Chinese Public Diplomacy

Falk Hartig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317611080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presentsthe firstcomprehensive analysis of Confucius Institutes (CIs), situating them as a tool of public diplomacy in the broader context of China's foreign affairs.

The study establishes the concept of public diplomacy as the theoretical framework for analysing CIs. By applying this frame to in-depth case studies of CIs in Europe and Oceania, it provides in-depth knowledge of the structure and organisation of CIs, their activities and audiences, as well as problems, challenges and potentials. In addition to examining CIs as the most prominent and most controversial tool of China's charm offensive, this book also explains what the structural configuration of these institutes can tell us about China's understanding of and approaches towards public diplomacy. The study demonstrates that, in contrast to their international counterparts, CIs are normally organised as joint ventures between international and Chinese partners in the field of education or cultural exchange. From this unique setting a more fundamental observation can be made, namely China's willingness to engage and cooperate with foreigners in the context of public diplomacy. Overall, the author argues that by utilizing the current global fascination with Chinese language and culture, the Chinese government has found interested and willing international partners to co-finance the CIs and thus partially fund China's international charm offensive.

This book will be of much interest to students of public diplomacy, Chinese politics, foreign policy and international relations in general.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315750088-1

In his November 2014 address to the Australian parliament, Chinese president Xi Jinping¹ noted that while many people applaud China's achievements, others have concerns ‘and there are also people who find fault with everything China does’ (Xi J. 2014). China, according to Xi,

is like the big guy in the crowd. Others naturally wonder how the big guy will move and act, and they may be concerned that the big guy may push them around, stand in their way or even take up their place.

(Ibid.)

Xi dismissed those concerns, vowing that his country remains unshakable in its resolve to pursue peaceful and common development.

While critics may discount such a statement as rhetorical window-dressing, it clearly illustrates that the Chinese leadership is aware that China's behaviour on the global stage is an increasingly important factor and contributes to how other countries assess Chinese intentions that again may influence their corresponding responses to China's rising capabilities. There is increasing acknowledgement that China's concern over its international status and image is one driving force in China's foreign relations. In its search for status as a global power, China ‘has discovered the importance of international image and soft power’ (Shambaugh 2013: 207) and ‘image considerations weigh heavily on the minds of Chinese decision-makers’ (Rabinovitch 2008: 32). Those considerations are reflected in the increasing awareness of public diplomacy in China. In recent years the concept of public diplomacy, broadly understood as a country's communication and engagement with foreign publics in order to support national interests, received enormous attention in the People's Republic of China (PRC or China hereafter), both in official and academic circles. Public diplomacy is seen as a means for telling China's story to the world and thereby countering the negative accounts of the country in foreign, mainly Western, media. In this regard public diplomacy is aimed at introducing the ‘real China’ to the world and communicating China's peaceful global intentions. In doing all this, public diplomacy should contribute to national progress by creating a favourable global environment for China's (economic) development. In order to communicate and engage with foreign publics, China is increasingly active in the conduct of public diplomacy using various programmes and instruments including the Confucius Institutes (CIs or Institutes in what follows).

This book investigates Confucius Institutes and their role in China's public diplomacy. Confucius Institutes are administered and partly funded by the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), an organisation under the authority of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and are comparable to international counterparts in terms of their fundamental tasks and services, namely teaching their language, introducing their culture to people in other nations, and conducting cultural exchange. Next to these idealistic purposes I argue that Confucius Institutes as an instrument of China's public diplomacy also contribute to more functional goals of China's overall diplomacy. And while people in charge of Confucius Institutes would normally define the CI's mission as strictly limited to language and culture and would deny any (foreign) policy related notions of their work, I argue that CIs in this regard are similar to their international counterparts such as the British Council or Germany's Goethe Institute. These organisations, although acting independently, are also working for their governments and their government's foreign policy goals. The fundamental difference, however, is in the nature of the political system Confucius Institute represent and the way they are structured and organised. Whereas British Council branches or Goethe Institutes are stand-alone institutes abroad, Confucius Institutes are normally organised as joint ventures between international and Chinese partners, normally but not always universities. This cooperation not only implicates that these Institutes are partially funded by the Chinese government, but also that CIs strategically engage local stakeholders and are located on campuses around the world. This is not to say that other cultural institutes do not work with local partners, but in the case of Confucius Institutes this cooperation is not only essential to maintain these Institutes, but it is very much the approach deliberately chosen by China to manage and run its cultural outposts.

As later chapters will outline in more detail, Confucius Institutes address, usually but not exclusively, a mainstream public audience that normally does not have any special knowledge about China. The main activities of CIs include language courses for various levels, the support for local Chinese teaching internationally and a wide range of cultural events such as exhibitions, screenings and various talks. Schedules differ from Institute to Institute, but generally all offer roughly similar content while trying to develop a unique feature or some singular programmes. From 2004, when the first CI was set up in Seoul, to late 2014, China has established 475 Confucius Institutes (and some 850 smaller Confucius Classrooms) in 126 countries.² In 2014 alone, 35 Institutes and 205 Classrooms have been opened worldwide, according to the umbrella organisation Hanban.³

Because of these astonishing numbers, and because of the affiliation with the Chinese government, suspicion and distrust emerged both in the media and academic circles, especially in the West, where CIs are mainly seen with suspicion, either assuming these Institutes are a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or are undermining the academic freedom of their host universities around the world. While one may question the rather one-dimensional criticism, it definitely helped to make Confucius Institutes the most prominent and most controversial tool of China's ‘charm offensive’ (Kurlantzick 2007). For critics these Institutes are ‘academic malware’ (Sahlins 2015) and an instrument for China to strengthen its geopolitical influence; its defenders state that CIs are ‘hardly a threat to academic freedom’ (McCord 2014), that China harbours no neo-colonial impulses and that it is a latecomer in respect of establishing cultural institutes abroad which European powers like France already did a century ago (Kluver 2014). The implicit message for the critics here is: don't worry, we are just as you are, we do just the same, and you did it long before us.

This study, which aims to sit in between these two opposing poles of hypercritics and unconditional proponents, contributes to the growing debate about CIs as it not only engages with the ideological disputes they have engendered, but also as it analyses the practical aspects of the everyday work of these Institutes as well as the broader political dimension of this whole enterprise. This study uses the concept of public diplomacy as the frame for analysing CIs and applies this frame to in-depth case studies of CIs in Europe (with a focus on Germany) and Oceania (with a focus on Australia). The case studies provide in-depth knowledge of the structure and organisation of CIs, their activities and audiences, as well as problems, challenges and potentials. This study also explains what the structural configuration of these Institutes can tell us about China's conduct of public diplomacy.

As this study demonstrates, the most important and crucial difference between Confucius Institutes and their international counterparts concerns their organisational structure as joint ventures, a fact that has multiple implications not only for individual Institutes and their partners involved, but more generally for the Chinese conduct of public diplomacy. This unique setting, in my understanding, points to a more fundamental observation, namely China's willingness to engage and cooperate with foreigners in its public diplomacy, which, as all diplomatic endeavours eventually serves national interests. This approach, in my understanding, is strategically smart as it potentially raises the profile and prestige of Confucius Institutes and makes them a comparable cost effective instrument of China's public diplomacy. Overall I argue that by utilising the current global fascination with Chinese language and culture, the Chinese government has found interested and willing international partners to co-finance the Confucius Institutes and thus partially fund China's public diplomacy. This approach shows striking parallels to China's decision to push its economic development after the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1978 the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping initiated the Reform and Opening-up policy and since then China and the world have become more and more interwoven, not only economically but also in political, social and cultural terms. One crucial component of this new policy after the Cultural Revolution was the shift away from an inward-looking and closed China towards one which not only turned to the outside world again but also started to cooperate with foreign countries. This opening-up first and foremost related to economics as the leadership under Deng realised that China's languishing economy could only recover with foreign expertise and especially foreign investment. As a result, from 1980 onwards the Chinese government began to encourage foreign businesses to invest in China, and it approved the establishment of so-called special economic zones. This opening-up led to the expansion of foreign trade and foreign investment into China and intensified China's economic relations with the wider world.

This willingness (that was also a necessity) to engage and cooperate with foreigners in order to pursue national interests is of particular interest for this study, because, as I argue, a similar approach can be identified with regard to Confucius Institutes. To put it simply: in the late twentieth century, China opted for cooperation with foreigners in order to rebuild its economy; in the early twenty-first century China is opting for cooperation with foreigners in order to promote its language and culture and thereby to shape its global image.

Two months after he kicked off China's Reform and Opening-up policy, Deng Xiaoping anticipated the consequences for both China and the world: ‘The role we play in international affairs is determined by the extent of our economic growth. If our country becomes more developed and prosperous, we will be in a position to play a great role in international affairs’ (Deng 1984: 174). The ensuing economic development not only made China the world's largest exporter and the world's second largest economy, but China is also increasingly expanding its external influence on the global stage and turned into an economic superpower with global interests.

For the international community, however, the question arises as to whether an emerging China will use its economic strength to become a strong military power and whether it might try to challenge, and ultimately change, the existing international order. The academic debate revolves around the question of ‘whether China's rapid rise will be peaceful or disruptive to the existing international order’ (Zhao and Liu 2009: 3). Concerns about the rise of China, as Chapter 2 outlines, culminate in the so-called China Threat Theory. The assumption that China could become a threat is not only prevalent in some academic circles and is reflected in the debates on Confucius Institutes, but is also partly echoed in the general public, at least in parts of the world like North America, Europe and parts of Asia, where China has to struggle with its overall rather negative image.

Events like the Hong Kong protests in 2014 against China's decision on proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system, the establishment of an Air Defence Identification Zone over the East China Sea in late 2013, the handling of the departure of Chen Guangcheng⁴ in spring 2012, the arrest of Ai Weiwei in spring 2011, disputes with Google in early 2010, or the Western impression that China was undermining a positive outcome at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 all resulted in the situation that China ‘has to deal with the reactions of sceptical publics across the globe’ (Blanchard and Guo 2008: 15). China is seen as a ‘spoiler’ in international relations, as an enemy of human rights at home and abroad and the global public perceives China as a threat to people's jobs. Whether such perceptions are true or not does not matter as ‘the image of a certain nation exists in many people purely as affect with no knowledge basis whatsoever’ (Kunczik 1997: 43).

Image problems, whether based on facts or fiction, are not something new for China and can be traced back centuries. What is new however, are China's comprehensive attempts to deal with its image, and to communicate more with the world by means of public diplomacy. From the Chinese point of view, there is an urgent need to better communicate with the wider world, as the scepticism towards China mostly results from an incorrectly perceived picture of the PRC. This argument holds that it is up to China to talk back and to explain its real self. These attempts to communicate recently became an important part of China's ‘go out policy’, which was originally initiated by the Chinese government in the late 1990s in order to encourage Chinese enterprises to invest overseas. The communication efforts can be seen as an addition to and expansion of China's economic development plan, which started with the mentioned Reform and Opening-up policy in the late 1970s. In the mid-2000s the economic strategy was extended to include public diplomacy and soft power policies to improve China's image in the world as well as the competitiveness and influence of Chinese cultural products and to actively promote Chinese culture in the world.

Conceptual background: political communication on the global stage

While the focus of analysis regarding the question if and how China's rise may threaten the world is on the economic and military dimension, a growing area of interest is in non-material and non-coercive means. Halper (2012: xx...