The passing on and internment of the late Queen Elizabeth II, UK’s longest reigning monarch, is a historical event that will be marked for generations to come both at home and overseas. It should now be time for introspection for the country as it makes the transition to a new ruler.
However, to mark that it is back to business as usual, the UK government recently decided to resort to its most convenient scapegoat to place the blame for its changing fortunes. According to the title of a story published on September 18 in “The Guardian”, “Beijing-backed Chinese language schools in UK to be replaced with teachers from Taiwan.” According to the story, a cross-section of MPs in the country intend to replace Mandarin teachers in the world-renowned Confucius Institutes in the country with Taiwan instructors.
Experts are questioning what has changed since 2014 when the then education minister Liz Truss, now prime minister, praised the network of Confucius classrooms, saying they “will put in place a strong infrastructure for Mandarin” in the UK. It’s the Politics, Stupid! And by the look of things, Liz has been learning very fast.
It is rather obvious where the new UK PM is getting ideas from on the Confucius Institute action. In a statement in August 2020, the then U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, claimed that the Confucius Institute U.S. Center was “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign” in American educational institutions. But as has now become customary with such sweeping statements, Pompeo did not offer any proof.
Consequently, the U.S. government changed the status of the Institutes in the country and re-designated their staff to diplomatic status. At the time 75 out of the 480 Confucius Institutes globally were based in the U.S. Not much has been heard about the saga since then, but the point had been made on the way to go.
Well, the war against China cannot get lower than this; or can it? Education is a sector that has remained sacrosanct for eons, even as countries fight over other conflicts. No society can claim to have a monopoly of knowledge, say, the way economically it can claim to be a superpower. Every society has built on the foundations of others to advance its knowledge base from where others can take cue. This is basically the way major economies have built their research and development.
The West’s strategy is undoubtedly to weaken, cripple or completely destroy anything that is backed by or linked to the Chinese State, a stratagem already being applied in undermining Chinese technology companies, and the country’s participation in free trade. This is how Huawei Technologies has been fought in the West, and the U.S. continues with its trade war through punitive tariffs of Chinese goods.
Language is definitely a crucial part of geopolitics. It is the reason why Western culture has become perverse over the decades as the countries set up their language institutes around the world. On its website, UK’s British Council proudly states that it works with people in over 200 countries and territories and are on the ground in more than 100 countries. In 2021–22 the Council reached 650 million people.
The U.S. carries out its outreach using Secretary of State departments including Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and, Educational and Cultural Affairs which are embedded in the country’s embassies. According to the 2021 Global Diplomacy Index, the U.S. has the second most diplomatic missions globally after China, including 166 of the 193 member countries of the United Nations.
From the foregoing, one can only conclude that the West is envious of the increasing reach and acceptance of the Chinese language and culture, which is a crucial part of national branding. The more people learn and speak Mandarin overseas, the more they appreciate the Confucius philosophy and the Chinese way of life.
This is a development that is gradually eroding the West’s hegemony. The fact that the Confucius Institutes have been targeted for crippling shows that they have been making inroads in people’s psyches, even in the West where established religion is constantly losing followers. The world’s serious crises cannot be addressed without a fresh philosophical approach, which incidentally China is offering.
Confucianism is a philosophy based on mutual respect and kindness toward others, and was developed to bring peace and stability in society. This is similar to China’s advocacy for a world with shared destiny where each country is a partaker of global wealth.
