Language courses and film screenings, calligraphy and cooking classes, lectures, exhibitions, readings, concerts and courses in traditional medicine. All this is part of the portfolio of the so-called Confucius Institutes, which the Chinese government opened abroad in recent years.
There are 19 such institutes in Germany. They should help to spread the Chinese language and culture abroad. And they are - at least in the West - sometimes very controversial.
The FDP education expert Jens Brandenburg warned that the Chinese government could take over the institutes influence at German universities: "Behind seemingly innocuous tea ceremonies and language courses hiding the icy propaganda of an authoritarian regime The direct influence of the Chinese Communist Party on courses on German Universities is an attack on the freedom of science, "he said.
The Confucius Institutes are run by the Chinese cultural organization Hanban. This was assigned to the Ministry of Education and subordinated to the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China, wrote the federal government this week in its response to a request from the FDP Group.
Unlike other foreign cultural institutes such as the Alliance française or the Spanish Instituto Cervantes, the Chinese variant is usually affiliated with a host university and often accommodated on its premises.
More than 500 institutes worldwide
It is obvious that the Chinese state is making great efforts to expand its cultural and political influence in addition to its political and economic weight. In 2004, the first Confucius Institute was opened in Seoul. There are now more than 500 worldwide. The work of the institutes focuses on the "development of socialist culture," the Federal Government judges. Follow this development.
more on the subject
It is also clear that the Chinese side will reach an agreement with the relevant German university if a new institute is to be founded. These should be individually different. What exactly is inside is opaque. "Under no circumstances has the contractual basis of cooperation been made public," notes the Federal Government.
Different signals
There are different signals from the universities concerning the cooperation with the institutes. Usually they are registered associations in this country. At the University of Duisburg-Essen it is headed by a board of directors, which decides according to its own information about the content and the individual events and projects.
The committee consists of two German professors and one Chinese professor. The latter will be sent by the partner university in Wuhan, if the German side agrees to the staff proposal, informed the college on request of SPIEGEL.
The institute and its currently 15 employees have no influence on the scientific work of the university, it is said. Rather, their role is to make an important contribution to mutual understanding with lectures and discussion events. The institute attaches importance to a critical monitoring of the current developments in China.
"We can clearly exclude an influence on the part of the Chinese government by the Chinese government," said Hans-Jochen Schiewer, rector of the University of Freiburg , which also cooperates with a Confucius Institute.
No facilities of research and teaching
The University of Hamburg , on the other hand, announced that the cooperation with the Confucius Institute there has been steadily decreasing since 2017. Participating universities would be asked by the Chinese side to co-finance the institutes. "This is problematic from the perspective of the university," it said. The institutes are not institutions of university research and teaching and as such should not be subsidized by German universities.
However, with all its official focus on culture and language, politics sometimes plays a role in the institutes, as an example from Hamburg shows: In 2015, the deputy managing director of the institute was ordered back to China, as the university informs. The institute had recently held an event related to the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf it is said that the cooperation agreement with the institute has been completed by April 2020. An influence on the university enterprise has not been observed in recent years, a spokesman said. But the association had fulfilled no scientific tasks with its offer for language courses and its status as so-called An-Institut therefore no longer be able to keep.
Heavy criticism in the USA
In the US, criticism of the more than 80 local Confucius Institutes is more severe. There, a committee of the US Senate at the beginning of the year had published a report in which he criticized: Cultural events at the institutes presented China as "approachable and sympathetic" and are rarely controversial.
In addition, Chinese teachers who want to work at the institutes would sign a contract with the Chinese government. In it they would have to assure that they uphold the "national interests of China". "Such restrictions seek to export China's censorship of political discourse," write the authors of the report.