In Europe, China, with its strong trade power, has set up Confucius Institutes in many countries like a mushroom. However, the nature and content of these institutes have begun to attract the attention of governments in the past two years, especially the British government, which is familiar with Chinese Culture, and has recently made significant moves to resist these institutes after pointing out that they are even suspected of carrying out some espionage work for the Chinese government. Although the bilateral trade volume has not been able to catch up with the trade volume between China and Germany and China and Britain, the naive and romantic French people, who traditionally have a good feeling for Chinese culture and the rich fantasy of the Latin nation, welcome China’s contribution of money and effort to send teachers to France for free to set up schools teaching Chinese. Naturally, the Confucius Institute has been blooming in France for a while. However, there are now some questions that can be raised loudly and publicly. For example, the French magazine le Point has recently begun to feature a number of concerns and warnings from French academic management and sinologists about Chinese modus operandi
First our eyes follow the lens of le Point magazine back to early September 2019, when Christian Mestre, dean emeritus of the French law school in Strasbourg, was in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China, participating in a program organized by the People’s Republic of China on “Counterterrorism. The fight against radicalism and terrorism, and the protection of human rights”, organized by the People’s Republic of China. Meister’s statement at the seminar was immediately reprinted in official Chinese media, such as Xinhua News Agency and the statist daily Global Times. For Beijing, his statement was worth as much as Gold.
President Meister seemed to believe the Chinese journalists, so he said: “I hope that France and other European countries will adopt the answers given by the Xinjiang authorities. In Kashgar, he himself visited one of the “vocational Education centers” in Xinjiang, the name given by Beijing to its re-education camps. He assured that the Chinese authorities were telling the truth, saying: No, China is not forcing or detaining hundreds of thousands of Uighurs. The French professor testified for the Chinese government that “these people are not in prison, but are being sent to mandatory training courses.”
Mester regretted that the restrictions on freedom in France are still “insufficient”. “It is necessary to strengthen the control of those parts of the population that are interested in the call of the Jihadist camp. However, the apology for the re-education of the Muslim population in China, proposed by the secularist delegates of the Conference of French University Presidents, has not attracted much attention. And there is much more debate about the situation of these Uighurs in the United States; which voted in the same month of September 2019 to pass a law defending the rights of this minority community. France will not really be aware of the problem until 2020.
When asked about it today, the sinologists at the University of Strasbourg say: I can’t believe it! “This is certainly not the position of the Chinese Studies Department at the University of Strasbourg,” says Boutonnet, head of the Chinese Studies Department. Marie Bizais-Lillig, a lecturer at the university, says: “It is not our role as scholars to make such political statements. Because to say so is not a matter of naiveté, but of a kind of “denialism. She said she was “very shocked” that “this is like a trip to the Soviet Union by French extreme pro-communists, or what could be called a German spy during Nazi Germany. Asked about this, President Meister admitted that during the trip, the seminar and an interview, he should have asked the question, “Which is better, to put radicals in prison, as in France, or, as in China, to put them in educational and de-radicalization institutions?” He denied using this to defend China’s policy in Xinjiang, and he accused the journalist of making up certain statements out of thin air. The story asks rhetorically: If that’s true, then why didn’t Dean Meister clarify this point 18 months ago? But Dean Meister retorted, “I don’t see why I need to apologize, I came to the conference as a scholar! “. He finally said, “I admit that I have been used by China as a propaganda tool for them. But Meister said he did all this to keep being able to have academic exchanges with China!!!
China’s blatant efforts to squeeze Confucius Institutes into the French university teaching system have raised concerns among some knowledgeable French people, but opinion reports point out that, at the top of French management, that “China’s growing influence in French academia” has long been a taboo subject. The management has to take into account and protect the 35,000 Chinese students in France and the lucrative revenues that bilateral cooperation can bring to French schools at the national level. Vidal, the French Minister of Higher Studies and Education, visited China in February 2019 and signed a series of agreements. Over the past fifteen years, eighteen Confucius Institutes have been opened in France, specializing in the teaching of Chinese language and culture, ten of which are located in higher education institutions.
However, in other Western countries, “China’s Trojan horse approach” to higher education has become a national issue of great importance. The Confucius Institute network has been categorized by the U.S. government in 2020 as a “diplomatic mission,” which is said to be a method used by China to increase its influence and thus restrict the entry of Chinese students into the United States. Australian campuses, which host 260,000 Chinese students, are now split between pro- and anti-Chinese factions. For example, in July 2019, in Brisbane, a handful of pro-democracy students staging a sit-in in Hong Kong were violently attacked by hundreds of Chinese students and recalcitrant elements sent by the Chinese consulate. This incident, and a string of revelations, prompted the Canberra authorities to launch a parliamentary inquiry into foreign interference in the affairs of its universities. In Europe, Belgium expelled in 2019 the director of the Confucius Institute at VUB University, a free university in the Flemish region of Brussels, on charges of espionage. But in France, by contrast, this debate could not be pushed forward.
Nevertheless, the Confucius Institutes at these universities are conducted in secret and the problems keep accumulating. The French experts interviewed see the Confucius Institutes as China’s “Trojan horse”. Françoise Robin, a French Tibetologist at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco), interviewed by the magazine, simply considers these Confucius Institutes to be China’s foreign “propaganda weapon”. Even if they are language courses, they can also convey political ideas, such as this Time showing a map of China with Taiwan as part of the Chinese territory. The Confucius Institute has tried to get into the Oriental Language Institute in Paris, she said, but we don’t need it, our school has been teaching Chinese for 150 years. ” This venerable and historic school of Oriental languages ‘knows how to defend itself. In 2016, Lobban invited the Dalai Lama to a seminar. The Tibetan scholar recalls, “The Oriental Language School received an official letter from the Chinese Embassy asking us not to host the Dalai Lama. Hidden behind a letter consulted by Viewpoint magazine was a glib warning that “you have to maintain good relations between Inalco and China.”
The Chinese government has always done its best to discourage French universities from inviting the Dalai Lama to speak. Frank Manuel, the principal of this school in Strasbourg at the time, was surprised to see that China later cancelled an exchange program for 30 International Students as a result.
The Vice-Rector of Sciences Po said in response to a press inquiry that she had not encountered any difficulties in cooperating with China and that the school would maintain the principle of reciprocity in the exchange of students, dialogue between countries and try to adopt international pluralism to avoid being overly dependent on one side and falling under the jurisdiction of the other. She said we will discuss the issue of national security in Hong Kong in 2020, as well as the Send China Ordinance. She also said that the school will never compromise on the issue of freedom, and our school’s principle is to try to protect students and research scholars.
As for how the University of Strasbourg, where Dean Meister is based, and the authorities of the Alsace province to which it belongs, have gone through the process of China using the Confucius Institute to make a head start and operate a long-term infiltration into the university, we will give you a more detailed account in our next program due to time constraints today.
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