Among the Chinese government’s efforts at thought control are its “Confucius Institutes.” They are educational programs located in colleges and universities worldwide, with more than 100 in the U.S. The schools get some funding for classes in Chinese language and culture, but in return the Chinese get to control the message. It’s an unseemly arrangement and more of the American schools that agreed to host them are rethinking it. North Carolina State just pulled the plug and in today’s Martin Center article, Rachelle Peterson of the National Association of Scholars writes about that decision.

NC State opened its Confucius Institute in 2007 and came in for a load of criticism when, two years later, it pressured the school to withdraw an invitation to the Dalai Lama to speak on campus. That tells the tale about these “educational institutes.” They don’t want any education that bothers the rulers in Beijing. Instead of owning up to the fact that it was complicit in a Chinese propaganda effort, NC State went defensive.

Peterson writes:

Two years ago, I went searching for the memoranda of understanding that the university signed with the Hanban (the Chinese government agency in charge of Confucius Institutes) and Nanjing Normal University to set up their Confucius Institute. NCSU claimed its signed memoranda were accessible and transparent, but its website linked to a university database open only to those with university email addresses. A professor there agreed to check the database for me, but even he could find nothing at all related to the Confucius Institute.

American colleges and universities shouldn’t operate in the shadows like that and shouldn’t be helping foreign governments to color people’s perceptions of authoritarian regimes.

It appears that the Confucius Institutes have peaked and are now receding as public scrutiny exposes their true nature.

Peterson concludes, “NCSU has made the right call in parting ways with its Confucius Institute — and it deserves praise. In the process, it is moving more of its Chinese-language instruction in-house to the domain of its faculty. This is where university instruction belongs. Perhaps North Carolina State University should have made this decision years ago, but, to its credit, it has eventually done the right thing. Now it’s time for more American universities to part ways with their Confucius Institutes.”