Confucius Institutes in universities ‘part of Party’s propaganda system’ think tank finds.

Confucius Institutes in universities ‘part of Party’s propaganda system’ think tank finds. 

The Henry Jackson Society report discovered that only four of the 30 institutes in the UK were solely providing cultural and language education. They observed that the majority are involved in more activities, from political lobbying to expanding China’s reach into advanced manufacturing. 

The Confucius Institute within Oxford Brookes University was established in 2016 with Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), a publishing company in China, which the research found was directly supervised by the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department. 

The Institute has set up 100 “Confucius Classrooms” in nearby schools, the report claimed. 

Moreover, staff at Confucius Institutes in the UK are having their political viewpoints and ethnic backgrounds filtered by Chinese officials, according to researchers. 

MPs have cautioned that the institutes are essentially a front for the Chinese Communist Party to clamp down on critical views of China and that they are having a “chilling effect” on academic liberty. 

The former Conservative leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, stated that: “Confucius Institutes are there to spy on Chinese students particularly. However, they are also there to bully the university hierarchy into ensuring that no critical debates on China take place at British universities.”

Anson Kwong, a researcher from Hong Kong now based in London, said: “By replicating China’s legal regime which restricts speech, Confucius Institutes have in fact successfully imported a regime of censorship onto British campuses.

“And our universities are indeed participating in the Communist Party’s systematic oppression of ethnic minorities and political dissidents. All this undermines our scholarship by corrupting our knowledge of China, so that we only get the official version of Chinese culture, society and history.”

  "Once you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you have a second source of opinions and authority that is ultimately answerable to the Chinese Communist Party, and which is not subject to scholarly review.” Source: Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. 

The Communist Trojan Horse 

There is a network of 30 Confucius Institutes in the U.K.

Li Changchun, the former 5th-highest-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party declared in 2007 that the Confucius Institutes were:  "an important part of China's overseas propaganda set-up"