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Following almost a decade of tension and unrest following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, President Bill Clinton normalized US-Sino relations by signing the U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000, intertwining both nation’s economies and smoothing over issues regarding democracy in the South China Sea. Less than one year later, under President George W. Bush, relations continued to warm with China and the United States growing its trade relationship and working together to pacify an ever ambitious North Korean state (Council on Foreign Relations, n.d.). The future looked bright for Sino-American relations.
The Rise
On November 17, 2004, the first Confucius Institute in the United States was unveiled on the campus of the University of Maryland (People’s Daily Online 2004). Under the auspices of the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Office of Chinese Language Council International [Hanban], Confucius Institutes were created with the stated goal of developing Chinese language programs abroad, providing information about Chinese study, and growing interest in the study of contemporary China (Confucius Institute Online 2011).
Although progress was slow to start, with only eleven Confucius Institutes founded in the United States by the fall of 2006, including the University of Maryland, just four years later some 70 Confucius Institutes were being sponsored by many of the most prestigious universities in the United States, including Stanford University, Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Attitudes regarding the growth of Confucius Institutes seemed warm at first. In the waning years of his administration, President of China Hu Jintao visited the White House in January 2011 while the U.S. economy sputtered and struggled, still feeling the effects of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, while the Chinese economy was growing exponentially (France 24 2011). At the same time, he visited the Chicago Public School’s Confucius Institute, which had been one of the first to open in 2005. According to a New York Times article, students and faculty at Walton Payton College Preparatory Academy cheered for Hu during his speech, while at the same time he dined with then- Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago business leaders (Wines 2011).
Though there were few concerns at the time about the partisanship of Confucius Institutes, a 2011 edition of The Economist did find that while there was little evidence to suggest that American Confucius Institutes were spreading the Chinese Communist Party’s viewpoints, “An online Confucius Institute, also supported by the Chinese government, includes an article noting the “active” efforts of some unspecified Confucius Institutes in opposing independence for Tibet and Xinjiang, pro- democracy activism and the Falun Gong sect” (The Economist 2011). Abroad, however, cracks were beginning to show themselves. In 2009, Yoav Ariel, Dean of Students at Tel Aviv University, shut down a Falun Gong art exhibit without ever seeing viewing it. An Israeli judge later found that Ariel and Tel Aviv University had, “…violated freedom of expression and succumbed to pressure from the Chinese embassy” (Weston 2012, 293). According to Tel Aviv University’s website, Ariel must have faced few consequences because he still taught at the university as late as 2021.
In the United States, despite cooling relations between Beijing and Washington following the election of Xi Jinping as President of China, Confucius Institutes continued to expand. By the Fall of 2014, 99 Confucius Institutes had opened their doors to American Students, but at the same time two closed their doors. In September 2014 both the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University announced that they were immediately severing ties with Hanban and closing their Confucius Institutes. The University of Chicago cited controversial media comments by Director-General Xu Lin as the primary factor in ending its relationship with Hanban (Schmidt 2014). This decision came in light of an earlier decision undertaken by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario to close its Confucius Institute after a Chinese language instructor was dismissed by Hanban for allegedly practicing Falun Gong (Schmidt 2014). 250 miles away in State College, Pennsylvania, administrators ended negotiations with Hanban after the organization failed to support PSU’s goal of expanding the Confucius Institute’s resources to include the study of politics, science, and environmentalism (Calderaro 2014).
The Hanban refused to adapt its plan for the Confucius Institute to Penn State’s growing Asian Studies department. In an effort to move forward, the university stopped using Chinese teachers from Hanban and the material that it provided; this caused University officials to question whether the program was worth keeping (Calderaro 2014).
Prior to its Confucius Institute shutting down, Ted Foss, then Associate Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, stated in an interview with The Nation, “Thank goodness we have money for the Center for East Asian Studies; we can go there for these kinds of projects [on controversial topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, or Fulan Gong]” (Sahlins 2013). Foss also stated that there was little pressure by Hanban on grants, research projects, and programming. Foss’ relief may have come with headaches for administrators at universities which have smaller endowments and smaller budgets. While the University of Chicago may have been able to avoid conflicts with Hanban over its programming by discussing controversial issues through different centers or programs, Confucius Institutes where budgets are smaller and East Asian Studies departments are less developed may have had no choice in offering decidedly pro-China programs.
The Fall
While the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State severed their relations with Hanban, the American Association of University Professors released a report which criticized Hanban and Confucius Institutes, stating that they were “inconsistent” with principles of academic freedom, governance, and institutional autonomy (American Association of University Professors 2014). The AAUP’s report, however, did not detail any examples regarding abuses by Confucius Institutes or Hanban itself in the United States, instead targeting the potential for abuse and a perceived lack of transparency by not making Hanban university agreements and contracts public. In light of souring relations between Washington and China and a growing perception among academics that Confucius Institutes were limiting academic freedom, between 2014 and 2017 three more universities would close their Confucius Institutes, but only 13 additional were founded.
After Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election and the Republican Party achieved majorities in both chambers of Congress, Confucius Institutes were not immediately targeted, despite language in the Republican Party platform which attacked the Chinese Communist Party and comments made by President Trump himself. In the lead up to the 2018 Midterm Election the rhetoric began to shift however, especially as Republican polling numbers struggled to match that of the Democratic Party. One poll taken by Quinnipiac University in January 2018 found Democrats to be as many as 17 points ahead of Republicans (Real Clear Politics 2018). In a letter to Miami Dade College and the Universities of North, South, and West Florida, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) urged the end of Confucius Institutes and alleged that they influenced the critical analysis of modern Chinese society and politics and served as a part of the CCP’s propaganda arm (Rubio 2018). \
To Rubio’s credit, his line of reasoning wasn’t completely unfounded. In a 2011 speech at the Beijing headquarters of Hanban, Li Changchun, a member of the Chinese Politburo, the most important political body in China, and Chairman of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization (the CCP’s propaganda arm), shared the effects of the Confucius Institute project.
The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for extending our culture abroad. It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical (Rubio 2018).
Once denigrated and considered an unfortunate relic of the past, Confucianism has grown within the last two decades to become one of the most important pieces of the Chinese political canon. Since 2000, Confucianism has re-entered China’s political sphere as an important ideological piece in solving much of the country’s issues, namely a lack of nationalism. While not all scholars agree with Confucianism being a necessary part in understanding Chinese nationalism, it has nonetheless become an important part of the rhetoric promoted by today’s Chinese Communist Party.
Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP has worked tirelessly to ensure contemporary interpretations of Confucius texts in China are made with the rhetoric of past CCP leaders (notably Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping) in mind, and that they harmonize the CCP’s attempts to centralize political power and maintain order. In effect, by modernizing Confucianism—or more accurately, institutionalizing it—the CCP ensures there are no questions regarding its legitimacy, provides a necessary moral framework for China’s rapid economic growth, and creates a “traditional” cultural export that the CCP can sell to the rest of the intellectual world. Thus, it is not particurally surprising that a scholar such as Confucius, who was at one time so despised that his deceased relatives had their bodies exhumed and hung from trees, and whose crypt was laced with dynamite by Mao’s Red Guard and essentially obliterated, was chosen as the face of China’s soft power growth in academia (Ye 2009).
Whether or not Confucius Institutes are the unfortunate victim of bad press and a name which has become entangled with Xi Jinping thought and contemporary Chinese socialism is difficult to say, and there is limited scholarship on the issue, even in the United States where the criticism is among its loudest. Despite this, the Department of Justice launched the China Initiative in November 2018. According to the DOJ, the China Initiative was a large-scale effort to investigate and prosecute alleged instances of economic espionage in the United States by Chinese agents (Louthan 2022). It did nothing of the such, however. According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, of the 19 cases that were prosecuted under the China Initiative which dealt with university professors or researchers, 14 of them were regarding failure to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities (Louthan 2022). For example, a federal jury found Professor Feng “Franklin” Tao of the University of Kansas guilty in April 2022 after allegations he defrauded the government by not disclosing his work with Fuzhou University and used federal grants to fund his research in China (Ruwitch 2022). At the time of his arrest in 2019, the University of Kansas still sponsored a Confucius Institute on its campus, but there are no links between the Confucius Institute and Professor Tao.
Just two months before the DOJ launched the China Initiative, President Donald Trump signed into law The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, a bill which is passed annually that sets out the Department of Defense’s budget and policies. This bill was unique, however; it was the first of its kind to include a section prohibiting the allocation of Defense funds to fund a university’s Chinese language program (U.S. Congress 2019). This language was later expanded in the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 to prohibit the allocation of Defense funds to any university which hosted a Confucius Institute, essentially forcing universities to pick between their agreements with Hanban and the Department of Defense (U.S. Congress 2021). Unsurprisingly, many universities sided with the lucrative grants offered by the DOD, and as of May 2022, 18 of the 58 Confucius Institutes who offered a reason for shuttering their doors stated the National Defense Authorization Act as the reason why.
However, since the Democratic Party has taken majorities in Congress and gained control of the Presidency in 2020, language targeting Confucius Institutes has been excluded from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, meaning that universities that host Confucius Institutes will once again be able to enter into contracts with the Department of Defense and receive appropriated funds (U.S. Congress 2022). In the face of continued instability within Congress, however, it remains unlikely that American universities will again enter into agreements with Hanban.
This shift in policy doesn’t preclude Democrats from blame in the campaign to end Confucius Institutes in America. From 2018 to 2021, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) rigorously lobbied the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Tufts University to end their Confucius Institutes, citing comments by FBI Director Christopher Wray about the FBI’s concerns regarding Confucius Institutes and the effects of the NDAA.
The Chinese Communist Party spends millions annually to fund Confucius Institutes. China’s government does this because it wants a foothold on American college campuses which it uses to bully students, stifle critical thinking, and influence public perception. China’s government is able to use money to influence research, buy off professors, and even steal intellectual property that Americans fund (Moulton 2021).
From Senator Rubio’s letter and Rep. Moulton’s lobbying to the tightening of Defense funds, pressure was mounting on universities to end their Confucius Institutes. From 2018 to 2022, 99 Confucius Institutes closed their doors in the United States. This is same number that had been open in 2014. Most universities gave no stated reason for closing their Confucius Institutes, but there is enough evidence to suggest that continued political pressure by Congress and the NDAA were major contributing factors. As of May 2022, only 12 Confucius Institutes remain active in the United States, and only eight of the 12 are located on physical university campuses.
In the midst of the Confucius Institute closures across the United States, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report detailing their investigation on Confucius Institutes. The GAO found no evidence of wrongdoing by Hanban or any Confucius Institute. In fact, some administrators continued to defend their decision to host Confucius Institutes, even as pressure was mounting on them to discontinue the controversial programs.
Officials emphasized that their school considered potential drawbacks before deciding to establish a Confucius Institute, and thus monitor the institute on an ongoing basis to watch for signs of undue influence. Further, some case study school officials noted that they did not think concerns and criticisms about Confucius Institutes applied to their institute because each institute is unique to the school at which it operates. Several of these school officials told us that they believed such criticisms were not backed by evidence or based on specific incidents, but instead were rooted in a lack of understanding about Confucius Institutes (Government Accountability Office 2019).
Confucius Institutes Today
As of May 2022, there are no international laws restricting the spread of soft power. Historically, the United States has used to Hollywood and movie production as a psychological tool in foreign policy to influence opinions of the United States abroad (Aydemir 2017). In the contemporary era, the Republic of Korea has used the explosive power of Korean Pop [K-pop] music to grow its economy and cultural power (Valeriano 2022). So why then was China’s attempt to grow its soft power abroad welcomed so differently in the United States, and what does the politics surrounding Confucius Institutes mean for the future of Chinese culture in the United States? There is no easy answer to this question.
Republican and Democratic politicians may have succeeded in their goals of shuttering Confucius Institutes and prosecuting alleged instances of economic espionage, but in doing so it coincided with a nationwide increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, and did little to end the study of Asian languages and society. According to NBC News, in 2021 anti-Asian hate crimes grew 339 percent, and in the same period of time 34 Confucius Institutes closed their doors (Yam 2022). In addition, most universities which ended their Confucius Institutes justified their decision by bringing Confucius Institute programs in-house, such as Miami University (OH) which folded existing programs into its Global Initiatives program in 2020 (Miami University 2020). So as it turns out, the only actions that the federal government’s China Initiative and anti-Confucius Institute stance accomplished was removing the Confucius name from universities’ Chinese language programs and cutting off the flow of money from Hanban. According to Hanban itself each university that hosted a Confucius Institute only received $150,000 to $200,000 per year (Lee 2019).
It is thus incredibly doubtful that Confucius Institutes were ever a tool for espionage, despite what Moulton and Rubio told their constituents. Confucius Institutes were at their very core an attempt to grow Chinese language learning and likely to soften attitudes by academics towards universities in China, much like how Hollywood and K-pop soften attitudes abroad about Americans and Koreans respectively. Federal prosecutors allege that Professor Tao used federal funds to move his labs from the University of Kansas to Fuzhou University, but there is no evidence to suggest that Tao engaged with the Confucius Insitute on KU’s campus or that he really ever did what prosectors allege, in spite of successfully earning a conviction on the grounds of wire fraud (Department of Justice 2022). An earlier survey by the University of Michigan on Chinese American researchers found that seventy five percent felt unsafe in America and unsure of remaining in the country as a result of investigations like Professor Tao’s (Ruwitch 2022).
If Moulton is correct in his statement that Confucius Institutes bully students and stifle critical thinking, then it must be true by extension that the federal government has bullied academics and stifled research by Asian researchers in the United States. Now that Confucius Institutes are all but extinct, the spread of Chinese culture and language might not proceed as quickly, but the United States is also less free.
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