As the former Trump administration tries to shut down China’s Confucius Institutes in U.S. schools, some think tank scholars have discovered that the Chinese Communist Party has quietly renamed the institutes and their headquarters in an attempt to rebrand them and avoid scrutiny.
U.S. media reported Thursday (18) that the Confucius Institutes were originally part of China’s National Leading Group Office for the International Promotion of Chinese Language (Hanban, HANBAN), but the Hanban was renamed the “Center for Language Education and Cooperation” by the Ministry of Education last July. Education and Cooperation, which Chinese official media claimed at the Time was to dispel Western perceptions of the agency as a propaganda machine for Chinese ideology.
According to Rachelle Peterson, a member of the National Association of Scholars, a U.S. think tank, the Hanban has set up a non-governmental organization, the China International Education Foundation, to manage local colleges and universities, but the situation is not fully understood. Some U.S. scholars believe this is a public relations ploy by the Chinese Communist Party, and that while U.S. schools are closing Confucius Institutes and switching to other programs, the textbooks, curriculum, faculty and funding are all from the Hanban. She continued that as of Wednesday (17) there are 51 Confucius Institutes across the United States, more than 40 schools closed their colleges, but there are similar programs with new names.
Recent Comments