“HARMONY IS THE MOST valuable of all things,” said Chinese philosopher Confucius two and a half millennia ago. There’s little of it in evidence in the frosty relationship between the founding director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon, Bryna Goodman, and her fellow historian, Glenn May.
Their offices are separated by a ten-seconds walk, but the scholars don’t exchange visits. Their palpable ill feeling reflects growing discord among Western scholars about a decade-old push by China to establish government-funded cultural centres in schools and universities abroad. Intended to boost China’s ‘soft power’, the centres take the name of the peace-espousing sage. They tap into growing global demand for Chinese-language teaching. But they’re also fuelling anxiety about academic freedom.
In America, the Confucius programme has been widely welcomed by universities and school districts, which often don’t have enough funding to provide Chinese-language teachers for all who need them. But critics like Glenn May believe China’s funding comes at a price: that Confucius Institutes (as those established on university campuses are known) and school-based Confucius Classrooms restrain freedom of speech by steering discussion of China away from sensitive subjects.
In June, the American Association of University Professors called for universities to end or revise their contracts with Confucius Institutes (America has 100 of them) because they “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom”. May has also been asking the University of Oregon to close its institute, to no avail. Ms Goodman (who is no longer the institute’s director) says that in funding its interests, China is like any other donor to American universities. She says the institutes have become lodestones of what she calls a “China fear”.
When China opened its first Confucius Institute in 2004 in Seoul, it hoped the new effort would prove as uncontroversial as cultural-outreach programmes sponsored by Western governments, such as the British Council, the Alliance Francaise and Germany’s Goethe-Institut. The idea was to counter fears of China’s rise by raising awareness of a culture often described by the Chinese as steeped in traditions of peace.
Through the Hanban, a government entity, China provides the centres with paid-for instructors and sponsors cultural events at them. Its spending is considerable, and growing rapidly. In 2013, it was $278 million (Rs.1,700 crore), more than six times as much as in 2006. China’s funding for Confucius Institutes amounts to about $100,000-200,000 a year on many campuses, and sometimes more (Oregon received nearly $188,000 in the last academic year). By end 2013, China had established 440 institutes and 646 classrooms serving 850,000 registered students. They are scattered across more than 100 countries, with America hosting more than 40 percent of the combined total. There are plans for another 60 institutes and 350 classrooms to be opened worldwide by the end of 2015.
Goodman argues that the study of China needs all the funding it can get, even if that means taking money from countries with vital interests at stake — whether China, Taiwan, or the United States. She says if China were ever to meddle politically in Oregon’s institute, the Confucius programme would be quickly shut down.
Such assurances don’t address a big concern of critics — that the political influence of Confucius programmes is often subtle and slow-acting. If the critics are right, it’s very subtle indeed. Surveys suggest that in many countries China’s image has not markedly improved over the past decade. The Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, says 42 percent of Americans viewed China favourably in 2007. Last year, only 37 percent did. The political dividends of China’s soft-power spending are far from obvious.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)