Don’t you love it when the CCP says that they don’t agree?!?!? Vomit!!!
It doesn’t matter where on the planet they are squatting as there’s absolutely no respect for the laws of the land.
As one former Hk secondary school principal said to me during a discussion on contractual terms and conditions about 7/8 years ago…the contract is dead and people are alive! Do you understand the logic and reason??? I didn’t bother to do a rebuttal by the way. 19th century mentality belongs in the 19th century!
Italy can’t keep Xi’s teet out of their mouth? Figures, they need the slave labor for their “Made in Italy” goods. It’s not like they have a real economy.
How is Beijing adapting to the closing and shaming of their Confucius Institutes? This panel at the Heritage Foundation tries to find out:
Confucius Institutes, once a strategic part of China’s overseas influence campaign, have almost disappeared from the United States: 104 of 118 have shut down. But the demise of Confucius Institutes has not deterred the Chinese government, which has persuaded American colleges and universities to reopen and rebrand Confucius Institute programs under new names. A new report from the National Association of Scholars, After Confucius Institutes: China’s Enduring Influence on American Higher Education, documents the new ways in which the Chinese government exerts undue influence on American colleges and universities.
The world is still naive and kind, well mostly…took them long enough to figure out this global trojan horse move. Hopefully not too late. When dealing with China, the world really needs to think twice about the true motive behind a free lunch.
You may have posted the first thing in my life that didn’t make me wonder how that man hasn’t been assassinated yet. Now he’ll just be assassinated by a “lone gunman who has an ax to grind with him due to some cult that caused his mom to lose all her money”
The problem is that 100% of Chinese teachers in the US who come from China are trained in subtle anti-American, pro-China rhetoric and they are so skilled in doing so that even I can’t counter their ridiculous statements without them finding a way to make me sound like a racist. The CCP doesn’t need the CI. They have all of their brainwashed ex-citizens, now US citizens, doing the work for them.
(Edit to draw attention to what kind of person I am, based on anything not related to China that I post on this forum. Many of you call me “woke” and “left wing”, etc., even if I don’t consider myself that, because I don’t believe in a two-party system, a “binary”, as it were, but I’m certainly an anti-racist and loudly so, so if Chinese people can make me out to be “racist” , they’re REALLY good at what they do)
@dan2006 : closures of CIs are another example of the west slowly turning on the Chinese issue. These have been funded by China, basically free language teachers that for years many were happy to take advantage of. But, no such thing as a free lunch, and the costs of the free teachers have turned out to be more than most are willing to pay
Edit: oh, reading this article it seems the UK had spent a lot on CIs. I thought they were all fully subsidized by China, but is seems the financials probably vary by case. Still, turning point
The chinese are pretty capable of rebranding and popping up again. The problem remains under the skin, as it always has.
It is a step forward, but by no means is anywhere close to any kind of sollution.
as @nz said. they like playing the race card. or any card. I am not sure exactly if that’s because they are amazing at what they do or “we” are amazingly bad. I mean, to be quite honest, it’s not THAT hard to see through their efforts…
The difference is the heaps of restrictions placed on instruction by the CIs. No mention of taboo subjects: Tibet, Taiwan, etc. Remember these are in universities in the west—not external to them, but in them! Such illiberal and inflexible rules are in direct conflict with what university education is (or at minimum should be) about.
There’s been heaps of bad press about them. They are utterly unlike the other soft power institutes with which you might associate them (Goethe Insitute, Alliance Francaise, etc).
OK, but ultimately the point of exerting soft power diplomacy is furthering your own national interest and narrative.
It would be, for example, somewhat naive to think that other instruments of soft diplomacy from other countries do not also espouse the virtues (virtual or otherwise) of their paymasters.
Having worked in large organizations in the West and seen actual illegal conduct (such as fraud), rarely do employees whistleblow against their bosses even in criminal matters. In a totalitarian state like China I can only suppose the pressure to conform would be even higher.
From what some other posters told me about Chinese “black police stations” in another thread, even if there was no formal policy within CIs to spread CCP propaganda, I suspect all the employees in CIs would toe the party line anyway, out of fear of Big Brother finding out. Or the CI employees may just have been so thoroughly brainwashed from young that the indoctrination they got is all the truth they know. Sad
I’m not condoning the CI’s behavior, just playing Devil’s Advocate and saying other countries do it too. It’s the same thing with the West pointing fingers at Chinese spying (Huawei et al), what do you think the NSA and GCHQ have been doing all these years, not only to enemies but also to their own citizens?
P.S. I’m annoyed I didn’t know about CIs while I was a student - free Mandarin classes! Instead I paid through my nose for a few private lessons that I ended up forgetting. I consider myself resistant to indoctrination because of my rebellious disposition and willingness to buck the trend. “Only dead fish go with the flow.”
