This past April, in a ceremony attended by the Chinese ambassador, Barbados announced the establishment of a Confucius Institute at the University of the West Indies (UWI)-Cave Hill. This is one of over 400 institutes established in schools across 115 countries.

Officially, the Confucius Institute (CI) is a non-profit educational initiative which partners with schools across the globe to provide Chinese language instruction, scholarships for students to study in China, and promote greater understanding and appreciation of Chinese culture.

However, the organization’s close ties with China’s communist government, the sometimes ideological nature of its lessons and its efforts to reenforce China’s political positions, have raised concerns that the organization’s intentions may be less about promoting Chinese language and culture and more about expanding China’s political influence globally and spreading the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology.

The Confucius Institute

The Confucius Institute is owned and overseen by the Office of Chinese Language Council International, known as Hanban. Hanban labels itself as a non-governmental, non-profit organization affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education; however, the organization has been described as a “government entity,” because its leadership is comprised mostly of incumbent Chinese government ministers and CCP officials.

Hanban’s chair, Liu Yandong, is also the vice-premier of China and a member of the Central Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, the group of 25 officials who oversee the party. Hanban provides partner schools with grants of about $100,000 to $150,000 to help establish CIs. Once established, Hanban funds the institute’s operation jointly with the host school.

The organization also provides teachers from China and pays their transportation costs and salaries. Hanban supplies its own books, videos, and other teaching materials to its institutes. Between 2004 and 2011, Hanban spent an estimated $500 million establishing and funding CIs around the world.

Beginning with Mexico in 2006, 33 CIs have been established in 11 countries in the Latin America-Caribbean region, welcomed in by schools and government officials. Ronald Jones, Barbados’ minister of education, said that the institute will bring about the “cross fertilization of ideas” and linguistic and cultural diversity.

During the opening of the Confucius Institute at UWI-Mona in Jamaica in 2009, the university’s head, Professor Gordon Shirley, said that the institute will attract “increased numbers of students” and further benefit the university by “increasing and deepening our understanding and appreciation of the culture of the people of China.”

Dr. Courtney Hogarth, director of the Confucius Institute at UWI-Mona explained that the institute holds celebrations for major Chinese festivals, teaches Chinese history and geography, Chinese language and culture, as well as Chinese calligraphy and tai-chi. The institute also shows films offering a “glimpse on life in China.”

Hogarth urged Jamaicans to “make full use of those services we [at the institute] have to offer.” China’s foreign minister Hua Chunying said that the CIs “promote international friendship” and describes them as a “bridge of friendship connecting the world with China.” However, evidence suggests the institute’s intentions may be more political than educational.

The Confucius Institute’s intentions

The Confucius Institute’s stated mission is to promote Chinese language and culture internationally, and Chinese state-run media has said that the institute “avoids ideological content.” However, CIs have been known at times to promote ideological content under the guise of language and historical instruction. In 2014, The Epoch Times reported that textbooks provided and used by the institute to help students learn Chinese included propaganda songs with lyrics, such as “Our mighty leader Chairman Mao, leading all of us forward.”

While The Epoch Times is a publication devoutly critical of the CCP, it is worth noting such songs have been a part of education in China and have been performed by CI students at events sponsored by CIs. Also, at least one advertisement in China for those wishing to apply for positions as CI teachers in Canada warned that all applicants would be “assessed to ensure they meet political ideology requirements.”

A video on the CI website’s ‘For kids and teens’ section provides an example of how language learning material is at times marked by CCP ideology. The animated video, which is in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles, offers a pro-communist, anti-American account of the Korean War. The video consistently referred to the conflict as “the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea,” as do some history books used by the institute.

The video, ostensibly to help children learn Chinese language and history, condemned the U.N.’s intervention in the war and accused the U.S. military of trying to “seize the whole (Korean) peninsula.” Yet, it praised the Chinese government for intervening on the side of North Korea.

Terence Russell, an associate professor at the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Manitoba, explained that the video was most disturbing because of its orientation towards young children who “lack the critical faculties to parse propaganda.” The video has since been removed from the Confucius Institute’s website, after controversy emerged over its content.

June Teufel Dreyer, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, said the history lessons taught in the institute’s videos and books are “outrageous distortions of what actually happened.” Dreyer added that historical events embarrassing to the CCP, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are not included in the institute’s teaching materials. The institute’s lessons also exclude any information on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.”

Li Changchun, a former member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee, the highest branch of the Chinese government and former head of the CCP’s Central Commission for Guiding Cultural and Ethical Progress, called the CIs, “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup” in 2009, lending some credence to the allegations.

Hanban and the CIs have also worked to promote China’s geopolitical stances, especially regarding the controversy over the sovereignty of Taiwan and Tibet. Hanban’s website describes Taiwan as “China’s largest island,” and maps used in the institute’s classrooms depict Taiwan and large portions of the South China Sea as Chinese territory. When talking about the CI’s teachers, Xu Lin, Hanban’s chief executive, said in a BBC interview, “All of them will say, Taiwan belongs to China.”

Falk Hartig, a researcher at Frankfurt University and contributing scholar for the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy, wrote that all foreign directors of CIs are told in orientation, “Taiwan and Tibet are part of China.” However, Taiwan and many of the islands in the South China Sea depicted by the institute as part of China are not under Beijing’s administration, and Taiwan adamantly rejects that it is part of the People’s Republic of China. Also, many of the islands over which China claims control are controlled by other countries that reject Beijing’s claims.

Hartig added that while he did not agree that the institutes are “sinister” propaganda, “the fact is that CIs are not apolitical organizations.”

The promotion of the ‘one-China’ policy in CIs is especially important for Latin America and the Caribbean. Twelve countries in the region still recognize Taiwan, and, as Bucknell University professor Zhiqun Zhu explained, China has “quickly and quietly doubled its efforts to win Latin American and Caribbean countries away from Taiwan” in order to “further isolate Taiwan diplomatically.”

CIs have played a much more forceful role in promoting the CCP’s position on Tibet in schools across the world. Since China’s communist government invaded and seized control of Tibet in 1950, maintaining that its right to sovereignty over Tibet comes from historical periods of Chinese rule in the region, it has been determined to crush any discussion of Tibetan independence or the numerous human rights violations it has committed in Tibet. The UN has described the nature of Chinese rule in Tibet as an attempt “to destroy in whole or in part the Tibetans as a separate nation and the Buddhist religion in Tibet.”

Despite the controversy surrounding the issue, as Professor Dreyer recalled, CIs would host speakers at universities who would endorse the Chinese government and “talk about how happy all the Tibetans were.” She added that these endorsements often occurred concurrently with “self-immolations happening.” This is a reference to the Tibetans who publicly set themselves on fire to protest and draw attention to Chinese oppression. Over 100 Tibetans have self-immolated since 2009.

The University of Maryland’s CI, for example, hosted Xie Feng, an official for China’s US embassy, in 2009. In his remarks, Xie described the period of Tibetan independence as one of “darkness and cruelty,” and asserted that all attempts by Tibetans to gain independence or more autonomy “will get nowhere.” Promotion of the CCP’s political agenda is even part of the instructions given to CI teachers.

Sonia Zhao, a former CI teacher in Canada, explained that while the institute’s teachers are instructed to try to avoid answering questions on Tibet and Taiwan, if pressed they must “say something the Chinese Communist Party would prefer,” namely that “Taiwan is part of China, and Tibet has been ‘liberated.’”

The institute has also made efforts to suppress criticism of China. In 2008 Yan Li, a former reporter for Chinese state-run media and director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, told students to “work together to fight with Canadian media.” Yan opposed the media’s reporting of Beijing’s brutal crackdown on Tibetans protesting Chinese rule and accused the media of supporting “separatists.”

An article on Wenxinshe, a Chinese-language website for Chinese scholars, praised Yan, saying that her influence encouraged Canadian students to “bravely” debate and oppose “anti-China elements” in Canadian television media, newspapers and on the internet. The article further explained that Yan’s efforts even yielded an apology from a Canadian news station.

It should be noted that Liu Yunshan, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and current head of the CCP’s Central Commission for Guiding Cultural and Ethical Progress, called on the communist party to use propaganda to “create a favorable international environment for us” and to exercise “control and management of foreign journalists” to “guide them to report China objectively and friendly.”

Yan’s actions represent a connection between the CI and the CCP’s propaganda aims.

Confucius Institute and the universities

The institute’s connections with the Chinese government and many schools’ reliance on Hanban funding have raised concerns over how much influence the institutes, and by extension, the Chinese government, have on their host schools. In 2011, Peng Ming-min, a former senior advisor to Taiwan’s president, in The Taipei Times, explained that colleges and universities hosting CIs must first “declare their support for Beijing’s “one China” policy.

This policy states that Taiwan is part of China and the CCP’s regime is the “sole legal government” of the Chinese people. It has, however, been suggested that this requirement is – at least publicly – no longer enforced.

• Andrew Lumsden is a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.