Jonathan Zimmerman critically framed the question of Confucius Institutes and academic freedom, "Let's suppose that a cruel, tyrannical, and repressive foreign government offered to pay for American teens to study its national language in our schools. Would you take the deal?" Zimmerman concluded that more Americans should study Chinese, but "on our own terms, making sure that it also reflects our best civic language of freedom, open discussion, and democracy". Professor Terry Russell at the
University of Manitoba questioned the Hanban's real motivation, fearing the university would not be able to organize certain activities judged "sensitive" to the Chinese, such as bringing the Dalai Lama onto campus. He said, "'We have a real conflict of our principles of academic freedom,' with the potential to have a faculty version of Chinese history and a Confucius Institute version being taught on campus." According to Cameron Morrill, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, "It is inappropriate to allow any government, either foreign or domestic, control over a university classroom, regardless of how much money they offer." In 2010, the
University of Oregon "came under – and resisted – pressure from the Chinese consul general in San Francisco" to cancel a lecture by Peng Ming-Min (see above). Meiru Liu, director of the Confucius Institute at
Portland State University, rejects May's criticisms CIs hinder open discussions of issues such as the treatment of political activist
Liu Xiaobo. Meiru Liu explained that while
Falun Gong, dissidents and
1989 Tiananmen Square protests are not topics the Confucius Institute headquarters would like to see organized by the institutes, they are "not major interest and concerns now by general public at large here in the US." Fellow UO professor and CI director Bryna Goodman countered May, noting the local Confucius Institute hosted forums on sensitive topics such as China's internet censorship and economic regulations, and "We haven't gotten any topic that has been proposed to us that we have considered out of bounds." Members of the Chinese studies department at the
University of Melbourne forced the institute off the main campus. Faculty at
Stockholm University demanded the separation of the Nordic Confucius Institute from the university, but an independent assessment rejected their claims that the Chinese Embassy in Stockholm was using the CI for conducting political surveillance and inhibiting academic freedom. A major concern of Confucius Institutes is their response to politically sensitive and controversial material such as human rights and Taiwan. Meiru Liu, director of the Confucius Institute at Portland State University, states the local institute had sponsored lectures on Tibet, China's economic development, currency, and US-China relations. Mary E. Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the
University of Michigan, said the institutes has been free in covering "that are controversial and sensitive in China". In particular, the Confucius Institute in
Edinburgh promoted a talk by a dissident Chinese author whose works are banned in China. In June 2014, the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) called on American universities, almost a hundred of which have Confucius Institutes, to reexamine the price they are paying in academic freedom. The AAUP's Report on academic freedom stated, "Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom." A 21 June 2014 editorial in
The Washington Post listed recent concerns about Confucius Institutes, including the AAUP advising universities to cut ties with CIs unless Hanban agreements are renegotiated, alleged violations of freedom of speech and human rights, and the secrecy of undisclosed contracts between schools and the Hanban. It concluded that "academic freedom cannot have a price tag", and recommended that if universities will not publish their CI agreements, the programs should end. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua "hit back with an angry editorial" on 24 June, saying the claims by the AAUP and others that CIs "function as an arm of the Chinese state and are pushing political agendas", actually "expose not so much communist propaganda as their own intolerance of exotic cultures and biased preconceived notions to smear and isolate the CPC".
United States Columbia University received $1 million in Hanban funds over five years, to begin a CI. Professor Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program, described a "strange silence about Tibet and other sensitive issues when it comes to Columbia, academics, and talks of China." Barnett said, "The issue is not China wants to promote itself and pay for Chinese to be taught. The issue is it wants to have a presence in the campus and much more than that. It wants to have a presence in the faculty and in teaching departments." Other academics have questioned how universities should respond when foreign governments limit academic freedom abroad. Since the 2001 publication of Columbia University professor
Andrew J. Nathan's
Tiananmen Papers, he and several other faculty members have been denied visas to China, and the Chinese government shut down the Modern Tibetan Studies Program's study abroad program in Tibet. The petition called Confucius Institutes "an academically and politically ambiguous initiative" sponsored by the PRC, and said the university risked having its own reputation used to "legitimate the spread" of CIs in the United States and around the world. In late October 2013, Marshall Sahlins, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, published the article "China U: Confucius Institutes censor political discussions and restrain the free exchange of ideas. Why, then, do American universities sponsor them?" arguing that universities like the University of Chicago should take the lead in canceling the arrangement. Writing in
Forbes, the Irish journalist
Eamonn Fingleton says, "In one of the most scandalous sell-outs in intellectual history, more and more universities now accept funding from the Beijing Ministry of Education". He calls the CI program a "Chinese mega-blooper", and says that largely thanks to Sahlins' leadership, "academic staff at many universities have begun agitating to rid campuses of the phenomenon". In 2014, Professor Sahlins wrote
Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware because incidents of academic malpractice in CIs, "from the virtually unnoticeable to the publicly notorious, are disturbingly common". Sahlins told the
Times Higher Education that his book did not represent some sort of "rabid anti-communism of a McCarthyite or Cold War sort – as defenders of Confucius Institutes have claimed", but rather, the issue is the preservation of the "values of academic freedom and intellectual autonomy upon which universities in the US and most of the world are founded." According to a
Chronicle of Higher Education article, since the first Confucius Institute in the United States was established at the
University of Maryland in 2004, "there have been no complaints of the institutes' getting in the way of academic freedom on American campuses"; the same article goes on to say that the Institutes are "distinct in the degree to which they were financed and managed by a foreign government".
Stanford University was initially offered $4 million to host a CI and endow a Confucius Institute Professorship in Sinology, but Hanban requested that the professor not discuss "delicate issues". After Stanford refused based on academic freedom grounds, Hanban accepted making an unrestricted gift, and the university plans to use the money for a professorship in classical Chinese poetry. However, in 2010, the Dalai Lama spoke at Stanford University and
Miami University (Ohio) – both institutions have Confucius Institutes. Representative
Dana Rohrabacher said, "The two pillars of America's status as an open society are freedom of the press and academic freedom. Communist China, which does not believe in or allows the practice of either type of freedom, is exploiting the opportunities offered by America to penetrate both private media and public education to spread its state propaganda."
Steven W. Mosher testified, "there have been allegations of Confucius Institutes undermining academic freedom at host universities, engaging in industrial and military espionage, monitoring the activities of Chinese students abroad, and attempting to advance the Chinese Party-State's political agenda on such issues as the Dalai Lama and Tibet, Taiwan independence, the pro-democracy movement abroad, and dissent within China itself." The
US Department of State issued a 17 May 2012 directive stating that the Chinese professors at university-based CIs were violating their
J-1 visas by teaching in schools at the precollege level and would have to return to China by 30 June to apply for a new visa. In addition, the institutes would be required to obtain US academic accreditation. Chinese officials reportedly applied pressure on Washington in response. On 24 May, State Department spokesperson
Victoria Nuland said there was "a mess-up in the processing in general" and called the original directive "sloppy and incomplete". The State Department said it would arrange the appropriate visa categories for Chinese teachers, without them needing to leave the country and re-apply. Xu Lin, head of the Hanban, told a CI conference in Edinburgh, "The US government hurt our feelings, but Confucius Institutes across Europe have done a great job, especially with cultural promotion, which is not surprising given Europe's rich history and culture." In April 2014, over 100 professors at the University of Chicago signed a petition calling for a University Senate Council vote against renewing the university's CI contract, saying that the Hanban's control of hiring and training teachers "subjects the university's academic program to the political constraints on free speech and belief that are specific to the People's Republic of China." The CI director
Dali Yang denied these charges and said, "Our Confucius Institute does not offer classes of its own; the teachers participate in the University of Chicago Chinese language program." Marshall Sahlins said that if the U. of C. withdrew from the Confucius Institutes, other universities "will think twice about joining or renewing their contracts". Media widely reported on this protest by U. of C. faculty. Historian
Bruce Cumings, who signed the petition, noted that China had recently fired prominent faculty members for their political views, and warned, "American universities should not be taking money or institute funds from governments that are jailing professors and that do not provide academic freedom in their own country."
Anthony C. Yu, a professor emeritus of Chinese, recalled speaking at a large gathering of CI teachers employed on American campuses, and finding most weren't trained language instructors and only a few were fluent in English. When George Washington University announced the establishment of a CI in 2013, a dean supported the program because the University of Chicago had also started one, but following the recent petition there, GW is changing the Faculty Code to protect academic freedom, particularly for professors studying Chinese policy, who could have cause to fear censorship by the Confucius Institute. On 25 September 2014, the University of Chicago stated that they had suspended negotiations to renew its CI contract because "recently published comments about UChicago in an article about the director-general of Hanban are incompatible with a continued equal partnership." This referred to Xu Lin's interview with the
Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in Shanghai. The article states that following the UChicago faculty petition, Xu Lin wrote a letter to Chicago's president and called the university representative in Beijing (where Chicago has a research center), "with only one line: 'If your school decides to withdraw, I will agree to it.' Her attitude made the other side anxious. The school quickly responded that it will continue to properly manage the Confucius Institute." Hanban Vice Director Hu Zhiping responded to Chicago's decision with a written statement: "Hanban thinks it's a pity that the University of Chicago has made the public statement before finding out the truth. Since Confucius Institute is a collaboration program, both sides can make a choice."
Dali Yang, the Chicago CI director, said the institute would continue to support existing projects after the current five-year agreement expired on 29 September. Several UChicago faculty members commented on the CI closure.
Bruce Lincoln, Professor of the History of Religions at Chicago, summarized the lengthy negotiations; the university administrators "accurately represented the institution's core values" when they argued against having a CI on campus, while the Chinese officials were "heavy-handed, condescending, and difficult". and told
The Wall Street Journal, "They knew that this was a dubious operation to begin with. They knew that there was a large opposition from an important segment of the faculty. And then, given that, the newspaper report simply triggered or changed the balance definitively." Gary Rawnsley, a British expert on international communication, said that Xu Lin could not have picked a worse time "to assert her imaginary authority", and the
Business Spectator concluded this hardline behavior highlights one of the biggest problems for Beijing's charm offensive. "It still relies on officials like Xu, who still think and act like party ideologues who like to assert their authority and bully people into submission."
The Economist called Xu Lin's statement "a boastful challenge" and said opponents of Confucius Institutes will claim this as a victory for academic freedom.
The Diplomat said that the current CI program of 465 institutes is heavily weighted toward the West, with 97 located in the U.S. but only 95 institutes in all of Asia. However, if backlash in the West continues to grow, the number of CIs "may plateau in the West while there remains immense potential for growth in other regions", including Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The official newspaper of the Communist party, the ''
People's Daily'' responded to the University of Chicago's closure of its Confucius Institute. On 1 October 2014,
Pennsylvania State University confirmed that it would close its Confucius Institute on 13 December 2014 when the contract expires, with its dean saying through a written statement that several of the university's goals are "not consistent with those of the Office of Chinese Languages Council International, known as the Hanban, which provides support to Confucius Institutes throughout the world." In an interview, a former director of the Penn State Confucius Institute, Eric Hayot, said he suspected that the Confucius Institute may not have been providing enough of a return on its investment. "I will say that in my experience as CI director one of the major frustrations with the relationship was that we consistently had more ambitious ideas for the ways CI funding could be used", such as research projects proposed by Penn State professors on topics concerning the environment, science, and politics. He said the Hanban regularly rejected such proposals "too far outside the official CI ambit (which they would tell us was mainly 'cultural')," "A lot of what the Hanban wanted us to do didn't make sense given our institution, faculty population, and student population," said Professor Hayot, who was not involved in the CI contract negotiations this summer. "Had they been flexible, it would have helped Confucius Institute succeed here."
The Telegraph said China's effort to project soft power "has suffered another serious setback", and the UChicago and Penn State closures represent a major blow to China's attempt at using the government-funded institutes to improve its image around the world. Henry Reichman, a vice president of the AAUP and chairman of the committee that issued a statement condemning Confucius Institutes, said, "There is clearly a growing sense that these academic centers need to be looked at a little more carefully ... I suspect U Chicago and Penn State won't be the only ones to come to the conclusion that a relationship with these institutes is not really worth it." A
Bloomberg News editorial mentioned the three CI closures within two weeks and says, "If the institutes are meant to be insidious vehicles of Chinese soft-power indoctrination, they're doing a terrible job. In fact, they appear to be causing more damage than good to China's image abroad." On 4 December 2014, the
United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations held a hearing entitled "Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China's Influence on U.S. Universities?". Chairman
Chris Smith said, "U.S. colleges and universities should not be outsourcing academic control, faculty and student oversight or curriculum to a foreign government", and called for a
Government Accountability Office study into academic agreements between American universities and China. The testimony of
Perry Link, a Chinese studies professor at
UC Riverside, made three policy recommendations: American university administrators should adopt a policy of "consciously staking out the broadest of fields" in their programs with China, the U.S. government should fund Chinese-language programs in the U.S., and should withhold visas for CI instructors as long as China continues to withhold visas for American scholars on political grounds. On the day after the House hearing, PRC
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman
Hua Chunying responded, "All Confucius Institutes in the U.S. are there because they were applied for by U.S. universities of their own will. We have assisted with supplying teachers and textbooks at the request of the U.S. side but have never interfered with academic freedom." The
John McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 prohibits the use of Department of Defense funds for Chinese language instruction provided by Confucius Institutes. In August 2020, the
United States Department of State designated the headquarters of the Confucius Institutes in the U.S. as a "foreign mission" of China. The United States
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 withheld federal research funds from colleges and universities that had Confucius Institutes. As of 2022, all of the Confucius Institutes located on
SUNY campuses were closed because federal research funding was jeopardized.
United Kingdom In Britain, there are at least 29 Confucius Institutes, the second largest number in the world after the United States, attached to major universities such as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cardiff and University College London. There are also 148 Confucius 'classrooms' in schools around the United Kingdom, according to the Hanban website. As part of its wider and ongoing work on China, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission held an inquiry into China's Confucius Institutes in February 2019. "This inquiry asked the fundamental question: Are Confucius Institutes a benign and even positive presence, enhancing better understanding and cooperation with China, or a negative influence, threatening and restricting freedom of expression and academic freedom? Our conclusion is that on balance, given the evidence we have received, and while the teaching of Chinese language and culture should be welcomed and encouraged, Confucius Institutes as they are currently constituted threaten academic freedom and freedom of expression in universities around the world and represent an endeavour by the Chinese Communist Party to spread its propaganda and suppress its critics beyond its borders."
Israel In 2008,
Tel Aviv University officials shut down a student art exhibition depicting the
"oppression of Falun Gong" in China. A Tel Aviv District Court judge subsequently ruled the university "violated freedom of expression and succumbed to pressure from the Chinese Embassy." The judge noted the dean of students "feared that the art exhibit would jeopardize Chinese support for its Confucius Institute and other educational activities." NSW Minister for Education
Adrian Piccoli defended the classes, and noted the Chinese language syllabuses did not include the study of political content. Shuangyuan Shi, director of Confucius Institute in Sydney, noted the institute primarily focuses on language, and teachers are not there to draw conclusions for students in regards to controversial subjects. After the
University of Sydney's Institute for Democracy and Human Rights organized a 2013 talk by the Dalai Lama, the university warned that they could not use its logo, allow media coverage, or permit entry to the event by Tibet activists—forcing organizers to move the event off campus. University officials decided, "there was a better way of doing it. A small group, a small section of the student body, was really not the best thing."
Sarah Hanson-Young, an
Australian Greens senator, said "As a democratic country, we should be encouraging more open and frank discussion about the current situation in Tibet, not banning the country's spiritual leader from addressing students and staff at universities." A spokesperson for the activist
Australia Tibet Council said the university had given in to China. "They have compromised their academic freedom and integrity, and it also sends a disheartening message to the Tibetan people," more than 100 of whom have died in recent
self-immolation protests.
June Teufel Dreyer, a
University of Miami (Florida) professor of political science, claims that Confucius Institutes have distorted history, citing universities in Australia inviting speakers "to shill for the government and talk about how happy all the Tibetans were".
Canada In December 2013, the
Canadian Association of University Teachers passed a resolution calling on all Canadian universities and colleges that currently host CIs on their campuses to cease doing so, and those contemplating such arrangements to pursue them no further. This action followed upon the
Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec closing its Confucius Institute, the University of Manitoba voting against hosting a CI out of concerns over political censorship, and
McMaster University cancelling its CI contract following an instructor's human rights complaint. CAUT executive director James Turk said Canadian universities that agree to host CIs are compromising their own integrity by allowing the Hanban to have a voice in academic matters such as curriculum, texts, and topics of class discussion, describing such interference as a "fundamental violation of academic freedom". Turk described CIs as "essentially political arms of the Chinese government", which restrict the free discussion of topics Chinese authorities deem controversial, and "should have no place on our campuses". At 19 June 2014 meeting of the
Toronto District School Board, Canada's largest school board, trustees voted to postpone the planned September startup of a Confucius Institute, in order to more closely examine a 2012 agreement that chair Chris Bolton unilaterally negotiated with the Hanban. On the morning of the meeting, Bolton suddenly resigned and was not available to answer questions. Many trustees complained that they had not received enough information about the partnership and were caught off guard when they received hundreds of emails and phone calls from parents protesting against CIs. An editorial in
The Globe and Mail said Bolton "showed a stunning lack of judgment", and warned that "the Confucius Institute functions as little more than a long arm of the Chinese state, pushing its political agenda under the guise of simple language instruction." The deputy director-general of the
Hunan Provincial Department of Education sent a letter to the TDSB that said, "If the Confucius Institute in Toronto was suspended, there would be a great damage to the relationship between the two sides, which is hard for us to accept." On 30 September 2014, the TDSB's Planning and Priorities Committee voted to terminate the Confucius Institute program, leaving the final decision to the full board meeting at the end of October. TDSB chair Mari Rutka declared she did not feel reassured that going forward would be a good move, and said, "There have been too many concerns raised, I think, again, we have the examples of a number of other institutions that have decided not to go on with this." Trustees said they had heard both sides of the argument, and received pressure from both parents alarmed over China's control of the programs and from Chinese officials who warned them that dissolving the partnership would endanger the TDSB's most lucrative market for fee-paying international students. The CI issue has been contentious, involving a website and petitions. The committee heard from 10 speakers, half against the contract (including a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service Asia/Pacific chief who warned the institutes are a "Trojan horse"), and half in favor (a spokesperson from the Confederation of Chinese Canadian Organizations in Toronto who said the issue was not political but "about culture and language"). A newspaper editorial described CIs as state-supported, state-directed entities controlled by a "one-party regime that recently evolved from Marxism-Leninism into what can be best described as a novel form of non-democratic elitism with kleptocratic tendencies." At the 30 October 2014 full meeting, the TDSB voted 20–2 to cancel the CI contract. Trustee Pamela Gough said her concern was that "the Confucius Institute is directly controlled by the Communist Party of China, and there is irrefutable evidence that the party exerts its influence through [the institute]". In response to the TDSB rejection, an
op-ed from the state-run
China Daily called the criticisms "unfair" and accused CI critics of having "a deep bias against China". David Mulroney, a former
Canadian ambassador to China, said, "We're seeing really the end of the free ride that Confucius Institutes have had, particularly in North America".
Scandinavia In December 2014, Stockholm University, the first university in Europe to host a Confucius Institute, announced it was terminating the program. Press coverage of the
Braga incident in the Swedish press was said to have influenced the decision. "Generally it is questionable to have, within the framework of the university, institutes that are financed by another country," said the university's chancellor. No major university in Sweden now hosts a Confucius Institute.
Portugal A censorship effort by the Confucius Institute's international director
Xu Lin against Taiwan occurred in Portugal in July 2014. Upon her arrival on 23 July 2014, at a European Sinology conference partly organized by the director of the Confucius Institute at the
University of Minho,
Braga, Portugal, the international head of the Confucius Institutes, Xu Lin, ordered censorship of "important pages" that included references to Taiwan institutions, one of which, the
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, was also funding the conference as it has for the past 20 years. On the first day of the annual conference of the
European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), with several hundred attendees, Xu Lin ordered the programs seized. Four pages were torn out of the program before they were re-issued to conference attendees the next day. The president of the EACS ordered 500 copies of the deleted pages to be distributed to attendees and issued a report on the incident. The U.S. online university site
Inside Higher Ed quoted
Marshall Sahlins, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a leading critic of the Confucius Institutes, who said that this incident illustrated the Confucius Institutes provision that programming they fund must abide by Chinese laws, including those restricting speech; "Moreover they're going to enforce them the way they do in China, which is not so much by going to court... but simply by fiat." Taiwan's cabinet-level
Mainland Affairs Council issued a reproach over the censorship incident, saying, "The mainland should deal with Taiwan's participation in activities on international occasions pragmatically. If there is no respect for each other, the development of
cross-strait relations will be seriously hurt."
The Christian Science Monitor reported that the censorship has made more academics in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia grow uneasy with Confucius Institutes.
Eamonn Fingleton suggests that perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the whole
Braga Incident is that Beijing has reversed itself on the "hot-button issue at the center of the entire controversy. After vehemently denying for years that the Confucius Institutes have any kind of censorship agenda, Beijing has now tacitly acknowledged that this was false."
The Parliament Magazine said of the Braga Incident that European higher education should remain independent and not be turned into "an instrument of outright propaganda of the Chinese Communist party." In December 2014, the
BBC interviewed Xu Lin in Beijing. During the interview, BBC reporter John Sudworth asked about the Braga incident, but afterwards Xu Lin objected and insisted that large portions of the interview to be deleted. The BBC refused the Chinese censorship demand. One of the points she made in the interview is that
Taiwan belongs to China, and therefore outsiders have no business interfering. "Xu Lin not only refused to answer difficult questions, she also politicised the Confucius Institutes and reinforced the idea that they are led by dogmatists," commented Gary Rawnsley, professor of Public Diplomacy at
Aberystwyth University, Wales.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Xu's BBC interview, and said, "Critics have argued that China's Confucius Institutes pose a threat to academic freedom in the United States, Canada, Europe and beyond. Now the Beijing official in charge of them has confirmed it."
Russia On 27 July 2015, a prosecutor filed a complaint to the city court in
Blagoveshchensk Amur Oblast,
Russia, asking that the court shut down the
Blagoveschensk State Pedagogical University Confucius Institute on the grounds that it is violating Russian law by not being registered as a non-commercial organization, and thus, foreign teachers have no legal grounds to work at the institute. The prosecutor's statement said that instead of being a part of the university, the CI should be registered as a foreign cultural center. == Confucius Classrooms ==