An Analysis Of The Stereotypes Of Confucius Institutes And Goethe Institutes Formed By American Media

As the Chinese language and culture promotion organization, Confucius Institute not only devoted itself to international language and culture exchange, help foreigners to learn more about China, but also as an new channel of Chinese government public diplomacy to improve China’s soft power and national image.U.S. media is very important part of the global media, it’s a fact that the U. S. mainstream media leads the direction of public opinion, and also, in a certain degree, influences people’s idea or stereotype about stuffs. With the rapid development of Confucius Institute in U.S., the local media pay more and more focus on it, so far, there are three kinds of evaluations:Positive, Neutral and Negative. The supporter appreciate China’s effort to push the exchange of language and culture, and they also think its seem nature to improve China’s soft power after China has a strong hard power; The neutral understand China’s behavior and wonder the influence on U.S. education system; and the opponent see Confucius Institute as the overseas propaganda tool and spy agency of China’s government, and it would threaten the academic freedom of campus. To the contrary, the Goethe Institute (German language and culture promotion organization) leaves a good impression on U. S media, and the U.S. people have a positive stereotype of it.According my research of U.S. media (cover the mass media and academic research), the reasons of why U. S. media has different stereotypes to the two institutes are:1.different opinions to Confucius and Goethe;2. the development speed and scale;3. the relationship with the government;4. school-running model;5. different opinions to Chinese and German soft power.To solve the above problem and turn the negative stereotype to positive stereotype, I suggest Confucius institute:1. Make sure what kind of Chinese culture to spread and strengthen soft power;2. Slow down the speed, after came we need to consider how can we take root;3. Merge together with local culture;4.Uess officially;5. turn the running model to NGO.