Vietnam’s Confucius Institute Distraction

The controversy in Vietnam over China’s establishment of a Confucius Institute is misplaced, argues one blogger.

By Huynh Thuc Vy

China's propaganda tool and fifth column

When Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, meeting with his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, announced the decision to establish the first Confucius Institute, at Hanoi University, Vietnam, the news stirred considerable controversy among Vietnamese intellectuals.
Any move by the Vietnam’s communist government that smacks of dependency on China is likely to prompt protest. 

However, setting up a Confucius Institute, with its overtones of cultural hegemony, may only be distracting the Vietnamese public from more substantial concerns.
Confucius Institutes are educational and cultural institutions run by the Chinese government. They operate with the following objectives: encourage Chinese language learning, popularize Confucianism, and promote cultural exchange between China and other countries.

These three objectives actually serve one larger goal: building China’s “soft power.” 

Despite the controversy, it is not the institutes themselves that are the concern, nor even China’s soft power initiatives in general. 

Rather, the bigger worry is the hard power that China has demonstrated to a passive Vietnamese government in recent decades. 

Soft power should be considered in that context.
Take language learning – in this case, Chinese – for young Vietnamese. In fact, this should be encouraged. 

With tens of thousands of Chinese now living in Vietnam and comprehensive relations between the two communist countries lasting many years, Chinese language skills means jobs for Vietnamese. 

There is a natural incentive to learn the language, with or without a Confucius Institute.
Promoting Confucianism? Vietnam already has it. 

With 2,000 years of Confucianism in Vietnam, there seems little to gain by promoting it. 

Indeed, Vietnam continues to grapple with some of the less positive repercussions of the philosophy, such as an inert mindset. 

What it ought to be doing now is introducing the democratic thinking and creative culture of the West, just as Japan did starting from the late 19th century. 

That aside, there seems little to worry about in two governments trying to pour more Confucian water into a glass that is already full.
As for bilateral cultural exchange, given Vietnam’s political dependence on China, this too has already been taking place for some time, and has been mostly a one-way street for China. 

The concern here is not so much education and culture, but the broader political, economic and social dependence of Vietnam on China. 

The West doesn’t worry about Chinese soft power, because although a behemoth, China is known to have critical issues to deal with at home. 

But Vietnam’s government has left the doors wide open for China to impose whatever it sees fit. 

A Confucius Institute is just one more small brush stroke in a large picture that has been ugly for a long time.
Let’s review some of the practical upshots of Chin’s involvement in Vietnam. 

For instance, China and Hong Kong were given 50-year leases over nearly 200,000 hectares of upstream forests belonging to ten border provinces. 

More than 90% of projects involving electricity, mining, oil, metals or chemicals in Vietnam are run by China through the engineering, procurement and construction contracts. 

Tens of thousands of Chinese manual laborers have entered Vietnam, displacing local workers.
Vietnam has also become an importer of outdated technologies, low-quality products and poisonous chemicals from China. 

The Paracel and Spratly islands are in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone but are now under Chinese control. 

Chinese magazines, movies, cultural and political documents flood the Vietnam market.
In the presence of all this, what is one Confucius Institute? 

And a Vietnamese government already so dependent on its comrades in China on the ideology-based comrades from PRC to the extent it can offer only a feeble protest when its own fishermen are shot at by Chinese would hardly complain about a Confucius Institute anyway.
No, the controversy surrounding the establishment of a the Confucius Institute really only serves to distract public opinion from scandals, such as newborn babies dying after being injected with low quality vaccines, the eviction of farmers to free land for developers, and the continued abuses of human rights by security forces.
The Vietnamese government has been adapt at distracting the public for its advantage. 

The establishment of Confucius Institute is very likely another example.

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Chinese leaders control media, academics to shape the perception of China

How Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.

By Fred Hiatt

Paramilitary policemen stand in formation as they pay tribute to the Monument to the People's Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, November 17, 2013. China's new national security commission will enable the government to speak with a single voice when it comes to dealing with crises at home and abroad, state media cited President Xi Jinping as saying.

It’s well known that Chinese censors shape and limit the news and history their people can learn. 

What may be more surprising is how Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.
Last month, a cultural attache in the Chinese embassy in Washington invited Perry Link to attend a Forum of Overseas Sinologists in Beijing in December.
Given that Link is one of America’s eminent China scholars, this might not be surprising — except that he had not received a visa to enter China since 1996 for reasons the Chinese have never explained.
Link replied that he would be interested in attending, but would he receive a visa?
Absolutely, he was told.
You’re sure? Link e-mailed back.
Of course, the attache replied. 

Just send your passport, “and I can help you to finish the visa application.”
Link sent his passport and application, and on Nov. 8 received the following message: “After review, I’d like to inform you that you will not be invited to the forum.”
The Lucy-and-the-football quality of this exchange is striking, but Link is far from the only foreign scholar to be blacklisted. 

In 2011, 13 respected academics who had contributed chapters to a book on Xinjiang, a province of western China that is home to a restive Muslim minority, found themselves banned.
Link, who has forged a distinguished career at Princeton and the University of California at Riverside can survive a visa ban. 

But for a young anthropologist seeking tenure, the inability to do field research could be terminal. 

And because China never explains its refusals or spells out what kind of scholarship is disqualifying, the result is a kind of self-censorship and narrowing of research topics that is damaging even if impossible to quantify.
“The costs to the American public,” Link told me, “are serious and not well appreciated... It is deeply systematic and accepted as normal among China scholars to sidestep Beijing demands by using codes and indirections. One does not use the term ‘Taiwan independence,’ for example. It is ‘cross-strait relations.’ One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison... Even the word ‘liberation’ to refer to 1949 is accepted as normal.”
Academics understand the code, he added, “but when scholars write and speak to the public in this code, the public gets the impression that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, that a Nobel Prize winner in prison really is not worth mentioning.”
Increasingly, foreign journalists are subject to similar pressure. 

Paul Mooney, a veteran Asia journalist for Reuters, recently was denied a visa, with no reason given, according to the agency. 

Knowledgeable China hands for Bloomberg News, the New York Times and The Washington Post have met similar fates.
Bloomberg provides a telling case. 

Last year it published groundbreaking investigations on the wealth that China’s elites are accumulating. Corruption is a sensitive issue for Communist Party leaders, and, given Bloomberg’s business interests in China, the journalism took courage.
After the reports, Bloomberg’s Web site was blocked to Chinese viewers, and journalists were denied visas. Recently, according to the New York Times, Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about a billionaire’s connection to Chinese leaders, with its editor in chief arguing that it was important to maintain his reporters’ access to the country.
The editor denied the report, telling the Times that the stories remain “active and not spiked.” 

Until they appear, Chinese officials are emboldened to believe that their hardball tactics can succeed in shaping what Americans read — and don’t read — about their country.
Visa denials are only one way the Communist Party attempts to influence how China is depicted. 

American universities increasingly depend on money-making campuses in China and on Chinese students paying full tuition here. 

Hollywood rewrites scripts to ensure access to China’s screens.
As Sarah Cook of Freedom House writes in her recent 67-page report, “The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets Around the World”:
“In many cases, Chinese officials directly impede independent reporting by media based abroad. However, more prevalent — and often more effective — are methods of control that subtly induce self-censorship...”
Many Chinese-language newspapers outside China have become more pliant because of pressure on advertisers or threats to relatives of journalists still inside China.
But what the Communist Party sees as propaganda success may not help the country in the long run, for at least three reasons.
Debates overseas on the most contentious issues — Tibet, Taiwan, the one-child policy — are waged by the sharpest partisans, while China scholars who might bring more nuance to the discussions stay silent.
The leaders’ desire to have China be seen as a confident new power on the world stage is undermined by their apparent fear of honest scrutiny.
And stifling scholarship and journalism doesn’t just harm Americans’ ability to understand the complexities of the world’s most populous country, it also limits information and analysis for China’s decision makers. 

In the end, that can’t be an advantage.

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Chinese officials in new Photoshop fail

Anhui province apologises for doctored picture that shows vice-mayor hovering like a ghost above a puppet-sized old lady
Tania Branigan in Beijing

Officials in China's Anhui province have apologised for this doctored photograph, showing a ghostly vice-mayor minus his legs looming over a miniaturised senior citizen. 

With an eerie floating head and torso looming above a doll-sized figure, it could be a still from a supernatural movie. 

Instead the image now spreading far and wide is another spectacular Photoshop fail for Chinese officialdom.
The comically inept piece of doctoring, published by the government of Ningguo in Anhui province, was intended to show the concern of vice-mayor Wang Hun and other officials as they visited an old lady in the city.
But authorities deleted it, apologised and ordered an employee to write a self-criticism after they were deluged with mockery by internet users.
Microbloggers pointed out that while officials had merely said sorry for the obviously fake photograph, an official government crackdown threatens jail for lowlier souls spreading "internet rumours".
In a statement the officials said they had indeed visited centenarians including Cheng Yanchun during a Chinese festival. 

But an employee had merged two shots because the layout of the room where Cheng was pictured had prevented the photographer from capturing her and the officials in the same image.
"Cheng was sitting on a chair on the balcony, under the sun. The balcony space was very small and the camera lens could not cover the whole scene … When the employee of the municipal civil affairs department uploaded the photos … he simply merged two shots," the government said.
"We express deep regret to internet users for its negative influence … We will learn from the experience, to improve civil affairs work."
It said the party committee and government had acted rapidly because of their serious concern, ordering the civil affairs department to require a self-criticism report from the employee and criticise him across the city.
"Official fraud, making rumours, and there is no need to take responsibility? But a netizen whose post is forwarded 500 times has to take criminal responsibility," wrote one microblogger, Zhao Shimin.

Others suggested the manipulation had actually captured a fundamental truth about officials, who appear to be giants beside Cheng.
"It truly portrays the social ecology: the image of officials is glorious, the people are small and humble! What a good [bit of] Photoshop; he is really talented!" wrote one, who called himself Big Ear Picture.
Another suggested the officials were actually looking at real estate when they were pictured – presumably because of their enthusiastic expressions. 

 A third sent round a spoof showing them gazing at a scantily clad young woman.
An image of officials in Sichuan floating above the road they were supposed to be inspecting prompted similar ridicule and numerous parodies from internet users a few years ago.
Authorities insisted the visit had taken place but said the original photographs had been judged inadequate for publicity purposes. 

That picture looked almost naturalistic beside the Ningguo confection.

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British adventurer's re-education in China

   

BBC News

The young Robert Ford made the slow journey into Tibet to seek adventure in an exotic land
The British diplomat Robert Ford, who has died aged 90, was captured by communist troops in Tibet in 1950 and spent five years being re-educated.
Michael Bristow looks back at this pivotal moment in his life.
On the day he was released by the Chinese, Mr Ford was taken to the border with Hong Kong, then still a British colony, and told to walk across the rickety railway bridge that then separated the two territories -- and divided the worlds of communism and capitalism.
"I wondered whether I would get across the bridge -- I didn't know whether I would get a bullet in my back," is how Mr Ford remembered that final, stressful journey to freedom.
He did get across the bridge, and went on to forge a new career as a British diplomat.
But the fear, loneliness and uncertainty of being re-educated by Chinese communist interrogators stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Caught while escaping
Robert Ford was born in Staffordshire in 1923.
He served in the air force during World War II and at the end found himself in India, teaching Indian army officers how to be radio operators in Hyderabad.
He was bored with his job and so when an exciting opportunity came up, he jumped at it.
He got the chance to go to Tibet to be a radio operator in the British mission in Lhasa.
He enjoyed it so much that a little later he applied to do a similar job for the Tibetan government.
Tibet is now a fully integrated part of China, but when Mr Ford made his slow way into the Himalayan territory in 1948 to work for the Tibetans, they were mostly free to manage their own affairs.
China was then in the middle of a civil war and had no way of enforcing its claim that Tibet is part of the Chinese nation.
Mr Ford was eventually sent by the Tibetan authorities on a long pony ride to the eastern town of Chamdo, where he set up and maintained a radio link with Lhasa.
It was close to Chinese-controlled territory.
Too close, as it turned out.
The Chinese communists won the civil war in 1949 and in October the following year decided to press their claim to Tibet by invading with a small force.
Mr Ford left his escape to Lhasa too late and was eventually caught by Chinese troops as he sheltered in a monastery with a group of Tibetan officials, who had decided to surrender rather than fight.
For Mr Ford, it was the start of five years that were to test his beliefs to the very core.
Initially, the radio operator thought that the Chinese would sooner or later realise that he was innocent.
"I suppose I was very English in that regard. I could understand that the Chinese communists wouldn't like what I'd been doing, working for the Tibetan government. But I didn't feel guilty in the sense that I'd done something wrong," he said in an interview with the BBC shortly before he died.

Robert Ford initially found it difficult to readjust once he had been set free
Degrading lies
But the Chinese kept up their questioning, always implying that Mr Ford was guilty.
It seemed they thought they had captured a spy and, little by little, Mr Ford came to see that his position was not as good as he had first thought.
He faced charges of spreading anti-communist propaganda, exploiting the people by being a Tibetan official and helping the Tibetans resist the communist troops.
They were charges that could have led to the death penalty so, reluctantly, the British prisoner realised he would have to confess to something, even though he would have to tell degrading lies about himself.
But the communists were not happy with a simple confession.
Re-education is about turning a criminal into a new person, so Mr Ford's admission of guilt was only the start of a process; his Chinese interrogators wanted him not just to admit to his guilt, but to believe that he had done wrong as well.
This is how he put it in the book he wrote about his experiences shortly after being set free.
"It was no good just saying Stalin and Mao [Zedong] were right -- that would have been an impertinence. I had to apply their general wisdom to my own particular problem, showing that I was now seeing my crimes from the correct political standpoint," he wrote.
There were endless study sessions among the prisoners and their guards.
Cellmates even had to continue their discussions about Marxist theory when they were locked up for the night.
And then something unexpected happened to the man who had grown up not really questioning the British view of the world: he started to doubt what he had previously believed to be unshakeable truths.
At first he thought he could merely parrot the correct political statements, but then he found that, on some level, he was starting to believe the propaganda he was forced to say in the fluent Chinese he acquired while in prison.

Brainwashing ebbed away
At group meetings he wanted to join in and was sometimes overtaken with the mass emotion the prisoners showed for their faith in communism and Mao's new hopeful nation.
"The diabolical cleverness of thought reform is that the victim is made to want to believe," he wrote in his book.
But the interrogators never completely conquered their prisoner, as was revealed by the British man's thinking when given the chance to write home to his parents.
Despite the re-education, he wanted to write a reassuring note, but knew that his captors would read it and look for evidence that he had genuinely been reformed.
Mr Ford resolved his problem by writing a few short sentences revealing that he was all right at the beginning and end of the letter, with the long middle section reserved for "pro-China propaganda".
"My mother was very astute and picked this up," he said.
And then, suddenly, in 1954 a chain of events began that led to Mr Ford's release.
He was tried and found guilty of, among other crimes, spying, and sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Almost immediately afterwards he was told he would be deported, although he was not finally set free into Hong Kong until the following year.
His brainwashing gradually ebbed away, but the man who became a diplomat and served all over the world, in Angola, Indonesia and Geneva, never forgot his time in a communist prison.
"It changed me. I had a whole different outlook on what life was about and what was important," he told the BBC, although he admitted that it was initially a struggle to return to who he had been before his capture.
"The beliefs that you have before are strengthened, but there are also the doubts that you've been inculcated with. These have to be overcome."

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