MCLC: Sahlins on Confucius Institutes

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
Subject: Confucius Institutes
***********************************************************

Source: Marshall Sahlins (msahlins at uchicago.edu)

For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL, October 31, 2013

In a searing article in the November 18 issue of The Nation--now appearing
online [see below]--the prominent American anthropologist and inventor of
the Vietnam Teach-In, Marshall Sahlins, exposes the Confucius Institutes
(CI) housed in more than 400 colleges and universities around the world as
political instruments of the Chinese Government in the form of an
international educational enterprise.

Unlike the Alliance Française or the British Council, which are
stand-alone institutions outside of university precincts, Confucius
Institutes take control of accredited courses in Chinese language and
culture within the curriculum of the host schools. Through the CI Head
Office in Beijing, the government of the People¹s Republic of China
supplies the teachers, textbooks, curricula, and budgets of these courses.
The Head Office is supervised by and reports to a Council of government
officials headed by a member of the Politburo.

Confucius Institutes are presented and often understood as some sort of
benevolent outreach as well as a boon to schools hard-pressed by growing
demands for Chinese courses. But Sahlins reveals a less-than-benign side
of the project involving censorship, propaganda, discriminatory hiring,
and other practices that undermine the academic integrity of host
institutions in the US and elsewhere. Controversial topics barred in
Chinese universities‹Tibet, Taiwan, universal human rights, blacklisted
authors, mistakes of the Communist Party‹are generally off limits in
Confucius Institutes in America, first amendments rights notwithstanding.
The requirement that Confucius Institutes teach the official Mandarin
dialect, using the simplified characters promoted by the PRC government,
ensures that the critical and popular literature in traditional characters
in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and elsewhere will remain inaccessible to
semi-literate CI students, trained to read only what is acceptable to the
Party-State. Not coincidentally, as Sahlins is first to reveal, the
standard contract establishing a CI, signed by representatives of the host
institution and the Beijing Head Office, requires that the contents of the
agreement remain secret.

Some prominent universities have escaped such provisions in their CI
contracts, since Beijing has been willing to make concessions to them in
order to encourage other schools to join. Such is the case of Sahlins¹
home institution, the University of Chicago. However, in a series of
interviews with University of Chicago administrators and faculty, Sahlins
found that Beijing continues to set the agenda and select the
teachers‹with the effect that, as one put it, ³a certain amount of
self-censorship² has been introduced into the academic program of this
prestigious university. But then, Sahlins also found that the highest
officers of the University of Chicago were surprisingly uninformed of what
goes on in their own Confucius Institute.

Sahlins ends by calling on Chicago and other leading universities to
recognize how they are being used and to cut their ties with a project
that contradicts the values of free inquiry on which they were founded.
The question has now been placed on the action agenda of Chicago's Faculty
Council, where a fierce debate is likely.

For further information contact Bruce Lincoln (blincoln at uchicago.edu) or
Marshall Sahlins (msahlins at uchicago.edu).

========================================================

Source: The Nation (10/29/13):
http://www.thenation.com/article/176888/china-u

We were sitting in his office, Ted Foss and I, on the third floor of Judd
Hall at the University of Chicago. Foss is the associate director of the
Center for East Asian Studies, a classic area studies program that gathers
under its roof specialists in various disciplines who work on China, Korea
and Japan. Above us, on the fourth floor, were the offices and seminar
room of the university’s Confucius Institute, which opened its doors in
2010. A Confucius Institute is an academic unit that provides accredited
instruction in Chinese language and culture and sponsors a variety of
extracurricular activities, including art exhibitions, lectures,
conferences, film screenings and celebrations of Chinese festivals; at
Chicago and a number of other schools, it also funds the research projects
of local faculty members on Chinese subjects. I asked Foss if Chicago’s CI
had ever organized lectures or conferences on issues controversial in
China, such as Tibetan independence or the political status of Taiwan.
Gesturing to a far wall, he said, “I can put up a picture of the Dalai
Lama in this office. But on the fourth floor, we wouldn’t do that.”

The reason is that the Confucius Institutes at the University of Chicago
and elsewhere are subsidized and supervised by the government of the
People’s Republic of China. The CI program was launched by the PRC in
2004, and there are now some 400 institutes worldwide as well as an
outreach program consisting of nearly 600 “Confucius classrooms” in
secondary and elementary schools. In some respects, such a
government-funded educational and cultural initiative is nothing new. For
more than sixty years, Germany has relied on the Goethe-Institut to foster
the teaching of German around the globe. But whereas the Goethe-Institut,
like the British Council and the Alliance Française, is a stand-alone
institution situated outside university precincts, a Confucius Institute
exists as a virtually autonomous unit within the regular curriculum of the
host school—for example, providing accredited courses in Chinese language
in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the
University of Chicago.

There’s another big difference: CIs are managed by a foreign government,
and accordingly are responsive to its politics. The constitution and
bylaws of CIs, together with the agreements established with the host
universities, place their academic activities under the supervision of the
Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Language Council International,
commonly known as Hanban. Although official documents describe Hanban as
“affiliated with the Ministry of Education,” it is governed by a council
of high state and party officials from various political departments and
chaired by a member of the Politburo, Vice Premier Liu Yandong. The
governing council over which Liu presides currently consists of members
from twelve state ministries and commissions, including Foreign Affairs,
Education, Finance and Culture, the State Council Information Office, the
National Development and Reform Commission, and the State Press and
Publications Administration. Simply put, Hanban is an instrument of the
party state operating as an international pedagogical organization.

In larger universities hosting CIs, Hanban assumes responsibility for a
portion of the total Chinese curriculum. In the more numerous smaller
hosts, most or all of the instruction in Chinese language and culture is
under its control. Hanban has the right to supply the teachers, textbooks
and curriculums of the courses in its charge; it also names the Chinese
co-directors of the local Confucius Institutes. Research projects on China
undertaken by scholars with Hanban funds are approved by Beijing. The
teachers appointed by Hanban, together with the academic and
extracurricular programs of the CIs, are periodically evaluated and
approved by Beijing, and host universities are required to accept
Beijing’s supervision and assessments of CI activities. Hanban reserves
the right to take punitive legal action in regard to any activity
conducted under the name of the Confucius Institutes without its
permission or authorization. Hanban has signed agreements that grant
exceptions to these dictates, but usually only when it has wanted to
enlist a prestigious university, such as Stanford or Chicago, in the
worldwide CI project.

For all the attention that the Confucius Institutes have attracted in the
United States and elsewhere, there has been virtually no serious
journalistic or ethnographic investigation into their particulars, such as
how the Chinese teachers are trained or how the content of courses and
textbooks are chosen. One difficulty has been that the CIs are something
of a moving target. Not only are Chinese officials willing to be flexible
in their negotiations with elite institutions, but the general Hanban
strategy has also been changing in recent years. Despite its global reach,
the CI program is apparently not achieving the political objectives of
burnishing the image and increasing the influence of the People’s
Republic. Unlike Mao’s Little Red Book in the era of Third World
liberation, the current Chinese regime is a hard sell. Having the
appearance of an attractive political system is a necessary condition of
“soft power” success, as Joseph Nye, who coined the phrase, has written.
The revamped Confucius Institute initiative is to engage less in language
and culture and more in the core teaching and research of the host
university. Still, the working principles of the CI program remain those
of its constitution and bylaws, together with the model agreements
negotiated with participating universities. Routinely and assiduously,
Hanban wants the Confucius Institutes to hold events and offer instruction
under the aegis of host universities that put the PRC in a good light—thus
confirming the oft-quoted remark of Politburo member Li Changchun that the
Confucius Institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda
set-up.”

A 2011 article in The People’s Daily, the organ of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party, declared as much, boasting of the spread
of the Confucius Institutes (331 at the time) alongside other indices of
China’s ascent to world-political prominence, such as its annual growth
rate of 8 percent, its technological and military accomplishments, and its
newfound status as the second-largest economy in the world. “Why is China
receiving so much attention now? It is because of its ever-increasing
power…. Today we have a different relationship with the world and the
West: we are no longer left to their tender mercies. Instead we have
slowly risen and are becoming their equal.”

* * *
One impediment to understanding the operations of the Confucius Institutes
is that the model agreement establishing them, ratified by one or two
representatives of the host university, is secret. The agreement includes
a nondisclosure clause, which reads as follows (as translated from the
Chinese part of the bilingual text): “The two parties to the agreement
will regard this agreement as a secret document, and without written
approval from the other party, no party shall ever publicize, reveal, or
make public, or allow other persons to publicize, reveal, or make public
materials or information obtained or learned concerning the other party,
except if publicizing, revealing, or making it public is necessary for one
party to the agreement to carry out its duties under the agreement.”

Subject to nondisclosure are the articles of the model agreement, most
notably Article 5, which requires that Confucius Institute activities
conform to the customs, laws and regulations of China as well as those of
the host institution’s country. How would that be possible in, say, the
United States? Hanban operates under Chinese laws that criminalize forms
of political speech and systems of belief that are protected in the United
States by the First Amendment, making it likely that by adhering to
Article 5, American universities would be complicit in discriminatory
hiring or violations of freedom of speech. And because the constitution of
the Confucius Institutes stipulates that it and its bylaws are “applicable
to all Confucius Institutes,” the officers of host universities must
accept the Chinese control of academic work in their institutions and
agree to keep this arrangement secret. Is this even legal?

Although there appears to be no statement of the specific “soft power”
aims of the Confucius Institute program in its governing texts, there is a
seemingly innocuous clause that amounts to a Trojan horse. In laying down
a certain mandatory rule of language instruction, it effectively
stipulates that students will acquire their knowledge of China only in
ways acceptable to the Chinese state. The tenth and last of the “General
Principles” in the constitution and bylaws (Chapter 1) states: “The
Confucius Institutes conduct Chinese language instructions in Mandarin
using Standard Chinese Characters.” What is here misleadingly called
“Standard Chinese Characters” is the simplified script officially
promulgated by the PRC as a more easily learned alternative to the
traditional characters in which everything was written in China for
thousands of years, and in which much that is not to the liking of the
regime continues to be written in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the many
other Chinese communities beyond Beijing’s direct control.

In a richly detailed exposé of the politics of the mandatory language
rule, Michael Churchman has observed that instruction exclusively in
Standard Chinese Characters would create a global distribution of scholars
only semi-literate in Chinese. Native Chinese speakers with knowledge of
the relevant context and some prior exposure to the traditional script may
be more or less capable of deciphering it, but not foreign students who
learn the language at college age. Unable to read the classics except in
versions translated and interpreted in the PRC, cut off from the dissident
and popular literature of other Chinese communities, students in CI
courses cannot even access “the large and growing corpus of material on
Communist Party history, infighting, and factionalism written by
mainlanders but published exclusively in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Churchman
argues. Rather, they are subject to the same policies of language
standardization (Mandarin) and literacy (simplified characters) by which
the regime seeks to control what can and cannot be discussed in China.

* * *
Many reputable and informed scholars of China have observed that the
Confucius Institutes are marked by the same “no-go zones” that Beijing
enforces on China’s public sphere. In an interview reported in The New
York Times, June Teufel Dreyer, who teaches Chinese government and foreign
policy at Miami University, said: “You’re told not to discuss the Dalai
Lama—or to invite the Dalai Lama to campus. Tibet, Taiwan, China’s
military buildup, factional fights inside the Chinese leadership—these are
all off limits.” The Confucius Institutes at North Carolina State
University and the University of Sydney actively attempted to prevent the
Dalai Lama from speaking. At Sydney, he had to speak off-campus, and the
CI sponsored a lecture by a Chinese academic who had previously claimed
that Tibet was always part of China, notwithstanding that it was mired in
feudal darkness and serfdom until the Chinese democratic reforms of 1959.
The Confucius Institute at Waterloo University mobilized its students to
defend the Chinese repression of a Tibetan uprising, and McMaster
University and Tel Aviv University ran into difficulties with the legal
authorities because of the anti–Falun Gong activities of their Confucius
Institutes. Other taboo subjects include the Tiananmen massacre,
blacklisted authors, human rights, the jailing of dissidents, the
democracy movement, currency manipulation, environmental pollution and the
Uighur autonomy movement in Xinjiang. Quite recently, Chinese government
leaders explicitly banned the discussion of seven subjects in Chinese
university classrooms, including universal values, freedom of the press
and the historical mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party; this was part
of a directive to local officials to “understand the dangers posed by
views and theories advocated by the West.” It stands to reason that these
subjects will also not be matters of free inquiry in Cis.

More than one CI director has stated that his institute is free to discuss
anything it wants to; the only problem seems to be with the things they
don’t want to discuss. “We don’t know anything about the contract that
[Hanban officials] force their teachers to sign,” said Glenn Cartwright,
principal of Waterloo’s Renison University College, which houses the
institute. “I’m sure they have some conditions, but whether we can dictate
what those conditions can be is another story.” Human rights are not
discussed in the Confucius Institute of the British Columbia Institute of
Technology because that isn’t part of its mandate. According to director
Jim Reichert, “our function is really focused on cultural awareness,
business development, those sorts of pragmatic  things.” Even at liberal
arts universities like Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, the deputy director
of the CI told a newspaper in 2012, Confucius Institutes may not be the
correct venues for debates on Tibet and other sensitive issues; such
topics were better left to Sinology departments.

Elite universities resort to the same cop-out when justifying CI
restraints on the free exchange of ideas. Commenting on the possibility of
Chicago’s CI discussing Tibetan independence, the Tiananmen Square
massacre or Falun Gong, Ted Foss told me: “I think there’s a certain
amount of self-censorship. And thank goodness we have money for the Center
for East Asian Studies; we can go there for these kinds of projects. Our
mandate for the Confucius Institute here is to look at business and
economy in modern China.” That mandate, as he and others have allowed, has
provoked some “pushback” from Hanban about research subjects that the
Chicago CI should support. Hanban officials ask if “we are really trying
to fund [projects on] tenth-century art, because the agreement was [that]
we would concentrate on modern China.” Regarding “money for grants,” Foss
said in another context, “there hasn’t been any direct interference, but
as I say, there’s a certain amount of self-censorship…. What I’m happy
about is that we’re not having a lot of programming forced down our
throats; because we get these calls for dance groups or whatever coming
through town, and we have been able to say no…. But some of the other CIs,
basically they’re told, ‘Do this programming.’”

What Foss did think had been “dumped on” Chicago’s CI was its deputy
director, who hails from Chicago’s partner institution, Renmin University
in Beijing. An expert on the European Union, she had been assigned no
teaching or other duties at Chicago. “She’s basically the eyes of Hanban,”
Foss says. It puts him in mind of “any department, any academic department
in China. You’ve got the chair of the department, and you’ve got the party
head; and it drives my academic friends mad, but still you’ve got the guy
or girl who is to report” to Beijing. At every level—from the Politburo
authority over the Hanban headquarters to the deputy director from Renmin
reporting on the Chicago CI, with its echo of the party official
monitoring a Chinese university department—there is a repetition of the
dualism of the party state, in which the administrative entity is subject
to surveillance and control by the party. It should be incumbent on the
higher administrators at Chicago and other host institutions to make
themselves familiar with such unorthodox arrangements—or so you would
think. You would be surprised.

* * *
Because Confucius Institutes depend on a policy of what is not said, which
originates in the inner circles of the Chinese government and is largely
implemented through self-censorship, direct evidence of restraints on
academic discourse is not easy to come by. What little that is publicly
known must be a small fraction of what is actually practiced. There
exists, however, a body of evidence that is all the more revelatory
because it consists of the subterfuges practiced by Hanban to conceal
policies that are objectionable by the common standards of scholarly
knowledge and academic freedom in American universities and most others
worldwide. What Beijing learned, for example, was to drop from early
agreements the clause requiring American institutions to accept the PRC’s
“one China policy,” according to which Taiwan is part of the People’s
Republic. However, the description of Taiwan as “China’s largest island”
on Hanban’s website remains.

Until quite recently, the official English website of Hanban, in the
section listing the requirements for volunteer overseas Chinese teachers,
specified that applicants should have “no record of participation in Falun
Gong and other illegal organizations and no criminal record.” After a
dustup with a Canadian university about a Chinese teacher who did belong
to the spiritual movement, the site now states: “Applicants shall declare
to abide by Chinese laws and not to endanger the state security of China,
harm public interests or disrupt public order”—which, as a set of
qualifications for teaching in a North American university, seems bad
enough. In the matter of teachers’ qualifications, Professor Liu Xiaobo,
for instance, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, could not be
an instructor at a Confucius Institute because he has a criminal record:
he is serving an eleven-year sentence in China at present for advocating
human rights and democratic reforms.

According to The Epoch Times, a video about the Korean War titled “The War
to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea” was recently withdrawn from the
Hanban website. Among other historical claims, the video declares that the
Chinese were provoked into entering the war because the United States had
bombed Chinese villages near the Korean border, and had manipulated the UN
Security Council into passing a resolution that enabled American troops to
expand aggression against Korea. It seems that the page with the video
feed was deleted on June 11, 2012, the day after Christopher Hughes of the
London School of Economics sent the link to faculty colleagues who were
just then debating the teaching materials of the Confucius Institute,
which was established there in 2007.

Because of these questionable practices of academic discourse, the
Confucius Institute’s classroom program is not wanted in the public
primary and secondary schools of New South Wales, Australia. In July 2011,
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a petition with more than 4,000
signatures had been tabled in the New South Wales Parliament calling for
the state government to remove the Confucius Institute classrooms from a
number of public schools. “The government,” the story said, “has confirmed
that controversial topics, including the Tiananmen Square massacre and
China’s human rights record, will not be discussed in the program…. The
petition states that foreign governments should not determine what is
taught in NSW schools and that the curriculum should be free of
propaganda.” Then, in October 2011, a Greens MP, Jamie Parker, introduced
another such petition with some 10,000 signatures. Parker’s speech in
support of the petition rehearsed many essentials of a critique that could
be voiced wherever Confucius Institutes have been established:

The NSW government has admitted that topics sensitive to the Chinese
government, including Taiwan, Tibet, Falun Gong and human rights
violations, would not be included in these classes…. The Greens welcome
the teaching of Chinese language and culture, however we must be cautious
of foreign government influence within our state schools. These classes
are very different to other international programs such as Alliance
Française. 

Two incidents involving Confucius Institutes at Canadian universities,
McMaster and Waterloo, echo these concerns while also indicating some of
the larger intellectual and legal implications of the CI program. This
year, McMaster terminated its agreement with the program following a
complaint of discriminatory hiring filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of
Ontario by a CI instructor against the university. The complaint was
lodged by Sonia Zhao, a teacher from China who alleged that McMaster was
“giving legitimation to discrimination” because the CI contract that
enabled her to work at the university required her to conceal her belief
in Falun Gong. The Toronto Globe and Mail obtained a copy of Zhao’s
contract, which was signed in China and included the provision that
teachers “are not allowed to join illegal organizations such as Falun
Gong.” In 2012, a year after coming to Canada, Zhao recounted not only
that she had hidden her adherence to Falun Gong from the Chinese
authorities, but also how the Chinese authorities hide the Falun Gong from
CI classrooms. Interviewed in connection with her case, she said, “If my
students asked me about Tibet or about other sensitive topics, I should
have the right to…express my opinion…. During my training in Beijing they
do tell us: ‘Don’t talk about this. If the student insists, you just try
to change the topic or say something the Chinese Communist Party would
prefer.’”

Zhao’s case against McMaster went to mediation. After McMaster broke its
agreement with CI, the assistant vice president of public and governmental
relations explained, “We have a very clear direction on building an
inclusive community, respect for diversity, respect for individual views,
and ability to speak about those.” That’s a noble position, but it was
undermined by the university’s failure to perform its due diligence: the
Falun Gong proscription had been on the Hanban website for some time
before McMaster signed on with CI. And note the implication of the affair:
a Canadian university had to take legal responsibility for promulgating
the political agenda of the People’s Republic of China.

A different controversy erupted at the University of Waterloo, where, as
noted earlier, the head of the college that houses the local CI professed
no knowledge of the contracts that Chinese teachers sign and no ability to
control their terms. Perhaps that explains the militant action of the
Chinese director of the CI in defending the PRC’s actions in Tibet and
mobilizing her students to do likewise. The director, Yan Li, was
previously a reporter with Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese
Communist Party. In 2008, when the PRC put down a Tibetan uprising, she
rallied students of the Waterloo Confucius Institute to “work together to
fight with Canadian media,” which was reporting the regime’s heavy-handed
action. Yan Li took class time to recount her version of Tibetan history
and the current situation, using a map that showed Tibet clearly inside
China. Thereupon the students launched a campaign against the Canadian
media, protesting against newspapers, TV stations and online coverage they
claimed was biased in favor of the Tibetans. The campaign succeeded to the
extent that one TV station publicly apologized for its presentation of the
conflict. 

For the University of Manitoba, the creation of political impediments by
the Chinese government to the free discussion in Canada of topics
controversial in China is the reason it has not permitted a Confucius
Institute on campus. Said Terry Russell, a professor of Asian studies at
Manitoba, “They have no particular interest in what we would consider
critical inquiry or academic freedom…. We didn’t see how you could
reconcile inviting the Chinese government, which the Confucius Institute
is basically an agent of, to come on campus and present programs that
wouldn’t ever actually talk about human rights in China except according
to the official Beijing line.”
* * *
Confucius Institutes appear to have met more serious resistance in Canada
and elsewhere than in the United States, where there are more CIs in
colleges and universities—over eighty—than anywhere else. (Second to the
United States are Korea and Russia, with at least seventeen each; Canada
has eleven.) One reason is that CIs can operate differently in the United
States when it is to their strategic advantage to do so. Everything
suggests that as a means of increasing China’s own soft power in the camp
of its greatest competitor for world supremacy, Beijing is willing to be
flexible and accommodating in negotiations with certain American
universities. Other institutions may reject Confucius Institutes out of
fear of Chinese influence, but, says the curriculum coordinator of the CI
at the University of Iowa, “as far as my experience with it, it would be a
fear that’s not well grounded.”

The Iowa administrators have no complaints about their Confucius
Institute; in particular, they have none about Chinese hiring
practices—because these practices don’t exist there. Officials at Iowa,
having heard about the Falun Gong fiasco at McMaster, demanded contractual
measures to avoid a similar occurrence and Hanban acquiesced, allowing
Iowa to hire all employees internally with no interference. A McMaster
administrator who was involved in the Zhao case said that its “contract
with Hanban did not have the same stipulations.” After the Zhao case
broke, McMaster attempted to renegotiate its agreement with Hanban with a
view toward modifying the hiring rule; unlike Iowa, however, it was unable
to persuade Beijing. But then, as a large American public university, Iowa
is more favorably positioned to win concessions from Hanban. While
questions may remain about how the Chinese teachers there are selected,
how courses are taught and in what Chinese script, it is clear that Hanban
does learn from its mistakes.

Or perhaps its “loose rein policy” in the United States is an adaptation
of the empire’s form of indirect rule over the non-Chinese peoples of its
borderlands that began in the Tang Dynasty, if not earlier. In those bad
old imperial days, it was known as “using barbarians to rule barbarians.”
Similarly, the emphasis by Chinese authorities on Confucius Institutes as
a component of their politics of cultural conquest has more than one
resonance with the traditional imperial strategy of transforming
non-Chinese others by bringing them into contact with the dazzling
splendor and pacifying virtue of the Celestial Emperor. A beautiful and
peaceful China, harmonious and generous: these are major themes of
Confucius Institutes.

Another reason Hanban is willing to accommodate some American universities
is that their interests are different in scale and character. As an
instrument of the Chinese government, Hanban wants to spread the influence
of the Chinese state worldwide, particularly in strategically
consequential regions, and above all in the United States. The apparent
loss Hanban suffers by making a concession may be a long-term gain for a
global program. By contrast, American universities are concerned only with
their parochial welfare as academic institutions. They are thus inclined
to ignore or dismiss the unsavory political aspects of Confucius
Institutes—which is to say, the larger implications of their own
participation—so long as they get a good deal. Then again, given these
private interests, American universities have other good reasons for
refraining from objecting to the CI program. Directly or indirectly, but
ever-increasingly, American institutions of higher learning are heavily
dependent on Chinese money.

As of the academic year 2012–13, there were 2,062 students from China at
the University of Iowa. In the university’s business school, 21 percent of
the students are Chinese, an increase from 8 percent in 2009. Chinese
students account for more than half of the international student
population campus-wide, and more than 80 percent of the approximately 500
foreign students in the business school. Nor is Iowa unique in these
respects. The number of students from the PRC attending American
universities has grown dramatically in the past few years. In the academic
year 2011–12, there were 194,029 such students, most of whom pay full
tuition, accounting for over 25 percent of all foreign students—nearly
twice as many as the country with the next-highest number, India. The
number of students from mainland China grew from 98,235 in 2008–09 to
127,628 in 2009–10 and 157,558 in 2010–11. Nor are PRC students the only
source of Chinese largesse for US educational institutions. There are the
CIs themselves, which endow most affiliated universities with an initial
fee of $100,000 or $150,000 and annual payments along the same lines for
the duration of the contract, as well as free instructors, textbooks and
course materials, a number of scholarships for study in China, and 
upscale, wine-and-dine junkets to China for American administrators. These 
are not negligible perquisites, especially for smaller colleges, and they 
are all the more desirable because of the 47 percent decline in US 
government funding for language training and area studies programs in 
recent years.

Moreover, for publicly financed state universities, there may be another 
indirect but important dependence on China, insofar as their states have 
significant business relations with the People’s Republic that it would 
not be wise to endanger with complaints about academic freedom or 
invitations to the Dalai Lama. In 2009, when North Carolina State 
University—at which a CI had been established two years 
earlier—peremptorily canceled a scheduled visit of the Dalai Lama because, 
the president said, there had not been sufficient time to prepare for so 
august a guest, the provost, Warwick Arden, allowed that there were other 
considerations. “I don’t want to say we didn’t think about whether there 
were implications,” he said. “Of course you do. China is a major trading 
partner for North Carolina.” The director of the North Carolina State 
Confucius Institute told the provost that a visit by the Dalai Lama could 
disrupt “some strong relationships we were developing with China.” A 
Confucius Institute, Arden commented, presents an “opportunity for subtle 
pressure and conflict.”

* * *
For years, only smaller American colleges and universities—as well as the 
Chicago Public School system—struck deals with Confucius Institutes. But 
lately, major research universities like Michigan, UCLA, Columbia, 
Stanford and Chicago have joined the CI program. (An exception is the 
University of Pennsylvania, which has rebuffed efforts by Hanban to 
establish a Confucius Institute there.) As one would expect, these schools 
got sweeter deals than the less prestigious early adopters. Still, by 
paying $1 million over five years to Columbia and an initial $200,000 to 
the University of Chicago, the Chinese got a bargain in advertising, if 
nothing else. It is difficult to understand why Chicago and Columbia 
settled for such modest sums, except possibly as loss leaders on the 
important overseas academic centers they are establishing in Beijing.

Stanford upstaged both universities by negotiating a payment of $4 million 
from Hanban: $1 million for conferences, $1 million for graduate 
fellowships, and $2 million for an endowed professorship. One Stanford 
professor pointed out that it was “convenient for everyone concerned” that 
the designated professorship be assigned to the field of classical Chinese 
poetry, “something that isn’t controversial in any contemporary political 
way.” The Stanford dean who negotiated the deal, Richard Saller, also 
warded off a Chinese suggestion that the institute refrain from discussing 
Tibet. Saller, who is a highly regarded scholar of classical Rome, 
thereupon became the head of Stanford’s Confucius Institute, despite the 
stipulation in the Hanban guidelines that CI directors should “have 
in-depth comprehension of Chinese current national issues.” Yet in his own 
way, Saller knew enough about Chinese current national issues to grasp 
that Hanban was willing to treat Stanford generously and circumspectly 
because it was keen to use the participation of a prestigious university 
for its own larger purposes; its relationship with Stanford was too 
precious to jeopardize. Hanban officials “are very interested in getting a 
foothold at Stanford,” Saller said. He suggested it was because the 
Chinese would like to create a Stanford University and Silicon Valley of 
their own.

Even if Saller is correct, the affiliation of Stanford and its equals with 
Confucius Institutes has other advantages for the Chinese government: 
namely, it encourages other schools to sign up. According to The GW 
Hatchet, the student newspaper of George Washington University, after 
fecklessly comparing Confucius Institutes to the British Council, which 
has no university presence, the dean who negotiated the installation of a 
CI at George Washington mentioned solidarity with other universities. As 
she told the Hatchet, “I think we saw other top universities taking on 
Confucius Institutes, and that increased our comfort level.” She cited 
Chicago as an example. 

* * *
The establishment of a Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago 
was marked, as might be expected, by “free enterprise” in both its 
inception and academic content. Henry Paulson recently contibuted several 
million dollars for an institute in his name, housed in its own building 
on a prime piece of real estate near the main campus. Currently under 
renovation adjacent to the campus is a large church complex destined to 
become the new home of the famous Chicago Economics Department and the 
Becker Friedman Institute, thus posing to the architects the difficult 
challenge of changing the functional arrangement of the building while 
preserving its religious character. The Confucius Institute, aside from 
providing language teachers from China, has likewise been funding 
considerable research on aspects of Chinese economic development—in fact, 
a lot more economics than language teaching. As with other institutes at 
Chicago, the origin of its CI is identified with one man, the political 
scientist Dali Yang, who at the time he developed the proposal for the 
Confucius Institute was director of the Center for East Asian Studies. 
Over the course of about a year, Yang was able to usher the proposal 
through negotiations with Chinese officials, Chicago administrators and 
faculty colleagues.

Yang didn’t just build it by himself; his enterprise succeeded because it 
engaged larger institutional conditions that gave it persuasive force and 
effective backing. On the one hand, there was the ready complicity of the 
university administration, which like many others is given to an unseemly 
avidity for gelt, glitz and glory. The University of Chicago takes a lot 
of pride in its traditions. (By Thorstein Veblen’s account in The Higher 
Learning in America[1918], a certain competitive interest in institutional 
grandeur and public esteem on the part of the captains of erudition was 
already in place at the beginning of the twentieth century.) On the other 
hand, Yang knew how to adapt to Hanban’s new emphasis on “core research,” 
and in particular the apparent fascination on the Chinese side with the 
Chicago School of economics. According to Ted Foss, the Center for East 
Asian Studies is frequently besieged by calls from the Chinese Consulate 
asking to arrange a photo op with Gary Becker for a delegation of visiting 
dignitaries.

At Chicago, Hanban got what it wished for: not only a heavy preponderance 
of research proposals concerned with Chinese economic development, but an 
annual University of Chicago–Renmin Symposium on Family and Labor 
Economics, now in its fourth year. The partner institution of CIs in more 
than a dozen schools besides Chicago, Renmin has, more than any other 
Chinese university, a Janus-like reputation. In Chicago, it is vaunted as 
the leading Chinese university in the social sciences and humanities, 
whereas in China it is popularly known as the party’s university, as it 
was founded by the Communist Party and is a major forcing house for 
government cadres. The CI at Chicago presents the risible spectacle of 
Chinese Communists using Confucius’ name to channel Gary Becker’s 
über-capitalist ideology of rational choice.

The still-greater contradiction is that the Confucius Institute engaged 
the university’s cherished traditions of laissez-faire, both as a matter 
of academic freedom and as an economic philosophy, in a global project 
designed to increase the political influence of the People’s Republic of 
China. This antithetical combination of free enterprise and government 
constraint was already present in April 2008, when Dali Yang and Ted Foss 
consulted a Chinese education consul in Chicago on the general 
requirements for a Confucius Institute. By the testimonies of these two 
gentlemen—including a historical sketch of the Chicago CI written by 
Yang—the process of consultation that followed involved an early 
“heads-up” to the deans of humanities and the social sciences. Later, Yang 
presented the proposal for a Chicago CI to the China scholars of the 
Center for East Asian Studies, who after some discussion unanimously 
approved its establishment. This was the only group that ever had a vote 
(the Korea and Japan scholars were left out of the loop), and they were 
among the only university faculty members who knew anything about the 
institute before it was inaugurated.

Later, in 2010, after news of the deal became public, 174 Chicago faculty 
members signed a petition protesting the administration’s ill-advised 
acceptance of a Confucius Institute without the consent of a governing 
body that properly represented them. According to Dali Yang’s history, the 
executive committee of the Center for East Asian Studies had discussed the 
CI in the year leading up to its founding, but at least one member of this 
small committee—Bruce Cumings, the eminent historian of Korea—did not 
learn of the CI’s existence until a good six months after the deal had 
been signed and sealed with Beijing. (The executive committee of the 
center meets very infrequently, according to Foss, even less than once a 
year.) Otherwise, the only other consultation was a meeting late in the 
day with a “small working group of faculty, deans, and administrators.” In 
September 2009, the CI proposal was submitted to Hanban. On September 29, 
2009, the agreement to establish a Confucius Institute was signed by a 
vice president of the university and the executive director of the Hanban 
headquarters. On June 1, 2010, the institute was formally opened, with the 
president of the University of Chicago and Hanban dignitaries in 
attendance at the festivities.

* * *
Among the concessions that Hanban made to Chicago was striking the secrecy 
clause from the CI agreement. Apparently none was needed, because the 
Confucius Institute is still a secret in important respects to the chair 
of the faculty board that monitors its operation. Headed by the humanities 
dean, Martha Roth, the board consists of two other Chicago professors and 
two members appointed by Renmin University. Roth indicated in an interview 
that she was not aware of the provisions of the constitution and bylaws of 
the Confucius Institutes: “I don’t remember having looked at it.” Neither 
did she recall the provisions of the agreement that the university signed 
with Hanban. She thought, wrongly, that Hanban was “under the direction 
and auspices of the Ministry of Education”—an impression that Hanban 
officially conveys in English-language documents by its “affiliation” with 
that ministry, instead of the council of government officials to which it 
in fact reports. When asked about the required submission of research 
proposals to Beijing for approval and funding, Roth found the procedure 
unobjectionable, likening it to the practice of submitting proposals to 
the US Department of Education. Nor was she concerned about the problems 
that had arisen with Confucius Institutes in other universities, being 
satisfied that Chicago was following its own principles of academic 
freedom. When asked to comment on the provisions governing Confucius 
Institutes in the Hanban constitution and the agreement, Roth responded 
that such questions are “better addressed to the legal office” of the 
university.

Roth was certain, however, that Beijing does not supply Chinese-language 
teachers to Chicago and pay their salaries and airfare, as specified in 
these official documents. She said Hanban was thought to do so a couple of 
years ago, but “that never happened.” “This was unfortunate,” she said, 
“because we need more Chinese-language instruction.” Perhaps this patent 
mistake was made because the teachers supplied by Hanban offer courses in 
the regular curriculum of the undergraduate college, rather than in a 
teaching program of the Confucius Institute itself. Hanban has been 
providing two or more visiting language teachers to the University of 
Chicago since 2006, even before the formal agreement; since the agreement 
was signed, the supply has continued under its terms. Chicago’s own 
proposal for a Confucius Institute, as noted previously, had a significant 
teaching component. However, misconceptions linger about how these 
teachers are selected. 

Referring to what would be another concession to Chicago, both Dali Yang 
and Ted Foss say the university substantially controls the hiring of 
language teachers from China. In Yang’s words, “The university is fully 
engaged in the hiring process for Chinese teachers, not just a right of 
refusal.” Says Foss, “We have control over who’s sent.” However, the 
director of the Chinese-language program at the university, who engages 
the Hanban teachers, has a different view of the process. She says that, 
based on her knowledge, all Chinese-language teachers can apply for the 
job, but that they must hold advanced degrees in Chinese language and have 
taught foreign students at their own university. “Then they need to take 
some tests, such as English and psychological tests. If they are chosen by 
Hanban, they need to attend a training session. They say they learned 
things such as traditional folk arts.” When asked what role Chicago plays 
in choosing the teachers, the director, then in Beijing, responded: “We 
don’t choose. They recommend, and we accept.” Six weeks later, when 
contacted again in Chicago, she said the university could refuse Hanban’s 
recommendation on reviewing the candidate’s CV, and Hanban would then 
recommend another instructor, but that this doesn’t happen. In any case, 
because Hanban is operating under Chinese laws—such as those defining 
Falun Gong as a criminal organization—Chicago is at risk, however 
unwittingly, of practicing the kind of discriminatory hiring that brought 
McMaster University before a human rights tribunal. The university may be 
all the more vulnerable because it pays the Hanban-selected teachers a 
supplement to their Chinese wages.

This oversight seems still more serious because the obliviousness 
regarding the institute extends even higher in the administration than 
those immediately charged with overseeing it. On June 4, 2010, three days 
after the Confucius Institute of the University of Chicago was 
ceremoniously opened, the president and provost had a meeting with 
representatives of a self-constituted faculty organization called CORES, 
during which the CI came under discussion. CORES had organized the 
petition signed by 174 faculty members protesting what they called the 
“corporatization” of the university, of which the Confucius Institute and 
the Milton Friedman Institute were prime examples. The minutes of this 
meeting were circulated to all participants, with no corrections offered 
to any of the contents. The minutes indicate that two prominent East Asia 
scholars, Bruce Cumings and Norma Field, objected to the political 
character of the Confucius Institute, the role it would play in 
determining what is taught about China at the university, and how “they 
and other faculty members who work on East Asia had effectively been 
excluded from discussions and the decision-making process.” They were not 
alone: the minutes also record that University President Robert Zimmer and 
Provost Thomas Rosenbaum “acknowledged their lack of information on this 
matter and expressed bewilderment and regret at how this happened.”

What, then, would prevent Zimmer from cutting Chicago’s ties to its 
Confucius Institute, or Columbia and the LSE from doing the same? 
Prominent CI hosts should take the lead in reversing course, stressing 
that the issues involved are larger than their own particular interests: 
by hosting a Confucius Institute, they have become engaged in the 
political and propaganda efforts of a foreign government in a way that 
contradicts the values of free inquiry and human welfare to which they are 
otherwise committed. More than parochial institutions, universities too, 
each and all of them, are global projects: the universal ideal of free 
inquiry for the good of all humanity on which they are founded should make 
them more than a match for Confucius Institutes. It is long past time for 
Chicago to live up to its motto,Crescat scientia; vita excolatur. Let 
knowledge increase, that human life shall flourish.