Posted on 12/09/2018 9:56:04 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The University of South Carolina is standing firmly in its resolve to continue operating a Confucius Institute, a propaganda outpost of the Communist Chinese government.
According to University media spokesperson Jeffrey Stensland, “USC has enjoyed a 10-year partnership with the Confucius Institute, and by all accounts, it’s been a positive one for our students, faculty, and staff.” The university’s statement comes even as the Chinese government has admitted that it uses Confucious Institutes as “propaganda.”
According to Politico, Chinese minister of propaganda Liu Yunshan said in a 2010 article for People’s Daily, “with regard to key issues that influence our sovereignty and safety, we should actively carry out international propaganda battles against issues such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, human rights and Falun Gong...we should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”
Since 2014, the American Association of University Professors has decried the Confucius Institute as an origination which reduces “the integrity of the university and its academic staff.” According to the association, “Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.”
Controversy like this has led to the closure of Confucius Institutes at North Carolina State University, the University of Illinois, Texas A&M and more in years past. The University of South Carolina acknowledged this saying that they “are aware that some institutions have decided to end their affiliation with the Institute, but cannot speak to the specific reasons why or what the nature of those individual partnerships may have been.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) condemned the Confucius Institute during a Senate hearing in February: “It is my view that they’re complicit in these efforts to covertly influence public opinion and to teach half-truths designed to present Chinese history, government...
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreform.org ...
by all accounts?
Like your bank account and the university’s.. or swiss bank accounts? hmmmm
Has anyone here actually had any interaction with a Confucius Institute ? Could they be worse than Black Student Unions?
China was an ancient civilization, and Confucius was among it’s best teachers. One of the first things Mao did was to destroy all the Confucian buildings and temples and wipe out his teachings.
Odd name for an institute that pushes Communism.
I have worked with and done research on Confucius Institutes in the US. I do not believe they are engaged in propaganda. More like educational versions of Voice of America. Focused on language learning and intercultural understanding. I know I’ll take some heat for this, but I have done my homework.
Even back in Cultural Revolution days the main Chinese Communist academic mouth piece in American academia was the smooth and wise sounding and avuncular John K Fairbank. Of him I have written elsewhere:
John K. Fairbank believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.”
John K Fairbank is the greatest textbook case of how leftist academicians engaged in a symbiotic relationship with communist tyrants to both advance their careers and push a carefully modulated propaganda line designed for the American intellectual market. For several decades Fairbanks ‘The United States and China’ was probably the one book on China (other than Snow's ‘Red Star Over China’) that most US undergrads were exposed to in either a poly sci or foreign area studies class. It is a very well written conspectus of US-China relations that subtly makes the case for Mao and the CCP as the best alternative for China to deal with its massive problems and that the US by being a consistent supporter of the Nationalist produced a real ‘tragedy’ as the true interests of the US were i supporting the robust and sometimes necessarily brutal but progressive CCP. Many Americans absorbed the short lesson that ‘Well the Chicoms were dictatorial but the Nationalists were just awful, like Nazi's” This was the JKF was supposed to push quietly and sedulously. In return he was allowed to have certain access to and do research in Chinese state archives denied to other scholars who were not covert agents of intellectual subversion. Fairbank was a highly intelligent man and a fine writer and he just about dominated China studies in the US for nearly a half century. He conducted a kind of quiet campaign within his academic specialty to marginalize scholars such as Karl Wittfogel, who was more than Fairbank’s intellectual equal and who held ‘incorrect’ views of the Chinese communist regime. Fairbanks located himself in the center of the American intellectual universe teaching and writing his many books at Harvard. Blessed with an engaging politician like personality rather like an academic Dean Jagger he could seem reasonable in his views to even ardent anticommunists. As a agent of influence he was unparalleled and he genuinely empathized with Chinese thought processes and melded them to produce his own highly deceptive multilayer persona and in incorporating propaganda in his works on Chinese history from about the Opium War to the present in such a way as to seem moderate and convincing. His books such as East Asia the Great Tradition and The Modern Transformation, written with Edwin O. Reischauer , who wrote the sections on Japan, are excellent and still worth reading but one has to always be on the alert for any pro-communist interpretations. Fairbank became quite rich offering advice to bankers and big business after the Nixon opening of China as well as reaping large rewards from the many editions and revisions of his books and famous as well not just in academia. Unfortunately there are to many institutional barricades for his true record to be ever much known.
Fairbanks was the opposite of the leading Soviet academic mouthpiece Frederick Lewis Schuman of Williams University who endlessly and crudely beat the drum of Stalinist and then Soviet propaganda. As crude and predictable as a windup toy he presented the crudity and shallowness of Soviet academic propagandizing as compared to Fairbanks much higher quality published works and generally smoother and more intellectual performance.
China did have its tub thumpers akin to Schuman but they were prolific and shrill hacks such as Han Suyin who were quickly oblivionized once Deng got control.
I admit I wish a CC was available here in New Orleans. I got bitten by the China bug over 50 years ago and continue to find the country and its culture and history fascinating even as I see them our next great opponent.
I’ve lived and taught in China, studied its education system and worked over the years with many Chinese students. Once one understands the cultural differences it becomes easier to see how our two societies (though not our politicians) can become good friends.
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