Confucius Institutes and Soft Power: Contested Narratives

China has established a network of Confucius Institutes (CI) to promote Chinese language and culture and expand its international influence. As the ‘centerpiece of China’s soft power project’ (Hubbert, 2014; Yang, 2010), CIs have been established in 154 countries and caused great controversies in the mainstream media of the western world. Whereas CIs are presented as merely tools for connecting people and exchanging culture with other countries so as to create a deeper and more appreciative understanding of China, they have been perceived by many as Chinese propaganda outposts, which could undermine the academic freedom of western universities and ‘brainwash’ students. Some CIs have even been shut down due to such allegations and protests in the US, Canada, Sweden and Denmark. In this paper we develop a critical approach to soft power by exploring CIs as a site of contestation between these opposed narratives. Using the approach of ‘studying through’ from the Anthropology of Policy (Reinhold and Wright 2011, Shore and Wright 2011) we study how CIs are set up and operate in practice. Hanban is the central organization charged with approving, funding and monitoring CIs, but each CI is established through an alliance between a Chinese and a foreign university, with co-directors from each side commissioned to design activities collaboratively that suit the local context. The study is based on research in China at a university that has established numerous CIs around the world, and ethnographic fieldwork in four related CIs in Europe. We trace how the loosely defined framework for CIs’ structures and missions have been carried out in vastly different ways by different CIs. This approach opens the analytical space for critiquing and reconceptualising ‘soft power’ as a social process rather than seeing it purely as an instrument of public diplomacy. Central to that process is contestation between different narratives about CIs, which compete for credibility. The study shows that each CI’s presentation of China is so context-specific and contingent, that CIs can hardly act as the set of orchestrated communist propaganda machines that their opponents accuse them of being. Yet however hard CIs try to focus only on language teaching and cultural activities that provide alternative stories about China to the traditional ‘othering’ of China in the Western mainstream media. they can never fully de-politicize themselves. In the western mainstream media and in political speeches, their very existence is treated as a ‘threat’ to some of the traditional values of the local society. Although, to some extent CIs do inform and engage some people’s ‘hearts and minds’ the soft power they achieve is neither as China has planned nor as the opponents of CIs have claimed. In this case, the narratives of CI shall always remain contested and whose story/narrative wins is very much what soft power is about.