MCLC: China's Trojan Horse (3)

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China’s Trojan Horse (3)
With appreciation and mutual due respects -
As stand-alone points, it is difficult to disagree: corporate influence does not justify Chinese state influence; your concerns are mine too.
But there is always a larger context. Our social reality is one that is stratified by forces and phenomena of different orders of magnitude/scale, that entail varying degrees of significance in their implications. The article conveniently ignores the context and as such, wittingly or otherwise, fails to capture the fuller picture. Certainly, there's no connecting of dots.
While such tunnel-vision has its benefits for micro-analysis, they come at great cost to more complete analysis. Looking at matters so parochially, it becomes easy to lose sight of their whys and wherefores, and to inflate their seriousness. And so it is seems with the controversy over Confucian Institutes. Becoming the author's single-issue obsession (specialisation?) of analysis, it has led to the charge that they are a "Trojan horse subverting US higher education." No hyperbole? As an observer, the sense I get is of a tremendous fear of the outside. It's difficult not to detect Cold War ideological overtones.
Referring to it as fear-mongering is not to deny the reality of Chinese state interference; it is to say that the given analysis does not adequately appreciate the possibilities that Confucian Institutes open up despite state-interference. The evidence after all reveal a mixture of outcomes, according to my own research. Chicago may be able to reject CI grants but I've been told by directors of less-endowed schools that many China-related talks at their institutions would simply not happen without CI funds. Is no dialogue necessarily better than ostensibly state-controlled dialogue? Can nothing be learnt from the "other side", pernicious as they may seem? CIs present a  so-called crisis but are crises not constituted by 危/danger as well as 机/opportunity, as China scholars ought to know? Have we already made up our minds?
In any case, forgive me for i've detained you and members on this list for long enough. I was merely trying to point out that US universities do not need outside help spreading the "fear of speaking freely", they do it very well themselves. In fact, much of it has already been accomplished, paradoxically, by the very values they supposedly cherish, as argued by Liah Greenfeld in "Back to 1984: The Role of American Universities in Dismantling Liberal Democracy," Society 53, 3 (May/June 2016).
Best, Tung-yi
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 17, 2017
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