Illustration: Dionne Gain It emails journalists offering all expenses paid trips to China ("flights, accommodation, meals and internal transport") and, in an unusual approach for a university body, describes itself as taking a "positive and optimistic view" of the Australia-China relationship. Click the "research" button on its website and you won't see research, but "fact sheets" urging Australia to approve the Australia-China free trade agreement, not to run freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea and not to block the takeover bid for an electricity network. Huang chairs the Institute himself, or so he says, in another departure from normal practice. He says he personally chose Australia's former foreign minister Bob Carr to run it. John Fitzgerald, a China specialist who directs philanthropy studies at Swinburne University, says it is the clearest departure from accepted university practice he has seen. Other research centres, such as those part-funded by the United States, critically examine what's happening in the US. Another academic familiar with the Institute who teaches in China says there is more questioning of the Chinese regime among his own Chinese students than there is at the University of Technology, which seems to be the way Huang wants it. A prodigious donor to both sides of Australian politics, he wrote in a Chinese newspaper last week that donors needed to learn how to have, "a more efficient combination between political requests and political donations, and how to use the media to push our political requests".

In Canada the Association of University Teachers has urged universities to sever their ties with Confucius Institutes. In the US, the Association of University Professors has issued a report suggesting their governance arrangements are "inconsistent with principles of academic freedom", and at Chicago University the university senate has voted against renewing the institute's contract after receiving a petition from 100 staff complaining that an outside entity was "in effect seriously influencing who's teaching and what's taught under our name". Shenzhen Yuhu founder Xiangmo Huang. Credit:Ryan Stuart Small gifts can pack a bigger punch than big ones. But here we don't seem to care as much, perhaps because, like Sam Dastyari, we believe we can take money without being expected to give anything back in return. That isn't how it's seen in China, that's not how it's seen by donors such as Huang, and it's not what the research shows. Yes: there is economic research into our response to gifts. Oddly, and disturbingly for recipients such as Dastyari, it finds that small gifts can pack a bigger punch than big ones. For their study entitled You Owe Me, Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus Schmidt allowed bidders to give gifts to students deciding which firms to award contracts to in a laboratory experiment. The games weren't repeated, so there was no chance of ever encountering the gift-givers again. Yet the small gifts won them over, even when what the bidders were offering was a worse service. As the size of the gift grew the effect faded.

They explain their findings by saying gifts "create a special bond between the gift giver and the receiver". The more obvious the attempt, the more our guard goes up. It's why doctors surgeries are filled with branded pens and free samples rather than wads of cash. Loading But there's a caveat. Experienced China watchers say the gift needs to be just big enough to create a slight feeling of unease. Once the recipient feels they might have transgressed, they're hooked for next time. * Fairfax Media has joined visits to China organised and paid for by the Australia-China Relations Institute