Among the tasks of the United Front is turning the residents of Hong Kong and Taiwan into fervent patriots. Other highly sensitive matters also fall within its remit: it is leading discussions with the Vatican about returning China’s Catholics (more than ten million people) to the bosom of the holy Roman Catholic Church. This is something Rome has long desperately wished for, but has always been stymied by the Communist Party’s insistence that the highest authority on earth for every Chinese citizen, including Chinese Catholics, is the Party and not the Pope.
This isn’t the atheist Party’s only power struggle with religious authorities. For some time, the United Front has been wrangling with the Tibetan government in exile over the reincarnation of the current Dalai Lama, who lives in India. The religious leader of all Tibetans has said a number of times in recent years that he has absolutely no desire to be reborn inside China. Beijing has reacted with obvious panic. A reincarnation of the Dalai Lama outside its control would be a nightmare for the CCP. The Dalai Lama can say and do what he likes, says Norbu Dunzhub, a United Front official from the ‘Autonomous Region of Tibet’, but he cannot deny that ‘only the central government in Beijing’ has the right to confirm his rebirth as genuine.179 The current regulations for the system of reincarnation, the official reminded the Xinhua News Agency, had been ‘clearly set out in the relevant document of the state administration for religious affairs from the year 2007.’
United Front workers, frequently in the guise of diplomats, also recruit Chinese businesspeople abroad, often through specially founded friendship and cultural associations. Western academics who show willing are courted during generously financed conferences and trips to China; critical voices, on the other hand, may find themselves threatened with a ban on visiting the country. For many sinologists, that would mean the end of their careers.
Meanwhile some universities – including the prestigious Göttingen University in Germany – have Chinese professorships that are directly funded by Beijing. Indirect finance is also popular. When the University of Cambridge set up a professorship for ‘Chinese Development’, it swore that the £3.7 million donation came from the private Chong Hua Foundation, which had no link to the Chinese government – until journalists revealed that the foundation, registered in the Bahamas, was controlled by Wen Ruchun, daughter of the former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao. The CCP is now bringing its ideological battles to the universities of the West. And from Brussels to Washington, new think-tanks tied to the CCP are springing up, so that Chinese academics or well-disposed foreigners can whisper the Party’s message into the ears of the powerful. Generally, though, ‘the CCP’s preferred method is to create dependencies and induce self-censorship and self-limiting policies,’ observes a study by the Royal United Services Institute, in a first attempt to present an overview of Chinese efforts to influence the UK. ‘The UK’s departure from the EU may increase the CCP’s desire to interfere,’ the study predicts, ‘as it seeks to implement further a “divide and rule” strategy, aimed at imposing its global vision and promoting its interests.’180
The Party strives to bring students living abroad into line through Chinese student associations. In Australia and the USA, increasing numbers of students are reporting that they are being spied on and subjected to ‘mind control’ and intimidation by these associations, which are also active in the UK. Robert Barnett, one of the most prominent experts on Tibet, and director of the Modern Tibetan Studies programme at Columbia University, reports that several Chinese students who had applied for research-assistant positions were, as he later discovered, sent by the Chinese consulate. And Wang Dan, the former student leader of the 1989 democracy movement, now says that ‘The Chinese Communist Party is extending its surveillance of critics abroad.’181 The Party is using a ‘campaign of fear and intimidation’ to silence Chinese students in other countries. ‘Unpatriotic activities’ like Wang Dan’s seminars and salons at American universities are being recorded by ‘agents or sympathisers of the Chinese government’, he claims, and Chinese students who attend are reported to the consulate. Those who overstep the mark run the risk that threats will be made to their families at home. Meanwhile, students at several US universities have set up Communist Party cells for the purposes of ‘ideological guidance’, and on returning to their alma mater in China, some have been asked to report on their classmates’ ‘anti-party thought’.182
More than half a million young Chinese people are now studying abroad. Beijing is trying to organise as many overseas students and academics as it can, under the umbrella of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA). In at least one case (at Georgetown University in Washington), it has been proved that the CSSA is in part financed directly by the Chinese embassy.
Sometimes student associations cooperate with their embassies to organise cheering, flag-waving crowds, as for Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington in September 2015. Foreign Policy reported that participating students were each paid $20 afterwards.183 The associations like to organise positive celebrations of ‘Chinese culture’ – festivals such as the Chinese New Year – but if necessary they will also mount political protests. As when, for example the University of California in San Diego invited the Dalai Lama as a guest speaker. CSSA representatives insisted on a meeting with the university’s rector, and agitated against the visit on social media platforms – doing their best to mimic and co-opt the ideas and terminology of American college activism. They created the hashtag #ChineseStudentsMatter, and claimed that inviting the ‘oppressive’ Dalai Lama was an affront not only to the ‘feelings of the Chinese community’ but to ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. In this case, the university stood firm and the Dalai Lama spoke – unlike a few years previously, when North Carolina State University cancelled his invitation, seemingly following an objection from the Confucius Institute embedded in the university.
Turning Chinese citizens living abroad into foot soldiers for the Party’s cause is not the United Front’s only purpose. Increasingly, it is attempting to recruit people of Chinese descent, even if they are no longer citizens of the People’s Republic. It tries to appeal to a pan-Chinese patriotism, a pride in China’s tradition and mission – the noble executor of which, of course, is the CCP. The 2018 amendment to the Chinese constitution included ‘patriots who endeavour to revitalise the Chinese race’ in the list of groups forming a united front ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party of China’. The People’s Daily promptly published a lead article in which it invited ‘sons and daughters of China’ all over the world to share in the prosperity and glory of the People’s Republic’s project.184
This appeal to racial solidarity, increasingly common in propaganda, is provoking dissent in overseas communities of Chinese descent. ‘When a state weaponizes patriotism and claims ownership of a people, it messes up [sic] with one’s sense of identity, when identity is already a messy concept for ppl who crossed borders and linguistic barriers,’ read a widely-shared tweet by Yangyang Cheng, a physicist who lives and teaches in the USA. She told the story of how she herself was once called upon by the CSSA to cheer for China’s president during a state visit (‘need everyone to outnumber Free Tibet etc. protesters’), and spoke of a ‘cunning and ruthless state’ exploiting the ‘people’s vulnerability’.185
There is also growing unease at the feeling that there is nowhere in the world where the CCP’s eyes cannot see, or where its arms cannot reach. Its range has extended far beyond the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of American, Australian and European universities. The kidnapping of the Hong Kong publisher and Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, who vanished from his holiday home in Thailand and resurfaced in a Chinese prison, may be the most spectacular example of the new cross-border activities of the Chinese security apparatus, but it is a long way from being the only one. Civil rights activists and dissidents living in exile, along with Tibetans and Uighurs, are also being targeted by Chinese agents, and suffering intimidation and threats.
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nbsp; These threats mainly relate to family members who are still living in China. One example is the journalist Chang Ping, already mentioned above. A critic of the government, he was sacked from his editorial job at the Guangzhou paper Southern Weekend. Today he lives in exile in Germany, where he writes for the news service Deutsche Welle. Following the open letter he wrote to Chinese dissidents in March 2016, calling on Party chief Xi Jinping to step down, his brother and sister in Sichuan disappeared into police custody for a few days. No, they had not ‘abducted’ the pair, the police said; they were just questioning them about a ‘forest fire’. At the same time, Chang Ping received a message from his brother, begging him to take back the letter and not to publish any more articles criticising the Party. Later, semi-official websites in Sichuan published an open letter from the brother, which said he was ‘very disappointed’ that Chang Ping wouldn’t stop ‘spreading lies’ from Germany and ‘maliciously attacking the authorities.’
Uighurs living in France – including French citizens – have spoken about being approached by Chinese police officers asking for personal documents. The officers generally made contact via phone or WeChat. They demanded their work and home addresses, current photos, scans of their French ID cards, and even marriage and degree certificates. ‘Hello, I am a police officer with the [redacted] police station,’ Foreign Policy quotes from one WeChat message. ‘Let’s have a good talk, otherwise it will be a lot of trouble to have to pay a visit to your father and mother’s house every day.’186
Meanwhile, China is offering substantial sums of money to bolt Confucius Institutes onto Western universities – and many are finding it difficult to say no at a time when finances are tight. Shortly after taking office in 2013, Xi Jinping made a speech in Qufu, the wise man’s birthplace, in which he sang the praises of Confucius, whom Mao had condemned in such harsh terms. Xi lauded the Party as the protector of the old values, but he reserved his most rapturous praise for the Confucius Institutes which were springing up like mushrooms all over the world. The success of the Confucius Institutes, said Xi Jinping, showed how hungry the West was for Chinese wisdom: ‘Their theory that capitalism is the highest good is teetering, while socialism is experiencing a miracle.’ The West’s self-confidence had taken a knock, he claimed. ‘The countries of the West are comparing themselves openly or secretly with China’s political and economic path.’
In 2004 the Communist Party decided to turn Confucius into their Goethe, their Cervantes – the figurehead for a national cultural institute with a global mission. Today, there are more than 500 Confucius Institutes in 142 countries (at the time of writing, there are 24 in the UK) and more than 1,000 Confucius classes. The government claims that almost 13 million people took part in the Institutes’ activities in 2017. Confucius is attractive again – a brand. And wherever you see him, the Party’s eyes peer out from behind the mask. How could it be otherwise, when the institutes that carry his name are ‘an important element of China’s soft-power efforts abroad’, according to politburo member Li Changchun? The Confucius Institutes like to make out that they are the Chinese version of the British Council or the Goethe-Institut, but there are good reasons to believe that, at heart, they are something quite different. To quote Li Changchun again: ‘It makes perfect sense to penetrate via the Chinese language.’
The Institute’s Beijing headquarters is the ‘Office of Chinese Language Council International’, known as Hanban for short in Chinese. Hanban’s website says that the organisation is ‘affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education’. But that is only a half-truth: in reality, Hanban is controlled by a directorate that oversees over a dozen offices, including the propaganda ministry. Until her retirement in 2018, the directorate was led for many years by the Vice Premier Liu Yandong – a member of the CCP politburo.
The model on which the Institutes are set up is fundamentally different to that of their European counterparts. British Council offices and German Goethe-Instituts operate as independent organisations with their own premises. Confucius Institutes, on the other hand, are generally founded in cooperation with local universities. The British or German or French university provides premises and infrastructure; Beijing provides money through Hanban; a Chinese partner university provides teaching staff; and each side appoints its own director. A few years ago a debate kicked off: were our universities allowing themselves to be bought by an authoritarian regime? Were the Institutes, as one German sinologist has argued, really ‘Chinese submarines’? One thing is certain: these universities have invited an arm of the Chinese state to come in and make itself at home. Nothing comparable has ever existed.
Given that Hanban’s core business is dialogue with the rest of the world, it is quite difficult to get hold of anyone there. My first requests for an interview at the start of 2014 went unanswered for nearly two months, and at some point they stopped picking up the phone for weeks at a time. Finally, Zhang Jing from the Institute for the Dissemination of Chinese Language and Culture said she was prepared to speak to me. This institute gives strategic advice to Hanban on the alignment and expansion of the Confucius Institutes. Their most important aim, said Zhang Jing, who herself studied in the USA, is to ‘feed the ideas of China into Western discourse.’ After all, she said, sinology had been founded by Western missionaries, and was dominated by the West to this day. ‘We in China were always the object of these studies. That carries with it the danger that you are either presented in an overly positive light, or in a distorted way.’ Beijing is currently less concerned about the over-positivity. In any case, Hanban is pleased to be able to give financial help to sinologists the world over: ‘We know that things are getting more and more difficult for the humanities everywhere. As a growing nation, China now has the means to support these studies.’
Reports of censorship and self-censorship are coming in, particularly from the USA, where there are more than a hundred Confucius Institutes. In Los Angeles a few years ago, when Hanban announced that it was opening twenty institutes in collaboration with the US College Board, the Board’s president David Coleman fell into poetic raptures: ‘Hanban is just like the sun. It lights the path to develop Chinese teaching in the US. The College Board is the moon. I am so honored to reflect the light that we’ve gotten from Hanban.’187
Meanwhile a report by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative lobby group, has recommended shutting down all the Confucius Institutes in the USA. A few universities have already taken this step, both in the USA and elsewhere. In Chicago, Philadelphia, Stockholm and Lyon, institutes have been closed after heated public debates. Germans like to stress that Confucius Institutes are set up differently in their universities, with more of an arm’s-length relationship (unlike in the USA, whether they are integrated into teaching programmes, and can even award course credits). ‘There’s so much more potential for conflict in the USA,’ says Philip Clart from the University of Leipzig. The institutes in Germany are almost all registered voluntary associations (e.V.s), which concentrate on providing language and cultural tuition to the general public, and are separate from the official day-to-day business of universities.
That may be so, but it is clear that Hanban wants more than just to provide language and tai chi courses for people. Beijing has declared quite openly that its aim is a ‘new sinology’. ‘Our institutes started worldwide with language courses, calligraphy and dumpling-making,’ says Zhang Jing. ‘But that’s too limited for us. We want the Confucius Institutes to bring our vision into the academic world, into sinology. Quite simply, people have a false image of our country. We hope that sinology will start to engage more with Chinese politics and Chinese economics, and we hope it will explain to people that we can’t just follow the Western path.’
If you believe Heiner Roetz, a sinologist from Bochum in western Germany, then Hanban is pushing at open doors. ‘The fact that institutional partnership is even possible has something to do with the underlying readiness of some people to protect the Chines
e regime, however much there might be to criticise,’ says Roetz. ‘And then they say we should leave China be; it’s a different culture. The real problem isn’t the Confucius Institutes at all – the problem is this cultural relativism within sinology.’
Sometimes Hanban doesn’t make things easy for its friends. At the end of July 2014, when Europe’s sinologists met at the European Association for Chinese Studies conference in the Portuguese towns of Braga and Coimbra, Beijing managed to cause a substantial scandal. Xu Lin, Hanban’s Director General and a vice-minister-level official, had travelled from China specially for the event, which Hanban was co-sponsoring. When she discovered that one of the other sponsors came from Taiwan – and that this sponsor’s logo appeared on the conference material – she seems to have given the order for all the conference programmes to be collected. And so various unknown Chinese people marched along the rows, saying things like ‘Excuse me, I’ve forgotten mine’ as they snatched programmes out of the hands of baffled delegates. The following day, the programmes turned up again, with the pages that had offended Beijing torn out. ‘It was a huge shock,’ says Daniel Leese, a historian and sinologist from Freiburg, who attended the event. Afterwards, the EACS president Roger Greatrex published an angry letter objecting to this act of ‘censorship’, and calling the behaviour of the Confucius Institute’s director ‘totally unacceptable’188.
The huge costs involved in running the institutes have drawn criticism within China as well. But Xi Jinping seems to have even bigger plans for them. In a meeting of the Central Committee for the Deepening of Reform chaired by Xi at the start of 2018, a paper was passed on the reform of the Confucius Institute. It can be found on the website of the People’s Daily, and contains the extraordinary declaration that in future, the institutes should better serve ‘the diplomacy of a powerful China’.189 The Party, then, explicitly sees the institutes as tools for exerting its influence. In an interview on Swedish radio, China’s ambassador to Stockholm said that of course teachers at the Confucius Institutes had ‘the duty’ to inform their students and colleagues about ‘the facts’ of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In light of the clear message coming from Beijing, the loyal defence of the institutes by staff at partner universities in the West is at best seriously naïve. By all means, let China to go on running its Confucius Institutes – only not inside our universities.
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