Promoting Confucius Institutes As China’s Instrument Of Cultural Diplomacy

China’s fast economic growth has created military and economic power to thenation. Both types of powers are known to draw attention of the international actors.Whilst any economic power may be both opportunity and threat, military powercertainly causes menace not only to immediate neighbors of the power holder, butalso to regional and global security.China is attracting a worldwide attention and is seen by the established powerswith suspicion. The views towards China among the big powers is diverse. There aresome that consider China and its rapid economic growth as a threat and watch it withsuspicion, while others regard China’s rise as an opportunity.China’s political leadership seems to have noticed the need to build andmaintain cordial relationships with all nation states. Its aspiration for development andthe desire to play a meaningful role in the claimed harmonious coexistencenecessitated intensification of its public diplomacy which can only be achieved byreaching out the foreign public, advocating its cause, and building its soft power in theprocess.Since the first Chinese scholar, Wang Huning, wrote on soft power in1993,Chinese culture is the central point in the discussions of China’s soft powerdevelopment. Chinese culture is highlighted as a major resource of soft power in thedebate among Chinese scholars. The case is the same by the political leadershipbecause the Chinese culture is asserted to be based on ’harmony’ and ’winning respectthrough virtue’.One of the public diplomacy initiatives in connection with Chinese culturaldiplomacy is the setting up of Confucius Institutes around the world. ConfuciusInstitutes are the chief instruments in offering Chinese language courses andpromoting Chinese culture worldwide. The Confucius Institutes are established inpartnership with foreign universities, and housed on university campuses. In just adecade, a total of475Confucius Institutes and851Confucius Classrooms have beenestablished in126countries as of December2014. These institutes have managed toteach the Chinese language to over3.4million registered students. The institutes arealso able to reach out50million people with over100,000cultural exchange activities.Nevertheless, establishing the Confucius Institutes in existing university campuses has become a major reasons for anti-Confucius campaigns in some places. Theaccusations directed at the presence of Confucius Institutes on university campusesrange from endangering academic freedom through espionage to surveillance ofChinese abroad.While Confucius Institutes are spread in many countries, much of the debateagainst the institutes comes mainly from North American and some Europeanuniversity professors. As the media is fanning the criticism, it is likely that is causesnegative perception on the general public about Confucius Institutes, and hence Chinaand there are occasions it indeed had. The skepticism of university professors in NorthAmerican and in European universities seems to have won some ears that someuniversities that used to host Confucius Institutes have decided to terminate theircontracts. Besides, much of available literatures about Confucius Institutes isdominated by writings in the West.The main objective of this research was to assess how China operates theConfucius Institutes as a tool for its cultural diplomacy, and whether the activities ofthe Confucius Institutes are making positive image of China in the country taken forthe case study.Based on primary data collected by surveys, interviews, and other sources,three important conclusions are derived from this research. First, the activities of theConfucius Institutes have positively contributed in changing the perception ofparticipants about China. Second, although the Confucius Institutes are doing better inteaching the Chinese language and introducing Chinese culture to students atConfucius Institutes, the outreach to a wider audience with regard to promotion ofculture is not very significant. Third, the allegation by some university professors inthe West about Confucius Institutes disrupting academic freedom of host universitiesis found out to be absent in the Confucius Institutes under the study.The Confucius Institutes have the potential to build China’s image in a positiveway among the host community and create conducive environment for its foreignpolicy objective. But, it should be noted that soft power development is not a shorttime project. It requires constant engagement with the target public through various ways. As Joseph Nye, the famous promoter of the soft power, put it "soft powerresources are slower, more diffuse and more cumbersome to wield than hard powerresources."...