They primarily give language instruction, but also engage in cultural exchanges and are set up at universities overseas, where they have drawn concerns that they are propaganda machines aimed at stifling academic criticism of China’s Communist Party.
The U.S. State Department announced May 17 that many teachers at Confucius Institutes on U.S. university campuses would have to switch their visas, because they were teaching kindergarten through 12th grade while holding visas for university-level instructors. There were fears hundreds of them would have to return home, disrupting more than 80 U.S.-based institutes.
Chinese state media reacted swiftly, calling the restrictions an anti-Chinese witchhunt meant to distract Americans from a bleak economic picture in a presidential election year.
“This absurd measure reflects illogical thinking and an immature mentality,’’ said an editorial by state-run People’s Daily. “Finding scapegoats, witch hunting and shifting focuses are not the right ways to do things.’’
Under the headline “U.S. suddenly finds fault with Confucius Institutes,’’ the state-run Global Times said in an article Thursday that Washington was worried about the rising influence of the U.S.-based Confucius Institutes. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Hu Xijin, wrote on his microblog that the U.S. seemed to be using the visa issue as an excuse to “limit the growth’’ of the institutes.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said earlier in the week that the government was in emergency consultations with the U.S. over the issue.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Thursday that the agency was working on ways for the teachers to update their visas while remaining in the U.S. She said Washington supports people-to-people exchanges, and that the visa directive was not targeting the institutes.
“This is also not about the Confucius Institutes themselves. It is simply about whether the right visa status was applied in these cases,’’ Nuland said.