With all the fuss over former prez Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) finances and the media-ready fainting spells of any woman who ever worked for him, some of the larger questions on where our Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government is leading us are not being asked.
Such as: What are we going to teach our kids in schools now that Taiwan is set to become a Chinese SAZ (Self-Abasement Zone)? When is President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) going to introduce a national Romanization system that is almost the same as Hanyu Pinyin? And when will Heir Apparent Sean Lien (連勝文) get his next promotion?
But it’s the propaganda side of things that really worries me. Apparently we’re not supposed to compete with China anymore, lest the poor dears get all teary over Taiwanese upstarts showing them up in front of lesser mortals.
One way that Taiwan competed quite effectively with China was by handing out scholarships to students and academics to come here to study Chinese. A beneficial side effect was that some of these people shaped Taiwan’s future by supporting dissidents and exposing the KMT’s human rights violations.
But Chen’s government, to its discredit, was never enthusiastic about expanding this form of diplomacy, and now, in its place, we have an administration that can barely speak the name of the country that elected it.
Meanwhile, China is leaping ahead with a campaign of “soft power” that makes the version espoused by former veep Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) look like the impotent showboating that it was.
This campaign involves opening hundreds of partly state-funded institutes around the world, mostly attached to universities, that teach courses on Chinese language and “culture” and fund teacher training. The name of this global strategic franchise is the Confucius Institute.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) using Confucius (孔子) as a diplomatic vanguard and business conduit? It doesn’t get any better.
Language courses are the main draw, but there are also courses for executives and the like. The “cultural” courses variously involve calligraphy, martial arts, tai chi, food, traditional music, painting — the kind of stuff that wealthy Chinese high school students might study for a while because their parents make them, then stop as the real, modern, globalizing China and all its imperatives kick in. In China these days, “culture” presumably ends right there.
Universities everywhere are falling over themselves signing up to host these institutes, which are superficially answerable to them. Like barnacles, however, the institutes are not just near campuses; they are often right up against them, or even inside them, oftentimes with the same senior academics in charge, and with vice chancellors and Chinese consular staff on the advisory boards.
Staff (particularly imports from a partner university in China), curriculum materials and activities fall under some level of control of The Office of Chinese Language Council International, or “H anban” for short. Hanban sounds innocuous, but its board is stacked with officials from Chinese government ministries.
At last count, says the Confucius Institute Online Web site, there are — wait for it — 260 of these “institutes” around the world. The word is that the Chinese are aiming for 1,000.
But to the best of my knowledge, not one has a course that includes vocabulary for “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” “Tibet crackdown,” “forced abortion,” “systemic corruption” or “exploitation of the peasantry.” Nor, for that matter, “soft power.”
I have looked in vain for course materials that discuss the long tradition of appropriating Confucian teachings for ugly ends.
For a while in China, the neo-Confucianists were in the ascendancy. Now we’re in a new phase, and what better name for these champions of centrifugal “cultural” diplomacy, these born-again Dragon nationalists, than “quasi-Confucianists”?
The sinister thing about this is not just the physical and bureaucratic proximity of a Chinese government-monitored organization in halls of learning, but that other academics will have to mingle with these people — and expect to get into a fight if they hold a scholastic or principled position that pisses off Chinese patriots among their number.
Imagine the consequences of such a fight when their boss and your boss are the same person, but they have truckloads of cash on the table and the support of Chinese consular spooks.
Truly amazing is the speed with which academic units have cross-pollinated with their Confucius Institutes, apparently with little discussion of academic independence, the potential conflict of interest, nor even at times the slightest acknowledgement that any of this poses a problem.
Take the London Confucius Institute, which has attached itself to and “advises” the renowned School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The institute council boasts a number of academics from China, including the vice president of Peking University and the dean of that university’s International College for Chinese Language Studies. Beijing’s commissar is Wang Yongda (王永達) from the Chinese embassy in London. Also on board are two SOAS academics, including one Bernhard Führer, who once edited a book deliciously called Zensur — Text und Autorität in China in Geschichte und Gegenwart, which might well be subtitled: “The tragedy of cashed-up academe: Having your dangao and eating it too.”
Looking to the future, the best-case scenario will see Beijing balk at indefinitely subsidizing tens of thousands of non-academic students, many of whom are studying for a lark or on the naive assumption that conversational Chinese will open the door to a life of riches.
Within the decade the Chicoms would look for more direct and profitable ways of exercising soft power. Withdrawal of funds would result in most institutes collapsing under their own weight or because of disquiet over their academic irrelevance. Some will morph into continuing education facilities and move house, while others would be absorbed into the university.
For all you students here in Taiwan struggling with your Chinese courses, look up your local Confucius Institute back home and be astonished at how many respectable academics who used to teach you have signed on without a twinge of pedagogical, corporate or personal conscience. All of a sudden your humble Taiwanese course seems almost ... well ... honorable, does it not?
When you do a grand tour of the very large number of Confucian Institute Web sites and see all the smiling faces, Chinese or otherwise, of diligent people who are spending years of their lives on this project, you feel some sadness. There must be lots of well-meaning, hardworking people in the lower ranks, and maybe some idealistic ones in charge.
That makes the truth more painful: Bereft of money or scholastic commitment to the study of China, universities around the world are outsourcing teaching to the CCP, even though the entire program is an explicit attempt by the Chicoms to exert influence on the back of “language” and “culture,” both of which it has the power to define, quarantine and erase.
Precious few have objected to any of this.
A Guardian article on Nov. 6 last year mentioned a few names, Canadian intelligence officials have expressed concerns, while Jocelyn Chey, a former Aussie diplomat and academic, spoke to a think tank in Sydney the same month, expressing concern over the role the institutes play in Beijing’s diplomatic agenda. Her talk — available in MP3 format at the Sydney Institute Web site — is even-handed, and all the more ominous for it.
But her comments were misgivings, not accusations. We can only wait for news that institute members discriminate against Falun Gong practitioners and other activists while cosying up to heads of universities to obstruct sensitive topics or individuals.
Being a happy little capitalist, I’m so inspired by all the Red yuan flying around these dollar-drooling campuses that I want to open my own propaganda wing in the medical departments of the same universities to cash in. I’ll call it the “Colonfucius Institute” (肛子學院), in honor of that neglected medical commentator of the Spring and Autumn Period.
This way we can combine study of Colonfucius’ little known texts with a revolutionary attack on colon cancer, one of mankind’s most pernicious killers. Patients will skip a general anesthetic and watch the camera go crazy in widescreen format set to exotic music (you know, twanging on a pentatonic scale), as incense laced with nitrous oxide swirls around amid soothing readings from the Colonfucian, ahem, Annals. All subsidized by Taiwan’s Department of Health, of course, with a complimentary DVD of the operation for the patient to take home.
Taiwan, rejoice! You can compete with China again — by taking medical diplomacy to the next level.
But what would Colonfucius say about the Confucius Institute, this academic equivalent of a sleeper cell?
I know it’s pushing things a little to ask some old fart who’s been dead for thousands of years to comment on our weary 21st century stupidity.
But in this case, I do think we can go to the source material for the answer.
I translate very crudely from the Sore Ring Cycle, his manual on hygienic practices for the body or, perhaps, the body academic:
汝食惡籽
知者不為
心虛血流
疏瀹而累
Thou hast consumed malignant seeds
When wisdom would have one refrain
The conscience pricks and corpus bleeds
So purge and purge and purge again.
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