When Zeng Jinghan accepted an offer to lead the Confucius Institute at Lancaster University in England in 2018, he already had a plan to write a book.
“I thought it would be very interesting if I could write about something that I know a lot about and participate in it personally, like Richard Crossman’s The Diary of a Cabinet Minister,” Zeng said, referring to the British politician’s memoirs published half a century ago.
The job did not offer higher pay, and he was still an international studies professor with Lancaster at the time. Zeng, now with City University of Hong Kong, said he took the job because he wanted to learn more about how Confucius Institutes operated and believed engagement with China was important.
Zeng’s book, Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director, Volume 1: Challenges, Controversies and Realities, was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier this year. It covers his six years as an institute director that began in 2019, including a detailed look at daily operations.
The book also counters accusations that Confucius Institutes serve as spy hubs or vehicles for promoting Beijing’s state narratives.
Launched in 2004 and set up at universities around the world, Confucius Institutes are educational and cultural centres mainly funded by the mainland government to promote Chinese language and culture. There are about 500 institutes around the world.
Before taking the job, Zeng said he was preparing for the worst because geopolitical tensions between China and the West were already running high.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump won passage of a version of the annual National Defence Authorisation Act prohibiting Defence Department funding from going to any Chinese language programme at a university hosting a Confucius Institute.
Recalling the ban, Zeng said he envisioned a worst-case scenario that Britain would probably “be facing the same thing a couple of years later”.
That fear did not materialise, and Confucius Institutes in Britain kept operating despite a threat from Rishi Sunak during his 2022 Conservative Party leadership campaign to shut them down. Sunak, who became British prime minister that year, dropped the idea.
Nevertheless, Zeng described his tenure leading the Confucius Institute at Lancaster as a bumpier ride than he had expected.
His first year brought “a lot of great things” that won the institute “recognition internally and externally”, he said, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and everything was “crushed immediately”. Soon another jolt came.
In mid-2020, Beijing restructured the institutes’ global administration. The Confucius Institute Headquarters, known as “Hanban” in Chinese and overseen by the Ministry of Education, was renamed the Centre for Language Education and Cooperation, which assumed many of its previous governmental functions.
The restructuring significantly affected Confucius Institutes worldwide, Zeng said, as the headquarters in Beijing previously provided all funding directly. After the change, individual institutes had to negotiate with their Chinese partners for funding.
In Lancaster’s case, the headquarters used to provide an annual deposit of US$50,000, with unused amounts rolled over to the next year. If outlays went over this amount, the headquarters covered the remaining balance at the end of the financial year.
Before 2020, the funding provided by Confucius Institutes proved highly popular among Western universities that sought to attract Chinese students, engage with China and tap into the country’s economic rise, Zeng said.
“People simply want to learn Chinese because China is so important,” he said. “And there is a huge market demand driven by the economic rise of China.”
“At the same time, the supply of Chinese language education is very low for lots of reasons,” Zeng added. “One reason is you don’t have really qualified teachers. There’s a huge gap there.”
Aside from providing funding, the headquarters helped send Chinese language teachers from the mainland when requested by individual institutes abroad.
At one time during the heyday, Zeng said, many universities vied to set up an institute on campus to build their institution’s international profile and attract Chinese students.
“The Confucius Institute Headquarters aspired to build itself as the most influential language organisation in the world,” he recalled. “Back in 2018, at its educational conference, there were over 500 university presidents and vice-chancellors gathering together in Xiamen.”
Zeng believed Beijing initiated the rebranding because of Washington’s “big attack” on the institutes’ “state affiliation”. Now, the institutes have all but disappeared from American university campuses.
But Zeng said state affiliation had been favourable for many countries.
“If you were based in Africa, Asia, the Middle East ... state affiliation was viewed as a good thing for a lot of local business owners and local governments,” he added. “They wanted to build relations with China so they could open their market, build more diplomatic ties and be able to secure business advantages, economic advantages.”
Zeng said the restructuring caused confusion at Confucius Institutes in England for some time. “Everybody was asking the question, ‘What’s the future of it?’ No one really knew,” he added.
His book describes how institute directors formed networks to sort out the situation. It also outlines the administrative labyrinth Lancaster had to navigate for its agreement with its Chinese partner university.
According to the book, Lancaster appointed Zeng as a “foreign director” without input from the Chinese partner university.
Although a partner representative acted as deputy director and both sides contributed to the curriculum, Lancaster held the final say. The institute also had the discretion to hire local teachers or recruit staff from schools in mainland China.
Zeng devoted entire chapters of the book to countering some of the allegations routinely levelled against the institutes.
Addressing claims that the institutes serve as vehicles for Chinese propaganda, he argued that they simply conduct standard cultural diplomacy, similar to the work of the British Council.
“This is a fundamental aspect of cultural diplomacy, a practice widely embraced by nations to foster mutual understanding, strengthen international relationships and promote their values and perspectives,” Zeng writes in the book.
“Institutions such as the British Council, Goethe-Institut, Alliance Française and American Centres actively engage in cultural diplomacy to expand global influence, support language education and facilitate academic and artistic exchanges.”
He also said Confucius Institutes would not by and large touch on sensitive topics.
“It’s mostly language and cultural courses,” Zeng added. “You won’t be talking about politics. Our teacher will be deliberately avoiding talking about politics for lots of reasons.”
As for the accusation that the institutes were Chinese spy hubs, the former director said he could not imagine that to be true, citing a lack of sensitive information to obtain from them.
“Some people in China could make the same argument that the British Council is a spy,” he added. “How much of that really matches reality? Actual spying involves defence material or military material, right? Not publicly available information.”
Zeng said mainland officials never asked him to provide sensitive information, such as identifying who might be anti-China.
Had they done so, he stressed, “that would not be acceptable to me. But I can let you know very clearly that I wasn’t being contacted by the Chinese government to do anything that I think is unacceptable.”
Zeng said he planned to publish two more volumes documenting his time as a director, focusing on interactions between British schools and local authorities, along with dealings with different Chinese stakeholders, aiming to show that the institutes were not an arm of the mainland government, contrary to popular depiction. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
