China is engaged in a “soft power” offensive encouraging complacency toward the Chinese “threat” via innocuous-seeming cultural programs, and must be stopped – unless they let the US reciprocate – a Senate committee found.
‘Confucius Institutes’, run by the Chinese government on over 100 American college campuses, are a Trojan horse for Chinese influence in America, according to a report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, part of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which also warned that 519 American public schools are harboring “Confucius Classrooms” aimed at swaying the hearts and minds of children as young as five.
Teachers – selected by the Chinese government via a process the hosting American schools are not privy to – must sign contracts with the Chinese government vowing not to “damage the national interests of China,” and US school officials told the subcommittee that sensitive topics like Taiwanese independence and Tiananmen Square were off limits.
At least a few of the Institutes have piqued the attention of the FBI, which is “watching warily” and has even “developed appropriate investigative steps” in some cases. Some teachers have been caught misrepresenting their work as “research” in order to secure visas – and some have reportedly been coached to do so by Confucius Institute directors.
Adding insult to injury, China has been uncooperative in permitting the US to roll out a similar program on its own college campuses, the subcommittee found. From 2010 to 2017, attempts to establish 29 “American Cultural Centers” were scuttled, stymied, and slow-walked, with those that did open controlled and scrutinized for connections with the US State Department (which funded the program).
The lack of “transparency and reciprocity” appears to be decisive for the report’s authors, who worry about allowing the Chinese free rein to indoctrinate students with “an incomplete picture of Chinese government actions and policies that run counter to US interests at home and abroad,” while the State Department was prevented from doing the same in China. Without a show of good sportsmanship by the Chinese, the committee suggested, Confucius Institutes “should not continue in the United States.”