U.S. requires Confucius Institute center to register as foreign mission

[Tangmo]

There are 75 Confucius Institutes in the USA, 66 of which are at colleges and universities. "Confucius" institute is a misnomer that is deliberately done by Beijing as these institutes are funded and staffed by the Communist Party Government of the PRC.

The institutes pay the host college or university for facilities and services but bring in their own faculty and staff and operate as a separate entity within a USA university. Chinese rules apply as for instance discussion is forbidden of Taiwan, Tibet, XinJiang, and so on for fear by the Party cadre dissenting voices will speak up...and out. According to the U.S. non-profit organization, the National Association of Scholars, the institutes compromise academic freedom, defy Western norms of transparency, and are inappropriate on campuses. The American Association of University Professors has opposed the institutes since they began.


The Party-Government in Beijing operates "Confucius" institutes in Australia, NZ, Canada and in EU countries although there have always been local objections to their presence as anti academic freedom and as propaganda agencies of Beijing. So it's encouraging to see this occurring in the USA and similar controls being implemented in the other host countries.

These institutes need to be shuttered and for good.




U.S. requires Confucius Institute center to register as foreign mission

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington said on Thursday it was requiring the center that manages Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes in the United States to register as a foreign mission, in a further sign of deteriorating bilateral relations. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled the Confucius Institute U.S. Center in Washington “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms.”


Pompeo said the goal of the move was to ensure American schools “can make informed choices about whether these CCP (Chinese Communist Party)-backed programs should be allowed to continue, and if so, in what fashion.” “The United States wants to ensure that students on U.S. campuses have access to Chinese language and cultural offerings free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies,” he said. Pompeo said the Trump administration had made it a priority to seek fair and reciprocal treatment from China and Beijing had enjoyed free and open access to U.S. society while denying that same access to Americans and other foreigners in China. In June, the State Department announced it would start treating four major Chinese media outlets as foreign embassies, calling them mouthpieces for Beijing. David Stilwell, the top U.S. diplomat for East Asia, said China had taken no action to address fundamental U.S. concerns about where bilateral ties were going and also referred to U.S. allegations that Chinese diplomats were involved in activities that undermined medical research and freedom of speech.

U.S. requires Confucius Institute center to register as foreign mission - Reuters

This action says all the personnel at the institutes are agents of a foreign government and not academics, researchers, independent scholars and so on. So if the door might hit 'em on the way out then good. The sooner they're sent back to where they belong the better.

 

[Tangmo]

This distancing began very quietly during the second term of Potus Obama when the China professionals in the government, embassies, think tanks in USA, military to military dialogue sessions in China and in the USA, among others, noticed China was, well, China.

That is, authoritarian, arrogant, overbearing, presumptuous, intolerant, demanding and so on and wasn't ever going to change from its thousands of years of embedded attitudes of superiority and an entitled supremacy. The Chinese hate democracy, they despise freedom and democracy; the Chinese detest Western Liberalism.

It matters not who is in the government at a given point, from 5000 years ago to the present and going into the future, the Chinese are who they are because they see no need to change. Indeed, the only way to change 'em is with a 2x4 where they can see it up close when it comes in on 'em. Even then they're slow.


CHINA

It's Time for Western Universities to Cut Their Ties to China

foreignpolicy.com - Salvatore Babones

It’s Time for Western Universities to Cut Their Ties to China. In their crass hunger for Chinese money, universities have become China’s fifth column

It’s time for Western universities to close their Confucius Institutes and end their academic cooperation with China. In the three decades following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the partnerships mainly focused on research collaboration. Later, they grew to include the Confucius Institutes for language education, generous funding for various joint projects, and the establishment of Western universities’ branch campuses in China. At a time when China was undemocratic but liberalizing, such engagement seemed like a sensible strategy.

There have always been uneasy moments in Western universities’ relationships with China, whether prompted by tensions over hosting the Dalai Lama or controversies over university self-censorship on China-related topics. But it seemed that everyone—even Beijing—shared the same ultimate goal of a more liberal, more democratic China. Now that China has tilted toward full-blown totalitarianism, the “values transfer” rationale for engagement with China has evaporated. Now that China has tilted toward full-blown totalitarianism at home and military expansionism abroad, the “values transfer” rationale for engagement with China has evaporated. It has become crystal clear that Chinese President Xi Jinping has no intention of leading China toward convergence with the West. As a result, Western universities can no longer argue that they are pursuing a larger civilizing mission in their dealings with China.

It's Time for Western Universities to Cut Their China Ties and Shut Down Confucius Institutes

Whether it's Biden or Trump the good times are over for the Boyz in Beijing and their popular Chinese populism that's thousands of years old and simply picked up by the CCP and exploited by 'em. Some Chinese would try democracy yet it would fail immediately because very few Chinese of the mainland have any remote clue of what democracy is.

 

[TheParser]

Great news!

Yes, shut them down.

They are puppets of the totalitarian Chinese government.

They also promote the simplified version of Chinese characters, instead of the beautiful traditional Chinese characters that are still used in Taiwan.

 

[Tangmo]

Chandler Thornton is the National Chairman of the College Republican National Committee and says he aspires to be a gentleman. He and the College Democrats have joined nationally to work to close the Communist Party institutes in the USA that are cynically called the "Confucius Institute" by the CCP Dictator Tyrants in Beijing.


Colleges must sever ties with Chinese propaganda institutes

By CHANDLER THORNTON |
May 21, 2020

. It’s time to admit a new Cold War is upon us, and that we need to take seriously China’s attempts to infiltrate American college campuses in order to propagandize, steal intellectual property and monitor what is going on in the United States. It would be niave to think that only the most blatant attempts at foreign spying are the ones we need to be on guard against. The most determined attempt by the Chinese to establish a presence on American campuses is the most obvious: Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, which pose as centers for language and cultural exchange. There are about 80 active Confucius Institutes in the U.S., including at such prestigious campuses as Stanford, Tufts and Columbia, according to the National Association of Scholars.


Last week, dozens of leading members of the College Republican National Committee, which I chair, joined with College Democrats to call for the permanent closure of Confucius Institutes on all U.S. campuses. While we may not agree on much politically, young Republicans and Democrats recognize the immense threat to academic freedom posed by these Trojan horses of the Chinese Communist Party. Confucius Institutes function as a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Their main purpose is to promote the Chinese state agenda. Through their activities on campus, they intimidate Chinese students, engage in disinformation campaigns and censor issues sensitive to the Chinese government. The Chinese government’s flagrant attempt to coerce and control discussion at universities in the U.S. and abroad is a real threat to the free exchange of ideas. Now is the time for colleges to take a stand for academic freedom by terminating their agreements to host Confucius Institutes.

Colleges must sever ties with Chinese propaganda institutes