JOIN USBeijing irked as India plans to review China's Confucius Institutes
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government now planning to review the collaborative arrangements between Indian and Chinese academic institutions, Beijing on Tuesday called upon New Delhi to avoid politicising normal cooperation between the two nations.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India is set to launch a comprehensive review of the functioning of the Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms jointly established by China and seven universities and colleges in India. The ministry will also review 54 pacts inked by Indian and Chinese higher education institutions for academic cooperation.
The move comes amid continuing military stand-off between India and China along the disputed boundary between the two neighbours in eastern Ladakh. The aggressive move by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to unilaterally alter the status quo along the Line of Actual Control – the de facto boundary between the two nations – prompted New Delhi to initiate a series of economic offensives against the communist country.
New Delhi’s latest move to review academic collaboration between Indian and Chinese institutions irked Beijing. The Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in New Delhi issued a statement, calling upon the Government of India to “treat Confucius Institutes and China-India higher education cooperation in an objective and fair manner, avoid politicizing normal cooperation, and maintain healthy and stable development of China-India people-to-people and cultural exchanges”.
China has since long been setting up Confucius Institutes abroad as collaborative projects between the educational institutions in the communist country and the colleges and universities in the foreign nations, professedly to promote its language and culture around the world. The Confucius Institutes are run by “Hanban” (Headquarters of Confucius Institutes), which is directly funded by the Ministry of Education of the Chinese Government.
The institutes, however, drew flak in United States and United Kingdom for being allegedly used by the Communist Party of China for overseas propaganda. They were also put under scanner in the US for alleged role in espionage on behalf of China.
A source in New Delhi said that the move by the Modi Government to review the role of the Confucius Institutes in India as well as collaboration between Chinese and Indian institutions were also triggered by “national security concerns”, just as the recent decisions to ban use of the apps developed by or linked to the companies in the communist country were.
China’s embassy in the capital of India said that bilateral cooperation on the Confucius Institute projects has been carried out for more than 10 years. “All Confucius Institutes were established by the Chinese and Indian universities after signing legally binding cooperation agreement in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, friendly consultation, equality and mutual benefit, and on the premise that the Indian side applied voluntarily and met the conditions for running the institute,” said Ji Rong, a spokesperson of the embassy.
She said that the Confucius Institutes had played “an important role in promoting Chinese language teaching in India and China-India people-to-people and cultural exchanges” over the past 10 years.