ROBERT KAPP, JEFFREY WASSERSTROM 06.23.14
icon(China Photos/Getty Images)
Dressed in ancient costume, people kneel in front of a statue of Confucius during a ceremony to mark his birthday in Changchun, Jilin province.
Last week, the American Association of University Professors joined a growing chorus of voices calling on North American universities to rethink their relationship with Confucius Institutes, the state-sponsored Chinese-language programs whose policies critics say are anathema to academic freedom. We asked contributors to discuss the debate. Specifically: the costs and benefits of having a Confucius Institute on a university campus; the economic forces at play; and the role of China in university life more broadly. —The Editors
Beijing’s Confucius Institute effort on American campuses has its ancestry in Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and perhaps other countries’ efforts to “do well by doing good” in American academia. It should not be viewed as uniquely insidious, in spite of China’s exceptionally rapid economic and strategic ascent in recent years. To view the CIs through the prism of a looming Chinese threat to the core elements of American national life, material, military, or moral, is a mistake.
Nowadays, Big China is indeed on a roll, publicly entertaining a “Chinese Dream” of national “rejuvenation,” but at the same time pondering how to be received by others as something more attractive than a gate crasher. The leadership’s steady concern, for the past decade or more, with Public Diplomacy—combined with its bulging coffers and the never-ending reminders of America’s Wow Factor on the world stage (LeBron James, “Transformers,” Starbucks)—are leading Official China to grapple with the problem of what defines China for its own inhabitants and what defines China for everyone else on earth.