American labels Confucius Institute in Chinese ‘foreign mission’

The US has designated the Confucius Institute (CI), China’s global education program, as a foreign propaganda mission.

The mandate states that CI, which offers language and culture programs abroad, is “owned as effectively controlled” by a foreign government.

Staff will be required to register and follow restrictions similar to those placed at diplomatic embassies.

It comes amid declining relations between China and the US.

In a statement announcing the move, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the Confucius Institute “an entity that promotes Beijing’s global propaganda and malignant advocacy campaign” on U.S. classrooms and campuses.

“The United States wants to ensure that students on U.S. campuses have access to Chinese language and cultural offerings free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies,” Mr Pompeo continued, adding that the move was made to better inform educators.

Analysis: US-China decoupling impact grows

By Zhaoyin Feng, BBC Chinese, Washington DC

China’s Confucius Institute defines itself as a non-profit organization that aims to promote the Chinese language and culture.

For many American students, CI has been a useful platform to study Chinese language, but critics say the organization is far from innocent.

The institutes have been accused of putting pressure on host universities to censor speeches that were considered politically sensitive to Beijing. One American university has canceled its plan to invite Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama for an interview. Another removed a reference to Taiwan from the biography of a university speaker.

Beijing is likely to take revenge, as it did when the US marked nine major Chinese state media as “foreign missions”. But it is difficult to speculate on China’s goals, as educational exchanges have already significantly disappeared with increasing tensions between the two countries.

America’s long-running Peace Corps program in China was terminated months ago by Washington itself.

Education, traditionally considered a low-hanging fruit of international cooperation, is now politically entangled and not spared in the unraveling of US-China.

• Does China’s network of cultural clubs promote propaganda?

• The hard side of China’s soft power

Tensions between the US and China have been rising at a rapid pace in recent months.

The White House has accused Beijing of lying about the origins of the coronavirus, which originated in China late last year, of using social media apps to spy on Americans, of stealing intellectual property, and of a hidden criminal in a Chinese Embassy in the US – to name just a few of the allegations.

Both countries ordered each other to close consulates in major cities last month.

What are CIs

Open to the general public, Confucius institutes promote the Chinese language, but also run classes in culture, from calligraphy and cooking to tai chi. They sponsor educational exchanges and hold public events and lectures.

The first CI opened in 2004 in South Korea. According to official data, at the end of 2018 there were 548 Confucius institutes around the world, as well as 1,193 Confucius classrooms based on primary and secondary schools. There are about 75 Confucius institutes currently active around the US, according to the South China Morning Post.

The CIs are joint ventures between the host university as a school, a partner university in China, and Hanban, a controversial agency under the Ministry of Education of China. It oversees CI operations and provides partial financing, personnel and other support.

Supported by significant government funding, China’s goal was to have 1,000 such institutes by 2020 in what it calls a “Confucius Revolution” to apply to the growing demand abroad to learn Chinese.

Some Western academics believe that the project poses a serious threat to freedom of thought and speech in education.

Others defend themselves, highlighting the benefit of offering access to Chinese language learning that cash-strapped universities simply cannot afford on their own.