A letter and petition have been sent by the Free Tibet campaign group concerning the Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, which are supported – financially and with resources and Chinese teaching assistants – by the Chinese government agency Hanban.
Launched in 2004, the Confucius Institute programme places teaching facilities in universities and schools worldwide. The main aim is to teach Mandarin and about Chinese culture.
In the UK, there are 25 Confucius Institutes, usually based at universities, and 92 Confucius Classrooms, normally based within individual schools. Globally, there are 442 Institutes and 648 Classrooms.
However, in recent years educational institutions have questioned the Confucius programme. They are worried that pressure to toe the Chinese government line on topics such as Tibet and Taiwan makes them incompatible with academic freedom.
Hanban’s head, Xu Lin, in an interview with the BBC in December last year, confirmed that all teachers at Confucius Institutes would follow official Beijing lines: “Every mainland teacher we send … all of them will say Taiwan belongs to China. We should have one China. No hesitation,” Ms Xu said.
Stockholm University in Sweden became the most recent to have broken their links with the programme. Meanwhile, in Canada, Toronto’s district school board scrapped plans for a partnership in October, while Pennsylvania State University and the University of Chicago in America have made similar announcements.
In January, SecEd reported concerns in Scotland over the five universities that host Confucius Institutes – Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt.
Conservative MSP Alex Johnstone said he was worried an “infrastructure” was developing in Scotland to push the Chinese state’s interests to the exclusion of other views. “Scottish politicians need to think seriously about what is going on at Confucius Institutes and what we need to do so things don’t go in the wrong direction,” he told The Herald newspaper.
The letters and petition from the Free Tibet group have been sent to coincide with Confucius Institute Day, which took place on September 24.
A statement from the group said: “The Confucius Classroom programme has been welcomed and supported by all the UK administrations, despite the Chinese government’s status as an authoritarian regime which repudiates democratic values and is guilty of widespread human rights abuse.”
In the letter, Free Tibet director Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren writes: “While promoting Chinese language learning and genuine mutual understanding between the people of China and the UK are commendable aims, allowing a foreign, unelected regime which is guilty of extensive human rights abuses a direct role in the education of our children is at best questionable and at worst dangerous and unethical.
“The government must demonstrate that it understands that risk. We urge you to provide us with assurances regarding the specific steps that the government is taking to ensure that pupils exposed to the influence of Confucius Classrooms are receiving an education with the comprehensive, balanced and accurate understanding of China that they deserve. If the government is unable to offer those guarantees on this matter, in our view the Confucius Classrooms in the UK should be shut down.”
In the interview with the BBC, Ms Xu said that the concern about Confucius Institutes and a lack of academic freedom came from a small but “loud” minority. She said: “I always ask the media people, give me an example, let me see – which university, which Confucius Institute faces this kind of challenge?”
Meanwhile, Free Tibet has contacted all schools with Confucius Classrooms in the UK to raise the issue and to offer its own teaching materials in English and Mandarin giving information about Tibet, human rights in China, and sources of information from Chinese dissident and human rights groups.
For details on the Confucius Institute programme, visit http://english.hanban.org and for more on Free Tibet, go to www.freetibet.org