Inside Higher Ed
July 24th, 2014
The debate about whether North American colleges should host Confucius Institutes – centers for Chinese language and culture study funded by an entity of the Chinese government – has intensified in recent weeks. About 90 American universities and eight Canadian higher education institutions house Confucius Institutes, which are run in collaboration with Chinese partner universities and staffed, in part, by visiting language instructors hired by Hanban, the Chinese government agency that oversees the Confucius Institutes as well as a parallel program at the K-12 level, the Confucius Classrooms. Hanban also supplies Confucius Institutes with Chinese language textbooks and teaching materials.
Confucius Institutes, which have sprung up at hundreds of university campuses around the globe since the program’s launch in 2004, have been controversial almost from the start. The resources they have provided to expand Chinese language teaching worldwide have been widely welcomed, but their rapid expansion has raised concerns about whether universities have entered into arrangements that could compromise their academic integrity and independence.
Critics have asked whether universities should be lending their imprimaturs to institutes sponsored by a foreign government – and an autocratic one at that. The Confucius Institutes have often been likened to other foreign government outposts that promote language learning and positive, benign views of their respective cultures -- notably the British Institute, the Alliance Françaises and Germany’s Goethe Institutes – but the major difference, as critics of Confucius Institutes regularly point out, is that these other entities are not housed in universities.