Why China wants you to learn Chinese

Without formal instructions, some CIs are nonetheless finding ways to meet their communities' language needs. The one at Michigan State University is developing digital training materials, San Francisco State University's CI has piloted two extracurricular programs for elementary school children, the institute in New York is helping 16 teachers get accredited and hopes to add 30 to 40 instructors next year, and the CI at the University of Kansas offers onsite courses for local corporations.

But as CIs in the US start up, some university faculty members remain skeptical of their presence on college campuses, raising concerns about the potential for political interference from the Chinese government.

"Of course, using the language to create a positive feeling toward China is political. There's no getting around that," says Elaine Gerbert, director of the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Kansas.

"They don't call it a Communist Institute," jokes Shengli Feng, director of the Chinese Language Program at Harvard University. He sees the institutes as an obvious PR campaign.

Some top schools like Harvard have not accepted money from China to open language institutes. G. Cameron Hurst, director of Pennsylvania University's East Asian Studies program, doesn't want to be "in the business of the Chinese government telling us how" to teach Chinese.

Some professors fear that China will try to silence other viewpoints taught on campus. "It's very important to keep [CI and CEAS] separate," says Ms. Gerbert of the University of Kansas, to avoid any academic interference with, say, research on human rights in China.

Other instructors are more concerned about teaching quality. China's teaching materials do not address matters of second-language acquisition, says Christy Lao, director of San Francisco State University's CI. As for teachers from China, "they don't understand teaching and learning in the US." There are different cultures and pedagogies, she explains. American teachers in China would face the same problem.

There seems to be a "confusion of academic and non-academic goals," writes David Branner, a Chinese language professor at the University of Maryland, in an e-mail. Other government-backed culture-and-language centers, like the British Council, Alliance Française, and Goethe Institute, "are housed separately from universities. I would have expected the Confucius Institutes to be the same.... But most are not."

Part of the tension may stem from the fact that many institutes have appeared on campuses with little or no input from existing language programs.

But CI directors say the negative reaction is overblown. "Academic freedom is the most important thing," says Yong Zhao, an American who heads the CI at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich. The concern is "understandable," but the level of concern is "unbelievable," he says. Meanwhile, the institutes are providing a forum for US-China cooperation and may truly enhance relationships – one of Beijing's stated goals.

"China is much more open to talking about their projects than they would have been 20 years ago," says Joshua Kurlantzick, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written extensively on China. China's willingness to engage with critics is "a substantial change," he says.

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