A message from Confucius

The Bridgeman Art Library

Back in fashion

ON THE ground floor of one of the University of Maryland's redbrick Georgian-style buildings is the small office of the Confucius Institute. When it opened five years ago, it was the first of its kind in America. Now there are more than 60 of them around the country, sponsored by the Chinese government and offering Chinese culture to win hearts and minds.

China's decision to rely on Confucius as the standard-bearer of its soft-power projection is an admission that communism lacks pulling power. Long gone are the days when Chairman Mao was idolised by radicals (and even respected by some mainstream academics) on American university campuses. Mao vilified Confucius as a symbol of the backward conservatism of pre-communist China. Now the philosopher, who lived in the 6th century BC, has been recast as a promoter of peace and harmony: just the way President Hu Jintao wants to be seen. Li Changchun, a party boss, described the Confucius Institutes as “an important part of China's overseas propaganda set-up”.

China's partial financial backing, its hands-off approach to management and the huge unmet demand in many countries for Chinese-language tuition have helped Confucius Institutes embed themselves in universities that might have been suspicious. The University of Maryland's institute does not offer courses that count towards degrees (and nor do many of the others). It helps with Chinese-language teaching in the wider community, not just on campus. The director, Chuan Sheng Liu, is appointed by the university, as most of them are.

There are occasional hints of politics. Earlier this year the University of Maryland's institute organised an exhibition of photographs from the Tibetan plateau. At an opening ceremony a senior Chinese diplomat made a speech criticising the Dalai Lama. The pictures, he said, showed the “remarkable social changes and improvement” in Tibet under Chinese rule and demonstrated that Tibet had been “part of China since ancient times”. But the website of the Confucius Institute in Edinburgh promotes a talk by a dissident Chinese author whose works are banned in China. Even the Pentagon has been helping to fund some language courses at Confucius Institutes under the National Security Language Initiative, launched by George Bush in 2006 to promote the study of “critical-need” languages.

The late Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 bestseller “The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order”, describes a Confucian world, with China at its centre, that will find itself in growing conflict with the West. This is the kind of view that the Confucius Institutes are intended to dispel. Mr Liu, a long-time physics professor at the university, says his mission is to promote cultural understanding. He speaks of the “amazing similarity” between Confucian teachings and George Washington's etiquette guide, “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation”.

Some American officials grumble that Chinese universities are far less receptive to America's cultural-promotion efforts than American ones are to China's. But as one comforts himself, “if you're in a system that's that paranoid, your soft power is self-limited.”