China-India border conflict: communication breakdown looms amid Confucius Institute review
- Indian education ministry will assess university agreements for the institutes and drops Chinese classes for secondary schools from national policy
- Coronavirus pandemic and June 15 border skirmish have soured attitudes towards China among Indians and academic exchange may suffer
“Speak Chinese well, and you will have friends worldwide.”
The China-India border dispute: its origins and impact
Analysts say India has serious concerns about safeguarding its security in the face of its growing confrontation with Beijing, but that understanding the Chinese language is critical to understanding China and crafting foreign policy.
“India, which now seeks to better protect its national interests, has to take all measures possible, in all realms, to secure itself,” said Sriparna Pathak, assistant dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs at the OP Jindal Global University.
“In India, China is held in awe. There is much more to be understood. However, if unilateral aggression from China does not stop, there is a possibility that even this extremely low level of people-to-people exchanges also stops.”
Pathak said Chinese influence at Indian universities was not widely discussed, so it was hard to say whether there were clandestine activities within Indian academia.
Ji Rong, a spokeswoman for China’s embassy in India, released a statement on Tuesday urging India to treat Confucius Institutes and China-India higher education cooperation “in an objective and fair manner” and to “avoid politicising normal cooperation”.
“Over the years, Confucius Institutes have played an important role in promoting Chinese language teaching in India and China-India people-to-people and cultural exchanges,” she said. “This has been generally recognised by the Indian education community.”
Confucius Institutes rebrand after overseas propaganda and influence rows
But Geeta Kochhar, assistant professor at the Centre for Chinese and southeast Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), said earlier mainstream narratives in India had shifted since the pandemic and Ladakh border crisis to become far more hostile to engagement with China.
“At the people’s level, I do see that these nationalist narratives are very, very strong,” she said. “For policymakers, this is not the case. There are serious concerns about the security, and we are seriously negotiating at the border, but I don’t think they are thinking about closing the doors to China completely, it is much more pragmatic.”
Kochhar said there had long been discussions about a Confucius Institute at JNU that had run into issues such as administrative hierarchy, but that political influence could be mitigated by the university’s varied ideological discourse and chances for students to counter Chinese narratives.
“Most of the courses that they would teach in the Confucius Institute would be basic [Chinese] language, which is something that is a basic requirement for Indians to understand China,” she said. “In the exchanges between 1.3 billion people [in India] and 1.4 billion [in China], we in India have hardly a few hundred who know the language.
“You cannot do any engagement with China or have cooperative understanding with China unless you know the language, the culture, the psyche of the Chinese.”
Official figures from India show there were around 23,000 Indian students studying in Chinese universities in 2019. That number for Chinese students in India was far lower, according to Rityusha Mani Tiwary, visiting fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi.
“Further tightening of the exchange programmes and culture centres will lead to a worsening of this situation,” she said. “There is a deep distrust regarding Chinese people in so far as close contact is concerned and there is a negative public opinion of China at the moment.”
Chinese state-run media has published pieces critical of India’s move, with the hawkish tabloid Global Times publishing a report on Monday titled: “A new target to suppress China? India uses the excuse of ‘Chinese infiltration’ to review Confucius Institutes and higher-level cooperation.”
Yang Chaoming, head of the Confucius Research Institute of China and member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Beijing’s top political advisory body, said India’s review reflected the lack of understanding of Confucius Institutes around the world.
“India’s blind rejection and exclusion of Confucius Institutes is part of their overall anti-China attitude,” he said. “Confucius Institutes are a window for China to understand the world and for the world to understand China. To close Confucius Institutes are to close an important channel for exchange, which would be a very serious mistake.”
