Propaganda Proliferator
The Confucius Institutes, under the aegis of the Chinese government, infiltrate nations worldwide in increasingly insidious and imperious ways
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has installed more than 530 so-called Confucius Institutes and 1,100 Confucius classrooms in 149 countries since the organization’s start in Seoul, South Korea, in 2004, according to the latest available tally released in 2017 by Xinhua, the PRC’s official state-run news agency.
The practice of exporting a Chinese brand of cultural learning centers may seem innocuous on the surface. However, the PRC-funded institutes, which are named for the ancient Chinese philosopher, are part of the PRC’s larger coercive scheme, experts say. The institutes claim to belong to a nonprofit, international public education organization established to teach Chinese language and culture abroad, akin to France’s Alliance Francaise or Germany’s Goethe Institute. However, a growing number of experts contend the Confucius Institutes are instead part of an expansive campaign on which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spends an estimated U.S. $10 billion internationally to manipulate the political and information environments of targeted countries.
Located in countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe, the institutes are overseen by an agency of the PRC’s Ministry of Education, known as the Hanban, which includes high-ranking members of the CCP’s propaganda and ideology branches. The structure enables “the realization of Politburo policies in the operations of Confucius Institutes. Insofar as Confucius Institutes and classrooms are installed in colleges and K-12 schools the world around, these educational institutions function as peripheral propaganda branches of the Chinese party-state,” Dr. Marshall Sahlins, a University of Chicago professor, explained in a July 2018 article on the Inside Higher Ed website. The PRC’s central Politburo, which has 25 members, oversees the CCP. In turn, The CCP orchestrates influence operations through its United Front Work Department (UFWD) to co-opt sources of potential challenges to its authority. The Confucius Institutes are part of the UFWD’s overseas efforts. The PRC has said it aspires to establish up to 1,000 such institutes by 2020.
Coercive Architecture
In recent years, the PRC has worked to obfuscate the institutes’ mission by focusing promotional messaging on their proliferation and self-professed success in providing Chinese language skills. However, PRC leaders explicitly described their intentions during the launch and expansion of the institutes and their extensive messaging campaign. In 2010, for example, China’s then-minister of propaganda, Liu Yunshan, told People’s Daily newspaper that the PRC’s overseas propaganda should be “comprehensive, multilevel and wide-ranging. … With regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out propaganda battles against issues such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights and Falun Gong. Our strategy is to proactively take our culture abroad. … We should do well in establishing overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”
The Hanban established many of the institutes in proximity to projects that are part of the PRC’s controversial One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure plan. China’s Xinhua news service reported in October 2017 that “135 Confucius Institutes were set up in 51 countries along the Belt and Road.” OBOR aims to build a trade and infrastructure network to connect Asia with Europe and Africa, but its projects typically come with heavy debt burdens and political strings attached. Host nations ranging from Djibouti and Tajikistan to Sri Lanka and Maldives have learned that OBOR terms mainly benefit Chinese government interests.
Xinhua’s announcement that the Confucius Institutes are being geographically aligned with OBOR projects supports the notion that the institutes are designed as part of an aggressive strategy to control host nations’ political will and undermine their sovereignty. Moreover, activities tied to the supposed cultural centers are increasingly moving beyond mere influence operations to interfere in host countries, a growing number of critics have charged.
“Communist China is infiltrating American universities to meddle with our curricula, silence criticism of their regime and steal intellectual property including sensitive dual-use research,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told The Washington Post newspaper in May 2018. “The Confucius Institutes are the velvet glove around the iron fist of their campaigns on our campuses. The American government needs new tools to protect the integrity of our universities and research and to block academic espionage.”
University Infiltration
Roughly 110 Confucius Institutes are embedded in U.S. colleges and universities, and more than 500 Confucius classrooms have been established in the U.S., according to a Hoover Institution report issued in late November 2018 and titled “Chinese Influence & American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance.” There are 160 such institutes spread across Europe, including 29 in the United Kingdom and 20 in Germany, the report said.
In February 2018 Senate testimony, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray fueled Cruz’s allegations that the institutes were tied to PRC espionage efforts and theft of intellectual property. He testified that Confucius Institutes number among the avenues the PRC uses to gather intelligence from U.S. universities nationally.
“It’s across basically every discipline,” said Wray. “And I think the level of naivete on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues. They’re [the PRC is] exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere.”
PRC efforts to steal research and technology from universities worldwide have been widely reported in the news media. Outright thievery, however, is not always necessary. The PRC preys upon the openness of foreign academic environments. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), for example, has been collaborating with universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. to advance its military technologies and capabilities, a November 2018 study titled, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute revealed. In the past decade or so, the PLA has supported more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad and develop relationships with researchers and institutions worldwide, the report’s author, Alex Joske, found. Chinese President Xi Jinping aims to expand this method of extracting intelligence from foreign universities as part of so-called civilian-military fusion efforts, according to media reports.
Dodging Oversight
The PRC has largely circumvented scrutiny of its Confucius Institutes in the U.S. by skirting laws and customary academic supervision by creating carefully structured partnerships. The Hanban sets up its centers jointly with a host U.S. university, providing a U.S. $150,000 grant in seed money, the Hoover report found. Then the PRC provides U.S. $100,000 to U.S. $200,000 per year in direct funding to the often cash-strapped U.S. institution. Grants for the Confucius classrooms at secondary schools start with U.S. $50,000 initially and then U.S. $15,000 annually, the report said.
Under such arrangements, the Hanban, working through a Chinese university, supplies teachers, textbooks and other materials that promote its cultural standpoint and that are subject to Chinese Communist Party control, the Hoover report said. As a result, institute teachers aren’t required to have green cards or pay U.S. taxes. They also are under the thumb of the Hanban.
The Hanban mandates through contracts with the host universities that the institutes’ activities must follow Chinese law, and terms of the arrangement must remain confidential, the Hoover report said. The Hanban relies on similar nondisclosure agreements in other countries as well. “Activities benefiting from Chinese funding or commercial ties with China are all the more concerning when Chinese influence is less easy to trace,” the Hoover report explained.
Incidents in which the PRC and its Confucius Institutes have interfered with academic freedoms on campuses have garnered headlines from Europe to Latin America to Australia and New Zealand. At a university conference in Portugal in 2014, for example, an administrator from the Confucius Institute censored materials related to Taiwan, confiscating the materials and removing Taiwan-related pages from the programs, the Inside Higher Ed website reported. In May 2016, administrators at a university in Peru that harbors a Confucius Institute canceled a painting exhibit featuring Falun Gong Chinese artists.
Doris Liu, a Chinese-born Canadian journalist and filmmaker, released a documentary in 2017 titled In the Name of Confucius that identified threats the institutes pose to Canada, the U.S. and other countries. Among other things, her film exposed the institutes for banning practitioners of Falun Gong, an exercise and meditation movement that the Chinese government has tried to suppress for two decades. “Our fundamental values are at risk or damaged. The institutes teach propaganda by sneaking it into our campuses,” Liu told the South China Morning Post newspaper in a 2018 interview. “First, there is the human rights discrimination. Second, it’s academic independence.”
Under pressure from the CCP, Chinese students and scholar associations also play a role in reaching and controlling Chinese living around the world as well as host country citizens, according to the November 2018 Hoover report. “Chinese scholars and diplomats have sought to influence on-campus debates in China’s favor and have even protested when American universities have exercised their right to invite speakers whom China identifies as unfriendly. Finally, some Chinese students and scholars have exploited the collaborative research environments on U.S. campuses to obtain sensitive American technologies,” the report found.
Student cells affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party have emerged on campuses in Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, the U.S. and elsewhere that effectively extend PRC surveillance efforts, according to an April 2018 article in Foreign Policy magazine. The cells are “part of a strategy, now expanded under Chinese President Xi Jinping, to extend direct party control globally and to insulate students and scholars abroad from the influence of ‘harmful ideology,’ sometimes by asking members to report on each other’s behaviors and beliefs,” the article said.
Samantha Hoffman, a visiting fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, told Foreign Policy, “You still know that if you actively protest against [the party], or if you make some kinds of comments, you know that that could harm you later on,” she said. “Information gets around. It’s a way of controlling what you are willing to do.”
The PRC touts the cells among its propaganda successes. “The rising number of overseas party branches is a new phenomenon, showing the growing influence of the [Chinese Communist Party] and China,” according to a November 2017 article in the Global Times newspaper, a party mouthpiece. “Overseas party cells are also responsible for promoting party and government policies.”
Increasing Awareness
On the basis of the prevalence of such improprieties, the U.S. National Association of Scholars (NAS), along with other higher education organizations such as the American Association of University Professors in the U.S. and the Canadian Association of University Teachers in Canada, has advocated for the removal of Confucius Institutes nationwide. A 2017 NAS report, titled, “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” found that in accepting such funding “to a large extent, universities have made improper concessions that jeopardize academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Sometimes these concessions are official and in writing; more often they operate as implicit policies.” To keep institute funding flowing and access to Chinese resources entailed in the contracts, many cash-strapped universities censor themselves, experts explain.
As public knowledge of the institutes’ activities has grown and pressure from critics has intensified, various international universities have ended their relationships with the institutes, including Osaka Sangyo University in Japan, McMaster University and the Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada, the University of Lyon in France, Stuttgart Media University and the University of Hohenheim in Germany, and Stockholm University in Sweden.
More than 10 U.S. universities, including Pennsylvania State University, the universities of Chicago, Iowa, Michigan at Ann Arbor, Minnesota at Twin Cities and North, South and West Florida, have also moved to shutter the institutes on their campuses — the majority of them in the past year. A bipartisan effort by Texas Congressmen Michael McCaul and Henry Cuellar, for example, led to the 2018 closure of two Confucius Institutes affiliated with Texas A&M University. In a March 2018 letter to their state’s universities, the representatives called the PRC-backed institutions “a threat to our nation’s security by serving as a platform for China’s intelligence collection and political agenda.” They added, “We have a responsibility to uphold our American values of free expression and to do whatever is necessary to counter any behavior that poses a threat to our democracy.”
Other universities that had been evaluating whether to open Confucius Institutes, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, have decided against such plans in recent years. A handful of schools, including the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Southern Utah University and Savannah State University, however, have opened institutes, holding the number of institutes open in the U.S. at about 100.
Government Protection Initiatives
Governments and universities worldwide should keep a vigilant eye on activities related to the Confucius Institutes and related PRC influence and control campaigns that take advantage of the openness of democratic systems abroad. The PRC’s authoritarian influence campaign is not about attraction or persuasion, but instead it focuses on distraction and manipulation, experts contend. Such interference activities erode the foundation of trust that makes open, democratic and multicultural systems work, and they can ultimately erode sovereignty, experts warn.
In the U.S. Senate, Cruz introduced legislation in May 2018 designed to more closely monitor foreign governments’ co-opting of U.S. educational institutions, such as the PRC’s activities through its Confucius Institutes. His proposed law, called the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act of 2018, would also make PRC funding of the Confucius Institutes comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In the U.S. House, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina introduced a corresponding proposal called the Foreign Influence Transparency Act of 2018, which also mandates universities disclose donations from foreign sources of U.S. $50,000 or more. The U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, enacted into law in August 2018, now prohibits the Defense Department from funding Chinese language programs that host Confucius Institutes unless they obtain a waiver. The new terms may lead to closing more institutes, such as the one at the University of Rhode Island, which accepted PRC and Defense Department funds. Given mounting concerns about PRC coercion and espionage, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is mulling whether to have more extensive background checks and other restrictions on Chinese students in the U.S., Reuters reported in late November 2018. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department shortened the length of visas to one year for Chinese graduate students studying aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing to reduce the potential threat to national security. They had been granted for five years previously.
The U.S. is also considering conducting more extensive checks on Chinese students before they attend U.S. schools, Reuters reported.
“Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” a senior U.S. official told Reuters. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”
