Did China infiltrate University of Missouri with propaganda — with our permission?
The U.S. relationship with China has long been a knotty, wary one — as evidenced by the eager Trump administration’s protracted battle to sign even a modest but historic “Phase One” trade deal this week.
So memorializing such a tenuous bond in concrete — in the form of official Chinese government “Confucius Institutes” at colleges and universities around America — wasn’t such a great idea in retrospect.
Amid stark warnings from the FBI about the institutes’ penchant for patent propaganda, a dozen or so universities have cut ties with the institutes. The University of Kansas did in December, and the University of Missouri is the latest to do so, in an announcement Wednesday that its institute agreement ends in August. Kansas State University was the first in the region to ditch its institute last June.
While ostensibly intended to provide Mandarin classes, cultural programs and K-12 and community outreach, a Chinese Communist Party official openly admitted the Confucius Institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”
U.S. concerns have included not just propaganda, but intelligence activities, censorship and matters of academic freedom.
To his credit, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley wrote to the University of Missouri last summer, urging it to end the Confucius Institute there. In response to Hawley’s questioning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he was encouraged by the number of universities curtailing their involvement with the institutes.
While acknowledging the benefits of American academic partnerships with a variety of foreign entities through the years, an American Association of University Professors 2014 report on Confucius Institutes warned that “occasionally university administrations have entered into partnerships that sacrificed the integrity of the university and its academic staff. Exemplifying (that) are Confucius Institutes … Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom. … Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China.”
The American professors joined with the Canadian Association of University Teachers in a call to cut ties with Confucius Institutes, of which there have been 100 or more in the U.S. alone.
In announcing its decision, the University of Missouri cited increased costs of the Confucius Institute program, due to revised State Department requirements to have certified Mandarin Chinese language teachers in every K-12 classroom where a Confucius Institute staff member is present.
Importantly, as a KU press release noted about that university’s ending its Confucius Institute, this is not a breaking off of cultural and academic engagement with China. It’s just that “KU has decided to continue its work in these areas outside the structure of the Confucius Institute. … A Confucius Institute is not a necessary component for KU to productively engage with China.”
In fact, both KU and MU were careful to note that their involvement with public-school Mandarin classes would continue in the region.
Yet across America, Chinese students at American colleges report they fear Chinese government monitoring and reprisals over such topics as the Hong Kong freedom protests. And professors say they’ve occasionally had to give the boot to non-student Chinese visitors showing up unannounced and unauthorized in their classrooms, as China has conspicuously slashed funding to programs that depart from Chinese government orthodoxy.
Such things are not just foreign to American academia, but are anathema to it.
Engagement, absolutely. But indoctrination and intimidation have no place in American schools, and certainly not at Missouri and Kansas universities.
This story was originally published January 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM.