Confucius Institutes were, until quite recently, not only promoters of Chinese culture, but also were widely accused of being an active arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Typically associated with universities in the U.S. and numerous other countries around the world, their official mission was to provide information about Chinese culture and language to students and others, both Chinese and non-Chinese. Yet, increasingly since their founding in 2004, the Institutes aroused suspicion that they were also involved in CCP propaganda, censorship, and espionage.
The Confucius program peaked around 2018, with about 118 chapters in the U.S. and 550 elsewhere. Thereafter it began to decline, especially in the U.S., as chapters–now widely regarded as security risks–began to close. As of last month, a total of only 18 chapters nationally remained open under their original name, but concerns are now growing that the CCP has simply rebranded the Institutes under a new name: the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs).
The National Association of Scholars issued a press release on June 21, announcing a new report that makes that very charge. Quoting the report authors, the press release reads:
[D]espite the demise of Confucius Institutes, colleges and universities have naively signed up for very similar programs under new names. . . The Chinese government has executed an end-run of U.S. public policy. In the wake of laws targeting Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government has deftly reorganized its program. . . [T]he most popular reason colleges give for closing a Confucius Institute is to replace it with something else.
The Center for Immigration Studies has done its own investigation, publishing a number of articles about the Institutes and their replacements. On July 27 appeared another such article, titled “More Evidence of CCP Activism at U.S. Universities,” which charges that the “CCP uses the CSSAs as a surrogate to ferret out, isolate, and punish Chinese students who do not toe the party line.”
The huge number of foreign students studying in the United States at any one time (in 2019, there were 1,095,299 international students here, fully 41 percent of whom [369,548] were Chinese) has long been a potential for foreign espionage. The colleges and universities, whose primary interest is money, love enrolling foreign students, however, because they typically pay full tuition. As the CIS.org piece says, “[M]any of the same universities that fell into the institutes’ trap the first time are perfectly happy to stick their hands back out and collect dollars in return for allowing China to ensure that it is always depicted in a favorable light on campus.”
So, if all that money means the Chinese Communist Party will send along a cadre of spies and propagandists, the university administrators are happy to look the other way. Looking the other way is also a specialty of the Biden administration, so don’t expect much action on the Confucius front anytime soon.
For more, see CIS.org.