Blurred times: the CI and culture war ≠ war culture
In light of the US government’s branding of Confucius Institutes as foreign missions of the Chinese Communist Party, controversy has been sparked over whether these language schools are harmless institutes of Chinese culture or propaganda vehicles.
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On August 15, the US government officially designated the Confucius Institute (CI), Chinese language and culture schools, a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and announced strict regulation of its staff. Henceforth, CI teachers and organisers must submit to a monitoring programme akin to those used for diplomatic and embassy staff in the US.
My reaction to this news was probably more instinctive than most. On the one (rational) hand, the CCP are an autocratic monster guilty on just about every count of inhumanity a court could prosecute for. On the other hand - this is the emotional one - my Confucius Institute was a somewhat managerially inept wonderscape of unknown culture beamed across the continents to the hands (in pockets) of this scruffy kid mucking about in his scruffy streets. I took my first steps in mā má mǎ mà (these sounds, they tell you even more proudly than you learn, all mean different things) in its badly lit classrooms. I was treated to my first Mahjong trouncing on its terrace and allowed into the secret society of those who know Chinese restaurants here do not really make Chinese food in its second floor corridor. My Confucius Institute was a pleasure palace of LED lanterns and Sainsbury’s soup dumplings to rival the most extravagant Emperor Qianlong could ever have conceived.
Yet a 2019 enquiry into their operating practices by the Conservative Human Rights commission concluded that Beijing have “succeeded in suborning significant portions of higher education,” with the CI programme, weighing as a “great threat” to academic freedom now and in the future. A mainland friend of mine corroborates their claim that the sheer presence of an institute and its “seven don’t mentions” can feel like a giant behaviour beacon broadcasting BEHAVE. Meanwhile in Australia, allegations flew that Confucius’ uniquely forward positioning resulted in easy organisation for sometimes violent anti-Hong Kong student movements across the country last year. While the IOE institute here at UCL has managed to steer mostly clear of any great controversy, the British government were alarmed to report direct conspiracy between the CI and the Chinese embassy in London to surveil students with even trace connection to dissidence. “Clear evidence” demonstrated the CI’s intent and capacity to affect or undermine the direction of curricula at British universities and the report warned of IP theft attached to joint research projects, etc. Across mainland Europe and North America, the once ascendant CI are now in retreat - losing a contract here, facing forcible removal there - and this trajectory is likely only to steepen as the world emerges from the coronavirus catastrophe into what certain pundits have already jumped into calling a “new cold war”. Yet written on my third hand (this one labelled “circumstantial”), I attended many CI-organised Mandarin discussion groups at the SOAS institute last year and topics of conversation were neither monitored nor limited, ranging from egg cookery to the immorality of ethnically targeted repression. Many good friends work there now or have done previously: as far as I can attest they are all good people.
For their part, the UK university coalition MillionPlus hit back at the report as unsubstantiated - its chair had “not heard one piece of evidence” supporting the claims made by human rights watch. There is also the question of just how much influence any particular Confucius Institute can exert over its host university - the very worst threat they can make is voluntary closure. Issues of CI surveillance and the ”soft power” they project are much deeper wounds, however, and more directly represent the inner workings of Xi Jinping’s post-2015 authoritarianism. Power is to be projected and imprinted.
Once upon a blazing August morning in Beijing, I set out from my apartment in Chaoyang to Ritan (Temple of the Sun) Park. Forty degrees (thirty-nine in CCP) of sun licking around my ears and reflecting in all the towered chrome of the capital, I wandered past enough little pockets of life to fill many an idle notebook. When I arrived, the park was occupied by prams, dog walkers and a troupe of elderly ”public square dancers” (one boombox and a disregard for synchronisation are all you need for this Chinese urban staple). The dancing sun in the lake against all this activity created a ”pleasing mutual contrast” (相映成趣 xiāngyìng chéngqù) I thought, and was proud of linking the idiom with life. Across the water, a blocky police post set back from the sunlight was a visible intrusion into the idyll of it all. Nobody seemed to notice, but my idiomatic bliss was disturbed. What need was there for this edgeways projection into a shared public landscape otherwise removed from all the workings of the city beyond? Much like the stories of Stalin waking up in cold sweats over that one peasant house on the Baikal that might not be hanging his portrait over the mantelpiece, the CCP lose sleep over the idea that they might lose track (and thereby hold) of their citizens. The CI are a valuable - and funded - conduit for the expression and communication of ideas that would simply not be broached without their presence, yet when it comes to the CCP and all their arms of state, a police post is always watching across the lake. What a shame, though, if the lake and all its merrymakers were to disappear in a ball of paperwork and diplomatic fury!
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