US attack on Confucius Institute criticized

Beijing on Friday urged Washington to stop politicizing a bilateral educational project, cease interfering in normal people-to-people exchanges and stop undermining mutual trust and cooperation after the United States designated the Confucius Institute US Center as a "foreign mission" of China.

"The US move is an act that demonizes and stigmatizes the normal functioning of the program. We deplore and firmly oppose it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a regular news briefing in Beijing, adding that China reserves the right to respond.

In a statement on Thursday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the CIUS "an entity advancing Beijing's global propaganda and malign influence campaign on US campuses and K-12 classrooms".

Zhao said Pompeo cited a lot of baseless reports that revealed his intention of suppressing the program under unfounded pretexts. He added that certain people in the US, out of ideological bias and for selfish gains, have been blatantly obstructing the normal functioning of China-US cooperative programs for awhile now.

"This is totally unacceptable," Zhao said, noting that all the Confucius Institutes in the US are jointly established with US universities in accordance with a voluntary application process.

"Their functioning has been open and transparent, they have been observing local laws and university rules and they have contributed to China-US people-to-people exchanges and have been welcomed by host universities and people in the US," he added.

The Confucius Institute serves as a bridge and bond for people across the world to learn Chinese, know China and enhance their educational and cultural exchanges with China.

Altogether, there are 65 institutes on US university campuses and approximately another 500 classroom programs affiliated with the institute in the country. While the US government is not closing the Confucius Institutes, it said that it would ask that universities, again, take a hard look at what those institutes are doing on their campuses.

The US designation came nearly two months after it designated the US operations of four Chinese media outlets as foreign missions. Before that, five Chinese media outlets had already been so designated.

"We disagree with the US State Department's designation and hope to clear up this fundamental misunderstanding," the CIUS said in a statement Thursday.

The CIUS is devoted to global education services and intercultural opportunities for US communities, promoting the "simple ideal" of US students learning the Chinese language, a goal that is shared by many educators and students across the US, according to the statement.

It insists that the Confucius Institute US Center, which has no direct connection to college campuses and is not involved in deciding CI curriculum, employment or funding, is being "targeted symbolically".

"CIUS has no influence, let alone 'malign' influence, over how universities run and manage their own Confucius Institute language programs. We hope the State Department (will) visit those schools and see for themselves just as members of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) already have," it said.

The GAO, a federal agency that conducted interviews with institute personnel and school officials at 10 schools with Confucius Institutes, reported in February 2019 that officials from more than half of the case-study schools said that establishing a Confucius Institute offered benefits that aligned with the school's strategic plans to forge international connections and to expand the global reach of their campuses.

Officials at several case-study schools also said that the funding provided for the institutes was a small proportion of a larger budget related to Asian studies and Chinese-language programs, and, as a result, could not exert undue influence, according to the GAO report.