MCLC: Sahlins on Confucius Institutes (2,3,4)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: Sahlins on Confucius Institutes (2)
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I find the following passage highly debatable:

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.

Is the push for Mandarin something exclusively Communist and PRC-y?

Is it reasonable to view the Simplified Characters as merely a tool for
the propaganda of the CPC? If a script is practiced by 1,5 billion people
versus 100+ million, is calling itself Standard "misleading"? [Some lines
further down he uses the expression Standard Chinese Characters himself.]
Is everything that is published in Simplified Characters friendly to the
CPC? Are those opposing or critiquing the CPC inside the PRC writing in
Traditional Characters?

If, hypothetically, Taiwan sponsored something akin to the CI's, wouldn't
it stipulate that "language instructions will be conducted using
Traditional Chinese Characters"?

Concerning the difficulty of reading materials in traditional characters,
wouldn't an automatic conversion software (Traditional to Simplified) be a
simpler solution? Are CI's meant to produce "scholars" "reading the
classics"?

I feel an antipathy here toward whatever stems from the PRC, even its
modernizing efforts like the Simplified Characters. I'm curious about the
detailed arguments in Michael Churchman's expose'.

Concerning the other points of professor Sahlins's critique, they convince
me much more.

Costas

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From: John Fitzgerald <J.Fitzgerald at latrobe.edu.au>
Subject: Sahlins on Confucius Institutes (3)

For the record, Marshall Sahlins was a leader among that generation of
American professors who wrote the script on Dow and the US’s military
influence on American campuses during the Vietnam War. And earlier this
year he is reported to have resigned from the National Academy of Sciences
because of his objections to the election of Napoleon Chagnon as Academy
President and to the on-going military research projects of the Academy.
His comments on CIs are consistent with his long-standing public
positions. They focus in particular on the limits that CIs present to free
and open critical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences of the
kind that makes critiques of Dow, Monsanto and the US military possible on
American campuses today. Sahlins believes those freedoms are worth
defending.

John Fitzgerald

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From: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
Subject: Sahlins on Confucius Institutes (4)

Excuse me, but I find Gregory Kaplan's comment a bit silly ... it seems
it was written without looking up any of Sahlins' important writings and
interventions on these issues ... such as, about the huge fight over the
Milton Friedman Institute which he referred to in this Confucius
institute article ... or his other writings on corporatization and the
future of the university? (Please do look them up).

I think, however, that there is one good point here: that the general
corporatization of the university, including corporation dependencies,
do also threaten academic freedom, --including as Sahlins has written
about--, and of course the issues of voices silenced, by the Chinese
state or by corporations, are fundamentally related, though there are
some major, major differences.

All this should be, and is already, part of the debate on these Chinese
government implants. It boils down to, if we want to, how can
universities be universities = something other than a state-corporation
extension. One reason why ignorant university administrators fall so
easily for a couple hundred thousand dollars, may well be because they
already have come to think of the university in terms of a
state-corporation extension.

--BTW, there's been a flurry of twitters on the article on Confucius
Institutes,

https://twitter.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Farticle%2F176
888%2Fchina-u

yrs,
Magnus Fiskesjö,