When the Left and the Right agree on something in these disputatious times, the wise man will want to know what it is. And what has brought these warring factions together, however briefly? The Confucius Institutes that dot American campuses.
The progressive New Republic magazine and the conservative National Association of Scholars (NAS) both warn that the Institutes are not the innocent cultural centers offering Chinese language instruction they pretend to be. They are, rather, a key stratagem of China’s “soft war” against America, crafted, in the words of NAS senior researcher Rachelle Peterson, to “teach political lessons that unduly favor China.”
Writing in the New Republic, Isaac Stone Fish referred to “an epidemic of self-censorship at U.S universities” that funnels students away from “topics likely to offend the Chinese Communist Party.” Topics like the disastrous Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962 that enforced collectivization in the towns and countryside and resulted in the deaths of 30 to 50 million Chinese.
China’s use of “hard power,” such as its aggressive weapons buildup,
its suppression of free speech and assembly in Hong Kong and throughout
the mainland, its stern warnings that Taiwan must not chart an
independent course, and its colonization of the South China Sea, draws
the headlines and attracts the attention of policymakers. Meanwhile
Confucius Institutes, financed by the Chinese government and supervised
by the Chinese Communist Party, are molding attitudes about China,
painting an idyllic portrait in which Mao Zedong is a revolutionary hero
and the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened. That the Confucius
Institutes are instruments of propaganda was confirmed by Li Changchun,
the head of propaganda for the CCP, who boasted that the Institutes were
“an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.”..........To Read More....
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