Part 4: How China Undermines Democracy

As we saw in our last chapter, principleless and money grubbing Western “academics” take as much Chinese cash and students as they can get their hands on. Some of the money comes in the form of Confucius Institutes, propaganda centers run by the Chinese Communist Party, which have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide.

The first Confucius Institute opened in South Korea in 2004. They quickly spread to Japan, Australia, Canada and Europe. More than 100 are in the United States. Britain has 29, second-largest number in the world after the United States. Australia has 14 and Canada has 12.

They’ve also been allowed to penetrate primary and secondary schools; there are 1,193 Confucius Classrooms and 5,665 other “teaching sites.” There are 47,000 full-and part-time teachers deployed from China teaching 1.86 million students in 154 countries.

How important are Confucius Institutes to Beijing? Very.

Very important, indeed.

They’re overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known as Hanban. Hanban is currently chaired by Sun Chunlan, Vice-Premier of China, Politburo member and former head of the Communist Party’s principal propaganda outfit. That makes her the number three person in the People’s Republic. Representatives from 12 top state agencies—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Press and Publishing Administration, a propaganda bureau—sit on Hanban’s executive council. Its director general is on the Chinese state council, the 35-member board that basically runs the country.

President Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping’s predecessor, endorsed the institutes as a way, “to cultivate and prepare an ‘army’ of people to make sure the CCP will be in power in the future … and increase our CCP influence around the world.”

Confucius Institutes are directly controlled, funded and staffed by Hanban, as part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government pumps an estimated $10 billion into a year.

What is China’s goal? To control discussion of three topics on campuses beginning with “T” — Tienanmen, Tibet and Taiwan.

Why are our “elite institutions” happy to carry Beijing’s water? Universities can continue to collect full tuition from their students while essentially outsourcing instruction in Chinese. In other words, it’s free money for the schools. At most Confucius-hosting campuses, students can receive course credit for classes completed at the institute.

Each Confucius Institute comes with $100,000 in start up costs provided by Hanban, with annual payments of about $100,000 over a five-year period, and instruction subsidized as well, including the air fares and salaries of the teachers provided from China. And each Confucius Institute typically partners with a Chinese university.

Hanban supplies the content – Mandarin teachers, textbooks, course software and other educational materials, which come with Beijing’s particular spin. They’re explicitly instructed to toe Beijing’s line on controversial political questions. There can be no discussion whatsoever of human rights in China, or the Tienanmen Square massacre. Should a student raise an uncomfortable question about, say, the political status of Tibet, Hanban’s instructors are ordered to refocus the discussion on Tibet’s natural beauty or indigenous cultural practices (which, ironically, Beijing has spent decades stamping out).

Think about that for a minute. Universities, who are supposed to be in the business of creating educational content and shaping how their students think, outsource that to the People’s Republic of China for cash. It underscores modern Western universities are pale imitations of the historic institutions whose names they carry. Essentially they are brand names issuing credentials, and no longer institutes of educational excellence.

Incredibly, Confucius Institute teachers are appointed by Hanban. They “must have a strong sense of mission, glory, and responsibility and be conscientious and meticulous in their work,” Hanban says. They also must toe the line.

Consider the case of Sonia Zhao, who did not. Zhao, a Chinese national, was sent by Hanban to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2011 to work at its Confucius Institute. She’s a practitioner of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-tinged spiritual movement that Beijing despises as a threat to its authority. Zhao quit a year into her tenure, arguing that McMaster University was “giving legitimization to discrimination.”

That’s because, in order to secure her employment with Hanban, Zhao said she was forced to disguise her fealty to Falun Gong. Her employment contract with Hanban explicitly stated that she was “not allowed to join illegal organizations such as Falun Gong.”This kind of open religious discrimination is illegal in Canada, as it would be in the United States. Under intense pressure, McMaster reluctantly shuttered its Confucius Institute in 2013, citing the institute’s “hiring practices.” Today, I bet McMaster’s administration would not have buckled.

As we showed in our last chapter, modern universities are a ponzi scheme desperately recruiting ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating to fuel the growth of a bureaucracy that investigates the wildly exaggerated claims of the grievance industry of homosexuality, racism, and sexism. (If you think that’s unfair, read about the nonsense that is “mirco-aggressions.”)

Administrative positions at colleges and universities grew at ten times the rate of tenured faculty positions since 1993.

What does China get for its money?

Confucius Institute staff act as spies for the Chinese government on the activities of Chinese students on campus. Chinese students often say they’re disappointed to arrive at a foreign university only to discover that their own government has established a presence on campus that made it feel as though they were still under the kind of surveillance that they had to live with in China.

Then keep in mind that as we pointed out in chapter 3, China uses its students abroad to steal research from universities. Confucius Institutes give China an official presence on campuses to hide its intelligence officials who direct this spying. Canada’s former Asia-Pacific intelligence chief Michael Juneau-Katsuya claims that Confucius Institutes are linked to China’s intelligence services and “represent a clear and undeniable menace to our society.”

The centers have also led to a climate of self-censorship on campuses that play host to them.

Take the debate at the “august” London School of Economics over whether to adjust the depiction of Taiwan on a sculpture, after complaints from Chinese students. The World Turned Upside Down statue, which was unveiled outside LSE’s student activity center, is a “large political globe” where the geographical locations of nation states have been inverted to show the world “from a different viewpoint.” On the map, Taiwan is colored pink while China is colored yellow.  

After more than three months of suspense, LSE caved, and added an asterisk next to Taiwan. The school then placed a sign below the globe which directly addressed the issue by saying, "There are many disputed borders and the artist has indicated some of these with an asterisk."

Examples abound of universities withdrawing invitations to controversial speakers under pressure from China or removing certain publications.

In 2014, at a European Association for Chinese Studies conference in Portugal, Hanban director-general Xu Lin confiscated all the printed programs and ordered pages advertising a Taiwanese co-sponsor to be removed. A pretty bold maneuver at an academic conference — almost like she thinks she runs the show. Not hard to see how she got that idea.

North Carolina State University, host to a Confucius Institute, scuttled a planned appearance by the Dalai Lama for fear of Chinese backlash: The director of the Institute warned NC State officials that such a visit could hurt “strong relationships we were developing with China.”

The University of Sydney in Australia did the same in 2013.

Then there is the case of Drew Pavlou. The 20-year-old arts student at Australia’s University of Queensland organized several campus demonstrations in support of 2019’s Hong Kong pro-democracy protests.

Pavlou also urged the university to close its Confucius Institute. That irked China’s consul-general in Brisbane. That he doesn’t have better things to worry about tells you a lot about China’s priorities. It also irked the venal, Chinese infiltrated administration that runs the University of Queensland.

Hoj and Xu: Two slimy peas in a pod

A protest on July 24 was stormed by Mainland Chinese (likely acting on the orders of the consul-general) intent on making trouble. They found it. Punches were thrown. That the police didn’t arrest foreign thugs breaking-up a peaceful pro-democracy protest and launch an immediate investigation into who sent them is mind boggling enough.

But, the person who most run afoul of the “authorities” is Pavlou. The University of Queensland accused him of 11 counts of misconduct. He has subsequently been suspended from school for two years.

The story gets better. While the university was in the process of booting Pavlou for exercising his free speech rights, Xu was awarded the post of visiting professor by UQ’s slimy vice-president Peter Hoj.

Let’s be clear: for Beijing’s cash, the “esteemed” University of Queensland not only opposes democracy in Hong Kong, it has persecuted one of its students for using his rights of free speech and free assembly.

Some politicians have finally woken-up to what China is up to on campus. And in places that aren’t 100% occupied by leftists, some Confucius Institutes have been closing. That has forced cash hungry “academics” to look for new ways to pander to Beijing.

Enter, “the best and brightest” who run four of Britain’s biggest brand name universities. They’re working with the Chinese to create an online platform so that its learning materials comply with China’s repressive internet regulations.

Confucius say … modern academics are frauds

King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, Southampton, and York — are enthusiastically taking part in the pilot program that will allow Chinese students to study for British degrees online without falling foul of the communist nation’s internet censorship that blocks certain websites.

Run by JISC, which provides digital services for British universities, the system sets up a connection between the institution and the student in China via the Chinese internet company Alibaba Cloud, which is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group headed by Jack Ma, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Ma is also a very proud member of the Communist Party.

If successful, JISC has happily said the program could be rolled out to all British universities.

Let’s give China its due. I can only pull this off if so-called academics - who consider themselves the best and brightest - allow it. That they allow it tells you everything you need to know about the kind of cancer they are.
Like the subject of our next chapter, the venal politicians who normalized the Butchers of Beijing after Tienanmen Square, “educators” have happily normalized the Chinese Communist Party for cash, while simultaneously teaching a hatred for Western civilization and their own countries. If the West does not want to cough and die — modern universities and the people who run them must be destroyed root and stem.