China Confucius Institutes face heat over propaganda

NEWDELHI: India’s education ministry has decided to review in the coming week, the setting up of local chapters of the Confucius Institutes in association with seven local colleges and universities after security agencies alerted it to the growing Chinese influence in higher education in India.

The ministry also plans to review 54 Memoranda of Understanding (Mous) signed between prestigious educational institutions including IITS, BHU, JNU and NITS and Chinese institutions. It has already issued a notification to the Ministry of External Affairs and the University Grants Commission.

The Confucius Institutes are directly funded by Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China with the ostensible aim to promote Chinese language and Culture. But they have come in for criticism all around the world, including the US and the UK for helping spread Chinese propaganda. Most recently, according to a BBC report of September 2019, Australia launched an investigation of “whether the agreements between universities

and the institute have broken anti foreign-interference laws”.

Around the same time, several universities around the world shut down programmes operated by the institute, that report added. Ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee have been quoted saying that Confucius Institutes are part of the overseas propaganda to project Beijing’s soft power . The decision to review the Confucius Institutes and the Mous comes at a time when the PLA has been amassing more than 50,000 troops, tanks, missiles and artillery guns in occupied Aksai Chin, in an open display of aggression against India along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh. The PLA has even spread the deployment to the middle sector in Uttarakhand.

According to officials , the Confucius Institutes in India to be reviewed are at: the University of Mumbai; Vellore Institute of Technology; Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar; . O P Jindal Global University, Sonepat; School of Chinese Language, Kolkata; Bharathiar University, Coimbatore; and KR Mangalam University, Gurugram.