Inside Out | US politicians linking Confucius Institutes with espionage is taking paranoia to the extreme
Chinese spies are certainly interested in stealing industrial secrets and US military technology, but they are certainly not doing it through these cultural outposts
I want to look at the paranoid nonsense being talked about the Confucius Institutes that have mushroomed across the world since 2005, with US politicians in particular implying they are hotbeds of espionage, generating some kind of existential threat to national security.
But first, I want to slip back half a century in time, to 1967. This was the time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Vietnam war was at its height, as was the Cultural Revolution. International Marxists were plotting the global overthrow of capitalism. Paris students had closed the universities and were pelting cobble stones at police.
I was studying for university exams in the sleepy Lincolnshire town of Grantham, and made my own little gesture: I wrote off to SACU – the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. In due course I received a bunch of unintelligible propaganda, and became perhaps the only person in Grantham to possess one of Mao’s “little red books”.
All was forgotten. I went off to Pakistan as a volunteer teacher for a year, and returned to study a degree in social anthropology and development economics. Coincidentally, I lived in student residences alongside a tiny group of mainland Chinese in the UK to learn English. I ended up teaching some of them, as I used my Pakistan teaching experience to finance my way through university.
Two years after graduation I arrived at the Financial Times on the foreign desk just as Mao died and Deng Xiaoping began the long slow process of pulling China out of the stone age. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time studying and writing about China, including meeting a few lowly staff from their London embassy.
Then one routine morning on the FT’s foreign desk I received a call from a man who said he would like to meet and “chat over a beer and a sandwich” at an address that even I knew to be the home of MI5. There followed one of life’s more surreal experiences. I was interrogated intensively on my links with China and Chinese. He even showed me a copy of my original hand-written note to SACU in 1967.