control of culture
-- and, many would argue, such is the main reason why Chinese culture is
not prominent in the world despite there being 1.3 billion citizens of the
PRC. The question is whether they would carry this attitude over to
institutes they fund in other countries, and whether there is any reason
to believe that they would not, or do not.

Bill

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From: jason mcgrath <jmcgrath at umn.edu>
Subject: more on Confucius Institutes (5)

I'd like to second Sean Macdonald's point that spreading a national
language and culture is far from limited to China and "is hardly some kind
of nefarious plan of attack for global domination." Those paranoid about
China's "soft power" can take heart from the fact that, for every American
student studying Chinese, there are over 3000 Chinese students studying
English. It's also safe to say that, to put it mildly, American popular
culture continues to attract more attention in China than Chinese popular
culture does in the US. (Indeed, if I wanted to make a case for mass
brainwashing, I would feel much more secure making it in the other
direction.)

Instead of fearing Confucius Institutes, what we should perhaps be getting
really upset about is the de-funding of public higher education in
America, which is what helps to make Confucius Institutes more and more
attractive to American universities. Funding for the Higher Education
Opportunity Act -- which includes fourteen language programs, some of
which support K-12 language instruction -- was cut by 40 percent in 2011.
Moreover, as many of us are all too painfully aware, funding for Title VI
programs, including the regional resource centers that have been so
crucial to research and education about China over the years, has been
slashed by 50 percent.

China-bashing has already become a safe applause line in this year's
presidential campaign. Instead of encouraging such thinking by fretting
about the spread of Confucius Institutes, we might consider holding our
politicians to account for creating the funding crisis in higher education
that makes Confucius Institutes an attractive alternative.

Jason

Sources:

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/01/01/20-embarrassing-facts-foreign-lang
uage-learning-u-s/
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2011/06/federal_fundin
g_for_foreign_la.html

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From: terrence russell <trussell510 at gmail.com>
Subject: more on Confucius Institutes (6)

In response to Sean¹s note about the Confucius Institutes, there is no
doubt that organizations like Alliance Francais, the Geothe Institute, and
the American Institute are designed to promote a particular kind of
understanding of the nations they represent in much the same way that the
CI does.  They are a kind of advertising medium for the sponsor nation,
and that is something tolerated in most places.  The critical difference
is that the aforementioned agencies operate in the community at large,
while the CIs are located in educational institutions funded to a greater
or lessor extent by the population of the host nation. Leaving aside the
Confucius Classrooms that generally operate at the primary or secondary
level, I think members of this list will appreciate that tertiary
education in the developed world is not about advertising or presenting
prepackaged messages prepared by foreign governments. That isn¹t what our
students or the tax-paying public pay for, whether they always understand
that or not.  Inviting the Chinese government on campus to teach their
version of Chinese culture and politics is like inviting Suncor on campus
to run a program on oil sands development. They provide the teaching staff
and the teaching materials, as well as some cash. All the university has
to provide is its good name and its tacit or active stamp of approval on
Suncor¹s (or the CCP¹s) message.  It seems pretty clear that many
university administrations view that as a good deal, in which case perhaps
we should be a little worried about our jobs.

Terry