China’s Confucius Institutes Go South, The Wire China, Oct. 1, 2023.
While Western governments are turning against Chinese cultural centers, developing countries are giving them a warmer welcome.
With cameras snapping away, nearly 300 scholars, businessmen and government officials gathered in a university hall earlier this month to celebrate the opening of a new Confucius Institute at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil. The fourteenth in the South American country, the school was hailed as a “new symbol of Sino-Brazilian friendship.”
Brazil’s growing number of Confucius Institutes — state-funded programs that promote Chinese language and culture — is part of a wider trend of expansion as China makes a push into the global South.
In June, Saudi Arabia inaugurated its first Confucius Institute in the kingdom’s capital, Riyadh. In March, officials in Djibouti toasted the second institute in the East African country: It has already enrolled more than 600 students. These new chapters are among some 500 state-linked schools operating across the world since the initiative began in 2004.
The often merry scenes at their launch events contrast with the attitude towards Confucius Institutes in other parts of the world, where they are facing ever more scrutiny and restrictions over their ties to Beijing. Concerns have grown that these state-sponsored schools could export censorship and propaganda, influence academic research and conduct espionage.
In the U.S., 111 Confucius Institutes have closed or are in the process of closing, according to the advocacy group, National Association of Scholars, leaving only about ten in operation as of June, while the Trump administration designated its U.S. headquarters as a foreign mission in 2020, citing the organization’s opacity and state-directed nature. The U.K. has stopped short of banning the 30 institutes operating there as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised last year, but it is reviewing their funding while launching new free speech legislation targeted partly at them.
A wave of institute closures has swept across Germany in recent months as government officials urged universities to critically assess their collaborations. “The Confucius Institutes are co‑funded by the Chinese government. The [Chinese] Communist Party uses them to advance its political agenda,” a spokesperson for the German Ministry of Education told The Wire.
Confucius Institutes ostensibly provide language and cultural exchange programmes by partnering with local universities and schools. Supervised by China’s Ministry of Education, its headquarters in Beijing typically supplies each institute with start-up and annual grants, teaching materials, a Chinese director and staff. In one case in Nairobi, Kenya, the Chinese government funded a brand new building to house the school.
For developing countries, the opportunities for engagement with China in education and more are often precisely what they are seeking.
Public perception of Confucius Institutes in Latin America remains largely positive, according to Parsifal D’Sola Alvarado, founder of the Andrés Bello Foundation’s China Latin American Research Center, which has tracked their spread in the region. Providing both funding and expertise, they are great resources for local universities that often could not afford to build their own Chinese department, he says.
“It’s very much a two-way street,” D’Sola says. “This is not only China pushing for greater engagement. This is also the Latin American side wanting a larger Chinese participation within the hemisphere.”
The growing presence of Confucius Institutes in developing countries echoes China’s broader efforts to rally the global South and shape a new world order. In August, China led efforts to expand the BRICS group of countries for the first time in 13 years. Last month, Beijing announced a special fund of $10 billion for its Global Development Initiative, which Chinese leader Xi Jinping proposed in 2021 to help reduce poverty.
…China is having an influence on the values that these young African students are absorbing and to what extent they are absorbing democratic values or not.
“China will remain a member of the big family of developing countries,” said Chinese Vice President Han Zheng at the United Nations General Assembly last week.
In some countries, there are expectations that cultural exchange could pave the way for other collaborations. Studies have shown that Confucius Institutes can facilitate trade and market access. Analyzing data from 1996 to 2008, a 2012 study by U.S. scholars found that Confucius Institutes increased trade with developing countries by up to 27 percent and foreign direct investment by 46 to 130 percent.
Institutes also sometimes function as development offices to set up further partnerships between universities, according to Sam Dunning, director of the UK-China Transparency, a British charity that has investigated the operations of Confucius Institutes.
“The potential to use the institutes to build up a broader relationship with Chinese institutions is a big draw,” Dunning says, adding that as a result, universities risk giving oversight of partnerships to their Chinese counterparts.
Critics say many higher education institutions overlook the strings attached.
“Confucius Institutes represent an anchor for China’s cultural diplomacy and that’s where the danger lies,” says Gregory Lee, a professor at University of St. Andrews and former board chairman of the Lyon Confucius Institute in France that closed in 2014 over interference from Beijing. “It’s seen as a cheap fix for promoting the Chinese language. But because what you get alongside language is all of the cultural and political narrative, you get an entirely biased, one-sided vision of China.”
The problem is pronounced in countries where there is no independent tradition of Sinology or Chinese studies. “There isn’t really any kind of yardstick to measure them against,” Lee says.
In one prominent case, a Slovak scholar alleged in 2021 that a Confucius Institute director had issued a veiled physical threat against him over his study on the risks of Sino-Slovak academic cooperation. (The institute director, later removed from the position, insisted that the line “You should be in very big stress, when you are walking through the street” was said in jest.)
D’Sola from the Andrés Bello Foundation fears that the institutes’ growing role in regional academic circles could skew research towards topics that only reflect positively on China over the long term.
“We have seen that local academics [in South America] tend to shy away from certain topics because they fear losing access to funding and engagement on an academic level with Chinese counterparts,” he says.
Similar dynamics play out in Africa, where Confucius Institutes operate in 47 out of 54 countries and Chinese language proficiency can help local students gain jobs with Chinese companies.
“It’s a very significant number. It has become a very powerful engine of knowledge diplomacy for the Chinese government in Africa,” says Rosemary Salomone, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York who wrote about the institutes in her book, The Rise of English. The fact that Confucius Institutes are housed in universities yet limit what can be discussed in classrooms sets them apart from similar institutions like the U.K.’s British Council, France’s L’Alliance Francaise or Germany’s Goethe Instituts, Salomone says.
“The long term [impact] is that China is having an influence on the values that these young African students are absorbing and to what extent they are absorbing democratic values or not,” she says.
Beijing has sought to manage its cultural outposts’ reputation. In 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian accused the U.S. of “demonizing and stigmatizing” the project, following the designation of its U.S. headquarters as a foreign mission. The same year, the Beijing headquarters rebranded itself to downplay its affiliation with the government. The global network is now managed by the Chinese International Education Foundation (CIEF), which describes itself as a non-profit educational institution.
…the narrative of a Confucius Institute will always be a standard narrative, which is being directed by Beijing.
In a statement to The Wire, CIEF said the institutes’ activities had never gone beyond the boundaries of education. “The development of Confucius Institutes is the objective reflection of the local demand for learning Chinese language and understanding Chinese culture in countries around the world,” it says. “Confucius Institutes are established simply to meet this demand, so there is no so-called ‘expansion’ to speak of.”
Critics argue the changes to its structure are largely cosmetic. “That’s not to say that all the teachers and interns that come and teach in Confucius Institutes are somehow part of a big scheme to subvert democracy,” Lee says. “But the narrative of a Confucius Institute will always be a standard narrative, which is being directed by Beijing.”