Managing foreigners for China: The Confucius Institutes

One of the hallmarks of the totalitarian assault on the West, whether by China or Russia or by predatory Islamism, is the complicity of the West itself in the assault. Some Westerners did it for money, while others shared ideological reasons of their own; they too hated the West and wanted to bring it down, whether motivated from far-left or far-right considerations. Some in the West, particularly in the United States, were also naïve. “Dialogue” and “encounter” were good in and of themselves and something to be welcomed, no matter the source or intention.

Ironically, of the three players mentioned – China, Russia, and Islamism – it was the least significant and weakest, the Russians, that garnered the bulk of the opprobrium in recent years. Some of this was due to the obsession of the American political elite and deep state in bringing down candidate and later President Donald J. Trump. There was supposedly a Russian angle there, although it turned out to be a partisan fantasy. Perhaps it was also due to the relative insignificance of the Russian threat inside the United States. To talk about China’s much more substantial malign influence was, until very recently, to involve major American corporations and leading Western universities. Russia had no high-powered sports league or entertainment company shilling for them as China did. And to raise the issue of Islamism would involve such uncomfortable, complicated subjects as religion, immigration, and identity, all political minefields. Unlike Islamism, which involves multiple actors, many of them non-state players, China’s efforts were orchestrated from the center of Chinese state power and aimed intentionally and strategically at the West (and also many other countries)

This is a case study by J. Michael Waller of an immense Chinese Communist Party (CCP) global influence operation designed to penetrate academic institutions and recruit foreigners worldwide. It is also a case study of how such an operation can be exposed and defeated. At issue are the Confucius Institutes, a global network of 550 (as of 2021) linguistic and cultural educational centers attached to Western schools and universities (and other schools and universities worldwide) to ostensibly teach the Mandarin language and Chinese culture.

The Institutes rely on the collusion, or turning a blind eye, of Western teaching institutions, their administrators, and faculty to Chinese government infiltration. All Confucius Institute curriculum and discussion are censored and controlled by a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party. While funded by the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, they are run operationally through Chinese embassies and consulates.

This massive tool of PRC ‘soft power” seeks to partner with western universities which sacrifice academic freedom and scholarly integrity in order to maintain and expand those partnerships. They also appear to serve as a means for the Chinese Communist Party to scout, attract, assess, cultivate, indoctrinate, and recruit Westerners who seek or who presently pursue careers relating to China. Scholarship recipients include foreign officials, diplomats, and customs officers.

The Trump administration took a relatively hard line against these institutes and applied reporting requirements to federally funded-schools to disclose any “gifts” from China, and designated the Confucius Institutes as a “foreign mission.” This would have forced the parent organization in the U.S. to register as a foreign agent. But both the Obama and Biden administrations have, for their own reasons, been more pliant and acceptable of this challenge. In 2009 the Obama administration actively encouraged the proliferation of Confucius Institutes across the United States. The Biden administration seems to be welcoming the reopening of the rebranded Confucius Institutes on American college campuses.

As in so many other cases, an adversary took the freedoms and openness of the West, especially of the United States, and turned these qualities against the West, while fashioning a tool of ideological subversion. Just like China repurposes the “woke” discourse of Western progressives to use as a tool against American foreign policy and the American model, so these Chinese institutes mimic the trappings of Western style universities – a very attractive model worldwide – to project power and influence foreign discourse on China.

This study by Dr. Waller, part of MEMRI’s ongoing China Studies Project, is as much a cautionary tale as it is a research project. It should serve as a bright red alert for Americans to understand the importance of topics often overlooked in recent decades by our policy elites – ideology, propaganda, education, subversion – that our adversaries have readily come to appreciate as tools of statecraft.

Read the full analysis here.