MCLC: anthropology of Confucius Institutes

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: anthropology of Confucius Institutes
***********************************************************

Source: Anthropology News (n.d.):
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/05/01/the-anthropology-of-c
onfucius-institutes/

The Anthropology of Confucius Institutes
By Jennifer Hubbert

In a 2010 episode entitled “Socialism Studies,” Jon Stewart of The Daily
Showhumorously skewered the American controversy over China’s Confucius
Institutes (CIs). This episode highlighted a California resident–speaking
against these Chinese government funded language and culture programs–who
declares: “If it comes from communist China, it is tainted with
communism…We should not be teaching our children about Mandarin language
and Chinese culture…That’s brainwashing.” To confirm, Daily Show
correspondent Aasif Mandvi then visits a middle school Confucius
Institute, where he discovers an “army of tiny Maoists who had to be
stopped.”

While The Daily Show clearly intends the viewer to express skepticism over
the California resident’s lingering Cold War fervor and to understand that
Mandvi winks at us with his suggestion that 12-years olds are primed to
abolish western democracy, the program’s mockery mirrors controversies
over the CIs’ perceived threats to western academic freedom that in turn
reflect wide-ranging perceptions of China as a general threat to global
well-being.

The debates over CIs are encapsulated in a cautionary article by
University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in a November issue
of The Nation and a rebuttal by George Washington University historian
Edward McCord. Both scholars work on campuses with CIs. McCord welcomed
George Washington’s, Sahlins wishes to have Chicago’s disbanded. Although
methodologically similar, drawing upon policy documents, interviews with
institute directors and concerned American faculty, and media reports,
their perspectives represent opposing ends of the spectrum. For example,
Sahlins (who has long championed ethical engagement in anthropology)
envisions the specter of Chinese state censorship when he invokes the CI’s
sole use of simplified characters, suggesting that readers will be denied
access to dissident writing that uses traditional characters. In contrast,
McCord contends that American Chinese language departments teach
simplified characters “of their own volition.” Similarly, while Sahlins
finds suspicious a perceived lack of American control over CI teaching
staff assignments, McCord argues “the low rate of [teacher] rejection may
suggest that the process is working effectively to provide top-quality
instructors for CIs.”

What can an ethnographically-grounded anthropological perspective offer to
this debate? I’ve been doing research on CIs for three years, sitting in
on classrooms, travelling with CI groups to China and interviewing
administrators, teachers, parents and students. This research provides a
glimpse into the complex workings of a disaggregated Chinese state and its
CI policies that privilege actual policy practices and the people who
implement them and are targeted by them. What this research suggests is
not that we stop interrogating CIs’ soft power intentions or
wholeheartedly embrace the programs, but that perhaps we are asking some
of the wrong questions. Rather than assume congruence with policy
intention and effect, what do we learn by considering what actually
happens in the classroom? I offer here a few examples of how we might
proceed.

Marshall Sahlins is not the only scholar to be concerned about the
singular use of PRC-based simplified characters in the CI classroom. Yet,
this perspective overlooks the fact that most of us trained in Chinese
read in both character sets; as such training in one does not preclude
access to the other. At the same time, McCord’s characterizing the
dominance of simplified characters in US texts as pure volition ignores
how the Chinese state has marginalized Taiwanese language publications,
censored Hong Kong writings and pressured the global publishing industry
in other more pernicious ways. Of more concern than the visual medium of
instruction I would argue, is the content of the CI language courses and
materials. And from this angle, like foreign language classes and texts in
other languages, CI texts provide a vocabulary for shopping and assessing
the weather, not an recitation of unsavory national history. As my own
high school French texts failed to include a detailed discussion of
guillotine use during the French Revolution, neither do CI curricular
materials chronicle Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the classrooms I’ve
visited, when conversations veered toward the politically controversial,
teachers answered questions briefly and returned to language study. We
might call this censorship, or we might understand it as common
pedagogical strategy. We also might look at the effect rather than the
intention. Students and their parents sometimes perceived this
disinclination to discuss politics in the classroom as a form of
“totalitarian” control. Teachers disputed this perception and I witnessed
teachers who both engaged in political discussions outside the classroom
and used alternative materials in the classroom. Regardless, if this
perception of censorship is the resultant image of “China,” it is arguably
the opposite of what the Chinese state desires for its CI soft power
policy. This suggests that the programs as a form of power for China are
ineffective at best.

We might consider the rapid and expansive growth of the CIs as a second
example of how asking different questions offers conflicting
understandings of policy effect. McCord argues that the growth of the
programs is a result of “China’s rising global profile,” something that
Sahlins compares to China’s “technological and military accomplishments,
and its newfound status as the second-largest economy in the world.”
Neither of these claims are factually incorrect. While McCord portrays the
increase in Chinese language studies as a function of this growing
profile, my own research implies that more important questions to ask are
what are students getting out of studying Chinese and how does that
outcome relate to Chinese state power? Are students truly succumbing to a
new global order targeted by China’s soft power policy or abiding by an
American-based “social contract” in which students strive for academic
success in a competitive educational environment? My research suggests
that it is the latter that more effectively drives student choices. In
many ways the “Chineseness” of the Chinese language matters because of its
perceived ability to protect students from the rapid shifts of late
capitalism not because of student affinity for “China.” Thus students
often study Chinese as a “magic bullet” to enhance chances for admissions
to Stanford or a job a Nike, not because of soft power effectiveness.
Within this context, Chinese emerges as the latest do-it-yourself project
to manage the future.

The CI controversy, despite its extremes, is therefore instructive on
multiple levels. I laud Marshall Sahlins’ commitment to guarding against
the corporatization of the university and appreciate Edward McCord’s
tempering of the ubiquitous “China threat” trope that pervades western
media. Grounded anthropological research does not ignore these
perspectives but pushes us to detach policy intentions from assumptions
about policy effect, to understand the disarticulated nature of state
power, to move beyond policy documents as our dominant sources of
knowledge, and to examine the effects of implementation on the people who
are the objects of policy itself.

Jennifer Hubbert is associate professor of anthropology and director, East
Asian Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. Her recent work has
examined the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo, published in Modern
China, City & Society, and positions: east asia cultures critique.
Jennifer’s current book project examines Confucius Institutes.