Opinion | US targeting of Confucius Institutes is just the latest push to gain free and open access to China
- This is not just about language teaching or combating communist infiltration: just like the trade war, this is about opening up China, primarily for US companies. And the main obstacle to this is the Communist Party
Almost every day, the United States takes further steps in a new cold war with China. Sometimes the measures are military, sometimes political, sometimes economic and sometimes cultural. But they all have the same target: the assets and public profile of the Chinese government.
The obvious intention of the directive is to establish administrative hurdles and brand the institutes – which offer Chinese language courses and lectures on China, including Chinese politics – as hostile communist propaganda organs, to discourage American universities from hosting them.
Pompeo’s statement said the institutes are “funded by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus”. Irrespective of its polemical rhetoric, his statement points to one crucial fact: Confucius Institutes are indeed publicly funded, as are most educational institutions in China, including schools and universities.
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US education says no to Chinese resources