Canadian educational establishments re-evaluate their involvement with Confucius Institute

Many Canadian educational institutions are currently going through some heart-searching over their use of the Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute to teach Mandarin and Chinese culture and history in extra-curricular classes.

The Confucius Institute (CI) has been under suspicion for years - really, since it began, in 2004 - for its somewhat blinkered approach to Chinese "culture", and certain touchy subjects (like the Tianenmen Square massacre, Falun Gong, Taiwan and Tibet) are prohibited territory under the Institute's Communist Party-dictated rules. Some of its other practices, like flying school board trustees to China on all-expenses-paid trips, have been criticized as suspicious, and some opponents claim it is nothing more than an arm of the Chinese Comnunist Party's propaganda department. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has even warned in the past that the Institutes could be operating as spy satellite offices, and the USA has recently labelled CI as a foreign diplomatic mission involved in political propaganda.

The Confucius Institute organization currently has 541 institutes worldwide, including 12 in Canada. In addition to language and cultural programming for the educational establishment involved, they also typically offer some classes to the general public, sponsor educational exchanges, and hold public events and lectures on all things Chinese. Some argue that they are just a cultural and language institute like many others, including the British Council, the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, etc. But the difference is that the Confucius Institute operates directly on school and university campuses, giving them preferential access to students and staff, and they appear to be under stricter controls over the content of their offerings.

Many Canadian school boards and universities that did use the Confucius Institute have since thought better of it and cancelled their programs with the Confucius Institute, including the Toronto District School Board, the whole of New Brunswick, McMaster University, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Several more are currenly in the process of re-evaluating the programs. Some institutions, like the University of Manitoba, were approached but chose not to sign up in the first place. Other boards and schools, however, particularly in the Prairies for some reason, appear quite comfortable with the way it operates. A similar process of reappraisal is taking place across the world, and many institutions are choosing to sever links with CI, while others are choosing to continue.

What I hadn't appreciated about it all is that the Confucius Institute does not actually provide language instructors, and that the schools and universities involved retain "control over the hiring, curriculum and academic practices of the Institute". What, then, do they provide? What is the point of them? Do they just provide money, books and the odd tai chi class? And is that money tied in some way to some sort of restrictive content agreement with the Chinese language instructors that are hired? Couldn't schools and universities just offer Mandarin classes without Confucius Institute involvement at all (in the same way as they offer German and Italian classes)?

It's all a bit mysterious. Which is perhaps in itself a good reason to avoid it like the plague.