Today and yesterday Stockholm University and its Confucius institute is organizing a conference in order to “put attention to” the book gift Stockholm University was awarded by member of the standing committee of China’s Communist Party’ Politbureau, Xi Jingping. The Confucius Institute was set up in 2005 by the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (Hanban) together with Stockholm University. This was the first of its kind in the West, the second only in the world.
Confucius institutes are indirectly run by the Chinese Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture. But since China is still a Leninist system where the ministries, just as the parliament do not have any real power, it is almost certainly the CCP Central Propaganda Department that oversees the Confucius institutes, just as it has always the Ministry of Culture. Despite some scattered protests from right wing politicians, anonymous scholars etc, debate and criticism against the suitability of an academic joint venture with a regime who does not honour liberties such as freedom of expression, even imprisons scholars on political charges, Stockholm University accepted and after some years prolonged the cooperation. Torbjörn Lodén the head of the Chinese Department became simultaneously the director also of the Confucius Institute.
Lodén’s own reply to criticism voiced publicly in Swedish newspapers was that they did not spread any propaganda only worked to enhance the cultural exchange with China (SVD 15 March 2007). However, opening the Hanban homepage (http://www.hanban.edu.cn/) one is met by a small photo exhibition from Confucius institutes around the world all focusing on a top leader of China’s Communist Party, like Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in front of smiling female students in Jakarta, President Hu Jintao welcomed by students and staff at a Chicago prep school, Li Changchun the party’s secret propaganda chief, a hardliner in questions on censorship and the media, is seen on two of the photos: with young Armenian students dressed in qipaos and waiving Chinese flags and holding hands with happy Nairobian women.
China just as the Confucius institute is still run by a Communist party with full control of the media, an organization that has used propaganda internally but also towards the outside world uninterrupted for six decades. It is a regime who harasses intellectuals and university researchers, does not tolerate differing views on literature, history etc. It is a regime that aims towards, but will never reach, full control of the discourse on Chinese culture history and society. Nevertheless Stockholm University has accepted both teaching material and teachers selected by an organization led by the Chinese dictatorship via the CCP Central Propaganda Department. In a defense against accusations that the institute represented one of the most repressive dictatorial regimes on the earth raised in one of Sweden’s two national daily newspapers its director Torbjörn Lodén argues that he is “happy for the progress that China has made in recent years, with increased freedom and higher standards of living for hundreds of millions” (Lodén 18 March 2011, Svenska Dagbladet). This might pass as an argument for politicians and business people to engage with China, but not for an institute of higher learning where young Swedes gain their view of the world.
The rapid spread of Confucius Institutes around the world has been described as a soft power initiative of the China’s Communist Part leading up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. After that, and especially following the financial crisis in the West the tone became less soft from the Chinese and from both official and popular levels there has been calls for the West to start learn from the “Chinese model” instead. In consequence, less interest is paid by the Chinese leadership to any sensitivity towards its dismal treatment of political and intellectual dissent. For having co-written a petition for democracy and human rights in China’s internationally most renowned professor in Chinese literature Liu Xiaobo was summarily sentenced to eleven years in prison. Only a few months later in connection with the Chinese purchase of the Swedish industrial flagship Volvo Automobiles, a Chinese delegation led by the next supreme leader of China’s Communist Party Xi Jinping visited Sweden.
Although being such an important and busy politician he had time for half a day at the Confucius Institute at Stockholm University officially received by Stockholm University representatives. At what for the Chinese is a Zhongwenxi, a “Department for Chinese literature” Xi Jinping presented the digital book gift which the Stockholm University conference is now held to call attention to.
The conference was filmed by the university and hopefully they will put out the second day’s presentations, including mine (although someone told me they stopped the cameras a few minutes into it).
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