US colleges face tough choice over China

American universities that receive funding from the United States Department of Defense to run Chinese-language programmes are facing a tough choice – take even a dime from China to operate a Chinese language and culture centre, and potentially lose that federal money, writes Chris Fuchs for NBC News.

The stipulation, written into the John S McCain National Defense Authorization Act, enacted in August 2018, has induced a number of schools to recently close these centres, known as Confucius Institutes, which are sponsored by Hanban, an organisation directly under China’s Ministry of Education. Amid escalating tensions between the US and China over a trade war, threats of Chinese espionage and political turmoil in Hong Kong, critics worry that China uses the Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda on American college campuses. But not everyone agrees.

“There is zero, I can tell you, political content in the textbooks used by the Hanban,” said David Shambaugh, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who sits on the faculty oversight board for his school’s Confucius Institute (CI). “Thus the accusations against CIs for spreading communist propaganda is hogwash,” he said.
Full report on the NBC News site