This article originally ran at the Sentinal & Enterprise.
The Chinese government funds classes at Tufts and UMass Boston, plus the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. China chooses and buys the textbooks, hires and trains the teachers, and provides course materials and extra operating funds. It's an easy way for colleges to ease budget crunches - but also an easy way for the Chinese Communist Party to spread propaganda.
Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is taking a close look at this practice, which China calls Confucius Institutes at universities and Confucius Classrooms at K-12 schools. The FBI is investigating. So are Senator Marco Rubio, Rep. Joe Wilson, and a growing bipartisan coalition.
China runs more than 100 Confucius Institutes in the U.S., plus another 500 Confucius Classrooms, all of which are overseen by an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
I spent a year and a half studying Confucius Institutes. I asked Confucius Institute staff how they would handle questions about Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 China massacred democracy demonstrators. One noted that she "tries to avoid" talking about it. But if hard-pressed to answer, she would "show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture."
Taiwan gets censored too. An American professor told me that shortly before Chinese government officials visited his campus, the Confucius Institute director inspected faculty members' office doors and tore down posters for National Taiwan University.
The directorgeneral of the Confucius Institute Headquarters Xu Lin, has also ordered the censorship of materials that reference Taiwan, which China claims as a territory.
Tibet, too, gets treated unfairly at Confucius Institutes, which gloss over China's aggression. North Carolina State University went so far as to disinvite the Dalai Lama under pressure from a local Confucius Institute.
The result is that students get a remarkably one-sided view of China, whether through outright propaganda or the quiet omission of China's faults.
American professors, too, face pressure to self-censor. Colleges don't want to lose the money that China provides, so they pressure scholars to tone down research projects that investigate China's human rights abuses or offend the Chinese government. Often the head of the local Confucius Institute is a colleague who will vote on promotion and tenure, putting special pressure on young, untenured professors. "This is my career and livelihood on the line," one professor told me.
Confucius Institutes are antithetical to the basic principles of higher education. They shackle the pursuit of truth. They fail to offer accurate courses. They outsource the classroom to a foreign government.
Rep. Moulton has written letters to both UMass Boston and Tufts, urging them to close their Confucius Institutes. A group of alumni, students, and Tibetan activists have written to UMass Boston and Cambridge Rindge and Latin. None of these institutions have announced whether they plan to maintain their Confucius Institutes or Classroom.
Perhaps UMass, Tufts, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin are examining the evidence with scrupulous care. Perhaps they are conducting an internal investigation or weighing measures to close their Confucius Institutes.
Or perhaps they feel paralyzed by competing interests: compelling evidence of China's interference on the one hand, and compelling funding prospects on the other. It will be telling which hand they choose.
Image Credit: Stepanstas CC BY-SA 3.0
