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Overseas cultural promotion? Where did China get that idea?

Like many new institutions in the newly moneyed, increasingly powerful modern China, Confucius Institutes closely follow a Western lead. Both Germany and Spain have long maintained overseas cultural schools named after a prominent national thinker (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for Germany and Miguel de Cervantes for Spain). France maintains the Alliance française and the U.K. runs more than 200 locations of the British Council. Altogether, at least 25 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas have dabbled with some form of “international cultural promotion organization.”

What’s CAUT’s problem with Confucius Institutes?

According to CAUT, the on-campus institutions play too close a role in the development of university curricula, which the body called a “fundamental violation of academic freedom. Simply put, Confucius Institutes are owned and operated by an authoritarian government and beholden to its politics,” said CAUT executive director James Turk in a Dec. 17 statement.

Is CAUT the only one leery about the schools?

Two Canadian universities have dropped the Institutes due to political concerns. The University of Manitoba declined offers for an Institute because of worries about the potential whitewashing of controversial subjects such as Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Last February, McMaster University announced plans to shut down its Confucius Institute due to concerns, raised in an Ontario Human Rights tribunal case, that the school required instructors to swear not to be members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China. Former agents with CSIS, the same agency that once warned of Chinese agents infiltrating everything from Canadian town halls to the federal cabinet, would seem to agree. “I think there’s a concern from an intelligence point of view, definitely,” Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a retired CSIS agent, told the National Post in 2010.