Confucius Institute

Confucius Institutes (CI; ) are public educational and cultural promotion programs of the state of China. The stated aim of the program is to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, and facilitate cultural exchanges.

The programme is funded and arranged by the (CIEF), a government-organized non-governmental organization (GONGO) under the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. The Confucius Institute program was formerly under Hanban, another organization under the Ministry of Education.

The Confucius Institute program began in 2004 overseen by individual universities. In 2020, the Chinese International Education Foundation was registered and granted exclusive use of Confucius Institute's trademark, and began to operate Confucius Institutes under a brand licensing model. The institutes operate in co-operation with local affiliate colleges and universities around the world, and financing is shared between Hanban and the host institutions. The related Confucius Classroom program partners with local secondary schools or school districts to provide teachers and instructional materials.

Officials from China have compared Confucius Institutes to language and culture promotion organizations such as Britain's British Council, France's Alliance Française, Spain's Instituto Cervantes. Research from the Freeman Spogli Institute and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research suggested that Confucius Institute employees have minimal training in politics, face little day-to-day monitoring while teaching abroad and are not screened for political beliefs. They do, however, tend to disseminate political perspectives in keeping with the official political views of the CPC and often prefer not to talk about Chinese political issues at all.

Confucius Institutes have been accused of being used as a form of "soft power" by the Chinese government, which spends approximately $10 billion a year on CIs and related programs to exercise these initiatives. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping in 2013 stated that the intentions are to "give a good Chinese narrative". There have been concerns about potential censorship regarding certain content, including discussions on individual freedoms and democracy, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Taiwan independence, human rights in Tibet, Falun Gong, and persecution of Uyghurs in China. Provided by Wikipedia