A report titled ‘Are Confucius Institutes legal?’ and released by the UK-China Transparency (UKCT) Organisation alleged that the Confucius Institutes in the UK have violated human rights of its participants by enforcing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) values on them.
Hot on the heels of these allegations, the UK government is to announce that funding for Mandarin teaching at branches of these Confucius Institutes would be withdrawn.
The UKCT which had looked into the recruitment process for Chinese staff, has also studied documents and data from all British universities involved and found that “British universities are operating Confucius Institutes illegally and enabling transnational repression in the UK,”
The Confucius Institute programme was established 20 years ago to promote Chinese language and culture overseas and support Chinese-language teaching. There are more than 530 institutes based at universities worldwide, 30 of them are in the UK.
Most of the language teachers come from China, and the UKCT report said they “are being recruited based on their ability to enforce ‘CCP discipline’ in the UK and are obliged to undermine free speech and to conduct harassment on command.”
The Chinese government demands applicants for roles at Confucius Institutes fill in a special form, UKCT said, that requires applicants to provide details of their “political characteristics” and “ethnicity”; promise not to have a child whilst working abroad; have their current employer evaluate their “political attitude”; and be evaluated by a CCP Committee.
“These practices are illegal under U.K. law,” the report said.
The application form also demands that applicants must promise to abide by the laws of China while abroad, something the British host universities are not aware of.
“There is … a systematic risk of Confucius Institute staff involving themselves in transnational repression by subjecting vulnerable individuals in the U.K. to harassment or intimidation and undermining freedom of speech on campus,” the UKCT’s report said.
Last July, when running for the leadership of the Conservative Party, the incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged that he’d “close all 30 of China’s Confucius Institutes in the UK.”
However, the UK government last week confirmed that law enforcement agencies are still investigating the allegations.
Sources said James Cleverly, the foreign secretary of the UK, is to announce that the government will stop funding to these institutes.
It is expected that Cleverly will on Tuesday announce an end to the £27m UK government funding for Mandarin teaching at the institutes.
Meanwhile, Simon Cheng, a Hong Kong democracy activist and founder of Hongkongers in Britain said the prime minister must act to protect the UK against Chinese influence.
Freedom of information requests show that the Home Office believes Confucius staff are subject to UK employment law, but in a survey, UK universities said they were not the employer of the staff at the institutes.
The report further showed the Home Office launched a new kind of tier 5 (temporary worker – government authorised exchange) visa route in 2014, known as the overseas government language programme visa scheme, but this is only used for the China-UK Mandarin teachers’ scheme.
A cross-party group of MPs including Sir Chris Bryant, Layla Moran, Sir Iain Duncan Smith and James Bethell demanded an investigation into these findings. They said the UK could find a way to increase knowledge of Chinese language and culture without unwittingly supporting Beijing’s overseas repression.
Meanwhile, the Asian Institute for China and IOR Studies (AICIS), a non-profit think tank, also said that the Confucius Institutes programme launched in 2004 on the lines of the British Council and Alliance Francaise is mired in controversies as it is working illegally in UK universities by contravening various well-established British rules and regulations.
AICIS’s Muraleedharan Nair said that the primary aim of China setting up Confucius Institutes abroad is for pushing the CPC's interests and executing its bidding, rather than promoting Chinese culture and the Mandarin language.
The analysis also highlighted China's interest, including "the teaching of Mandarin, promotion of scientific collaboration, political and business networking propaganda and activities intended to shape how China and the CPC are viewed and studied academically, and the extension of CPC influence on campus.
Other findings included, "the staff at these institutes are recruited in a highly discriminatory way that is illegal under UK law; staff are being recruited based on their ability to enforce 'CPC discipline' in the UK and are obliged to undermine free speech and to conduct harassment on command; universities are systematically enabling this in a way that breaches their legal obligations to staff and students; and the [British] Home Office is systematically enabling this by means of an unlawful dedicated visa route which makes the employment status of Confucius Institutes staff unclear."
The report highlighted that such conditions are illegal under UK law, AICIS reported.
However, China’s Foreign Ministry meanwhile insisted that there are “simply no so-called overseas police stations.” A spokesman said the claims were “groundless accusations against China” and “clearly political manipulation.
