Below is a chapter excerpted from China Incorporated, a new book by academic Kerry Brown. Read Asia Times’ review of the book here.
It has to be said that Confucius Institutes are curious entities. Unlike the Goethe Institute of Germany or the Alliance Francaise from France, they are almost all located within established non-Chinese universities. Some of these are very eminent institutions. The School of Oriental and African Studies in London, for instance, and the University of Chicago had such Institutes. (The latter was closed down in 2020.)
This means that from the start, they have existed in a far more complex environment that the stand-alone, more autonomous representative entities from other countries. The British Council, for example, tends to operate either independently of the other arms of the British state, or, in China, as the cultural arm of the embassy due to regulations there. Even so, in terms of office, badging, governance and identity, there is a lot of independence.
Established via the Hanban (the abbreviation for the Office of Chinese Council International) under the Ministry of Education in Beijing in 2004, as of 2019 Confucian Institutes across the world numbered 530, with an aim of opening 1,000.
Nestling in universities, they, however bright the idea operating in this way in the past may have been, were doomed to experience a vexatious fate.
Human Rights Watch in a document issued in 2019 put this unequivocally. The institutes are, it said. “fundamentally incompatible with a robust commitment to academic freedom. Confucius Institutes (CI) are extensions of the Chinese government that censor certain topics and perspectives in course materials on political grounds, and use hiring practices that take political loyalty into consideration.”
Despite this, it is clear that the perception of what the Confucius Institutes do races ahead of what any significant body of evidence shows that they actually do. Across the very different environments in which they are active, through different countries and in different local terrains, and according to the specifics of the institution they happen to be embedded in, Confucius Institutes are a mixed bunch.
My own experience since being aware of them from the mid-2000s onwards bears this out. Even back then, there was plenty of speculation about what these things were up to. Their closed doors and the ways in which they seemed to operate as an extension of the Chinese state right at the heart of liberal institutions, gave force to the worst possible interpretation. But the overwhelming impression I started to get was just how odd they were.
Confucius Institutes don’t, for a start, have a common narrative they tell. They each testify to a very different story. This may depend on the leadership each one has, and the opportunities offered to them wherever they are located. Chinese power as it flows through these is more akin to a somewhat reactive, opportunistic force adapting itself to the environment it flows into.
If countries or particular universities want to allow large-scale events celebrating the noble achievements of the Communist Party’s great leaders, events to which audiences might even turn up (even if only to devour the food after the formal event), then there are plenty of Confucius Institute directors who would be glad to step in.
But most of the time, Confucius Institutes are involved in language learning, very broad cultural education and doing what they said they would be doing – addressing the vast knowledge and linguistic deficit of the outside world.
If some of that looks like it might be presenting China in a positive light, then with a global audience that clearly has limited knowledge of China, and a country that is fast becoming more prominent, one has to ask the simple question: What is better – the provision of some knowledge about the place, or none at all?
If education systems in the outside world provided more material on Chinese culture and language, Confucius Institutes would have a far smaller audience. Their limited success in the past decade or so has been almost wholly on the back of having no competition in supplying this very basic education.
What is clear is that in a few cases, for entities run by an organization meant to promote China’s image abroad and increase what is sometimes called its soft power, they have been excellent at achieving the exact opposite.
China’s worst enemies could not have done more damage to the nation’s image than the remarkable attempts made in 2014 at a convening of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS) in Portugal. Zealous officials from Hanban and the local Confucius Institute, cosponsors of the gathering, were accused by conference attendees of taking the printed booklet for the meeting – some of them in the hands of attendees – and ripping out a page acknowledging support from the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
This was made even more inflammatory because of the presence of Madame Xu Lin, the global head of Hanban, who was due to speak. Her hasty departure, after protests were lodged with local authorities, was an inglorious and humiliating exit, rather than the victory lap of someone who had made a good point well.
Why the Chinese government does not want to funnel all its work through far more transparently marked Chinese cultural centers like the one that exists in the center of Sydney is an interesting question.
One has to acknowledge too that Confucius Institutes in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East are very different beasts from those in North America, Australia and Europe, where the political hang-ups are different.
As lightning rods for complaints and suspicion and as sources of seething discontent in some universities where large numbers of staff disagree with Confucius Institutes being present, it is hard to imagine a more clunky and counterproductive model.
Despite that, hard evidence of Confucius Institutes really effecting deep change in the mindsets of those around them, wherever they are located, is hard to find. And there are examples of some hosting riskier, more diverse events, ones which were often critical of the Chinese government.
This too is wholly dependent on who is in charge of them. In my experience, the main issue with many Confucius Institutes is not their activism, but that they do precisely nothing, and frustrate their hosts by taking up space and sometimes funding while simply stagnating. That, more than any other reason, is probably why there were cases of some closing from 2019.
The Chinese government was unwise a decade and a half ago to invest so much optimism into Confucius Institutes. It was a marriage made in Hell from the start for the simple fact that anything that placed foreign universities in direct relationship with the Chinese state in this way was going to become very complex and, without very clear terms of reference and mutual understanding, stood a good risk of being often very messy.
Leaving aside the rest of the world, one need only look at the situation in the UK to bear this out. Of the major universities there, for places like Oxford and Cambridge their internal governance and sheer byzantine opacity competes well even with the Communist Party itself. Unsurprisingly, Confucius Institutes made no inroads here.
At the London School of Economics, and Nottingham, and other places, their fate was tied to the complexities of these very different hosts. In the UK, no two universities are wholly alike. Their leadership, too, changes remarkably quickly. Today’s vice chancellor with a keen interest in China and desire to do more work there is often replaced by one with a completely contrary view.
In the heyday of university engagement with education in the PRC, Nottingham and Liverpool opened different kinds of campus centers or learning centers in-country. They therefore could link their Confucius Institutes to larger strategic plans.
Some like Manchester University, could in parallel have large numbers of Chinese students, a Confucius Institute and a center for the study of China with completely parallel objectives and different governance, funding and staff.
In other places, like Lancaster, Confucius Institutes gave an extra capacity for language and cultural learning that was unlikely to have funding were the Hanban not at hand.
The one thing one can say, about this single example of one country in Europe, was that the Confucius Institutes may have been derived from a common model, and come associated with a common mother institution in Beijing, but they had to fit into radically different, often fast changing contexts.
On top of this was the very inconvenient truth that of all western institutions, universities were going to be the hardest for the Chinese government to deal with. Beyond their huge diversity, there is also the one underpinning feature they share – a commitment to Enlightenment ideas of pedagogy which, in the words of dissident Liu Xiaobo, privileged analysis and self-criticism.
The British government, were it asked, could tell the Chinese government exactly how easy its own universities were to organize. Academics are infamously hostile to management of any kind – thus the remarkable decentralized model of Oxbridge where the vice chancellor is no more than the servant of college heads where, in some cases (Trinity in Cambridge for instance) the incumbent might be a far more powerful and higher profile figure.
Enforcing consensus and gaining friends in this kind of environment is either exhausting, or impossible, even for those that spend their lives working from within. The question is therefore why China decided to try to forge partnerships with a vastly complicated set of institutions among which the only commonality was their fierce resistance to being told what to do by anyone outside. Surely, they were naïve and did not know what they were getting themselves involved in.
There are other ways in which universities have been put in a far more complex relationship with China than through hosting of Confucius Institutes. For separate reasons, and largely through their own agency and compliance, in the case of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US (the Five Eyes, though in this particular case more akin to the Five Takers) enormous and ever rising numbers of Chinese students have come to do undergraduate, or post-graduate degrees.
From a slow trickle at the end of the 1990s, there are now 140,00 Chinese students in Britain alone, with about the same number in Australia and double that in the US. The University of Sydney is a case in point – with 6,000 students from the PRC in 2012, this has now climbed to something closer to 25,000. These contribute well over a quarter of all university revenue.
This means that, through active and willing collaboration, the great bastions of free speech and dispassionate enquiry are now largely bankrolled by citizens from a totalitarian country consistently accused of imprisoning anyone who dissents from the government line.
It is not, therefore, Confucius Institutes that should be watched fiercely as the great source of influence here, but the vast, high-fee-paying cohort of students. The Confucius Institutes are a mere tiny side show, even if the worst fears of their behavior are assumed to be true.
Even in this narrative, however, reality when viewed dispassionately turns out to be less amenable to those committed to the pure “China Threat creed.” Around 2014, while I was at the University of Sydney, reports in some Australian papers started declaring that the Chinese government was running spy rings among its students in country.
This was a bold claim. As someone actually based there day to day and dealing with this issue, I had not seen the compelling evidence the journalist working on this story had found. Nor, for that matter, had said journalist ever bothered to get in touch to get my views.
Our own research showed that Chinese students coming to study with us, if they had been working as deep cover agents, were at the same time dealing with isolation, immense financial pressure (far from being from wealthy families, they were often funded by networks of friends and relatives, which meant failure was far more than an academic issue, and had long-term impact on the rest of their lives) and well-documented prejudice locally.
While most Australians were friendly and accommodating, there were a minority that felt it permissible to berate and discriminate against Asian-looking students who crossed their path. In this context, the real, living, breathing Chinese students I got to know in Sydney were hard working, usually very low profile, and focused on doing everything they could to get through courses taught in a second language.
They were often homesick. The newspaper stories probably worsened that by creating a strong sense that they were far from welcomed in some quarters of their new adopted, temporary home. Nor did many reports in the media look much at the story of the high number of suicides by Chinese studying overseas.
It was easier and more dramatic to talk about spying. Of the 6,000 students at Sydney University at that time, maybe a tiny handful had been tasked with sensitive work and might be categorized as spies.
I am no expert on intelligence work but I would hazard a guess that, by its nature, not a lot of people can engage with it. This is for the simple reason that as an area of high risk, anyone running a spy ring would want to keep things small and tight.
And it would probably have been easy enough to work out where the main areas for covert work might be – those with a high component of intellectual property that could be stolen, or working in computing, engineering, places like that.
I can’t imagine there being a great appetite for the Chinese government to receive top secret strapline reports on the musings of the members of the school of social science, or the literature department. Likewise in business studies or accounting, where the vast bulk of Chinese overseas students were based.
“Chinese students as a vast cohort of spies” is one of the more pernicious myths promoted by certain media outlets. These reports were, and are, particularly corrosive because, of course, no one would ever overtly state they felt all Chinese students were indeed spies – but making claims about a limited number casts a shadow over everyone else. Paranoia ensues. In the worst cases, as one saw in 2020, there are crude, racist attacks.
Intelligent, evidence-based, well contextualized reports on areas of real risk, with a proper analysis of what might be done to mitigate this – that is highly necessary. But that would be something to be done only when one understands the specific areas that need protection, and why. It would also need to apply for anyone, whether from China or from Timbuktu.
What does the case of Confucius Institutes and Chinese actions in Western universities support, then? Are they clear evidence of a comprehensive, well focused, destructive and (most crucially of all) effective contemporary Chinese power campaign? Or, on the contrary, are they signs of opportunistic behavior by an entity with new capacity but an entity that clearly has severe limitations on both its mode of operations and what these yield for it?
The best we can say when we review the evidence is that, yes, we do see China trying to influence and use power, but over a specific and well identified set of issues. Rather than a masterful campaign by an adept, well-concealed “hidden hand” that stretches across global issues, we see an effort more akin to trembling, grabbing and upsetting things as China tries to promote its interests.
In this area, therefore, here is the very best verdict we can give so far: Unproven.
A final word on this. The greatest problem for Confucius Institutes, or for any Chinese campaign for influence, at least in Europe and North America, is the lack of an attractive alternative set of ideas to put before Western audiences.
Confucius Institutes are not effective disseminators of Chinese soft power for the government above and beyond the reasons given already because they do not have that fundamental thing that would make them so – a seductive, compelling belief system that can win hearts and minds.
Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics is not a worldview that is either easy to understand at first acquaintance or attractive when it is understood. That is not to say it doesn’t work for China, its host country. But it is unlikely to work in any place that is not China.
The clue, as ever, is in the name. To reinforce this point, some in the West should pause their agonizing and self-doubt for a second and observe that, still today, universities in America, Europe and Australia are the ones that attract Chinese students; there’s no trend in which Western students suddenly flock to be immersed in the attractions of China.
For the moment this shows that, for many young Chinese at least, the West continues to have potency and attractiveness. If only the promoters of the hysterical “China Threat” meme in the West would sound as if they held this view too.
Kerry Brown is a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. With 30 years experience of life in China, he has worked in education, business and government, including a term as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing. He is author of over 20 books on contemporary China, including his latest, China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One, published September 7 by Bloomsbury Publishing, from which this article is excerpted with kind permission.