Australian unis have formed a dependency, and China knows it

The UK’s Conservative Party is holding an inquiry into Confucius Institutes, the so-called language and culture centres that have been set up at well in excess of 500 universities and tertiary institutions around the world, bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.

The inquiry is being done under the auspices of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission and began in the House of Commons in London on June 5.

This, sharp readers may remember, is the the same party that under previous prime minister David “Brexit” Cameron performed one of the most egregious kowtows to Beijing of any Western government in modern history and then proceeded to lead a £750 billion UK-China fund that has since “struggled”.

A day before the inquiry began, the United States Congress saw a new bill, Countering the Chinese Government and Communist Party’s Political Influence Operations Act, introduced. Part of the bill’s aim is to monitor the influence of Confucius Institutes. The bill’s introduction coincided with the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre where, recent documents released by UK diplomats suggest, as many as 10,000 Chinese citizens may have been murdered by the People’s Liberation Army.

In Australia, more than a dozen major universities have Confucius Institutes. Of the Group of Eight universities, only Monash University and Australian National University do not have one (unkind people have suggested that is because no Chinese teachers would want to live in either the Melbourne suburb of Waverly or Canberra). This means that the universities of Sydney, News South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia all have Confucius Institutes. So too do UTS, RMIT, QUT, LaTrobe, Victoria and Griffith universities.

Confucius Institutes have been labelled by several former diplomats and anyone who knows anything about the party as “the thin end of the wedge” of the United Front Work Department, China’s overseas propaganda arm. But Australia’s higher education sector seems so beholden to the roughly 170,000 Chinese students who study in Australia (representing around 30% of the foreign student market), that it would be a brave university indeed who would kick a Confucius Institute off their campus, as some in the US and Europe have done.

Independent research seen by Crikey shows that a whopping 38% of Chinese enrollments between 2010-2016 went to the big four (Sydney, Melbourne Monash and NSW) and that percentage, according to industry insiders, has grown in the past two years. There are also some conflicting headwinds as Chinese universities move up in global rankings. An anti-Australia propaganda campaign by Beijing, including dubious safety warnings for students posted on Chinese Education Ministry websites, is having an effect, and the pay differential in China between locally and overseas educated China is shrinking fast.

And yet there has been plenty around in recent months about Chinese influence-peddling in Australia’s tertiary sector, with billionaires tipping tens of millions into vanity projects. Teachers at the big four say that recruitment agents are being paid extra by fee-addicted unis to fill less popular courses.

Professor John Fitzgerald of Swinburne University, one of Australia’s most experienced and clear-eyed China watchers, put it this way:

Weighing the value of vibrant scholarship against the inclination of donors to have a say in how their donations are spent is a delicate balance. With Confucius Institutes, Australian universities clearly got the balance wrong.

In this case, a donor in China assigns a teacher to each program and sets clear limits on what can be said and done in the classroom.

In effect, a number of Australian universities that are keen to expand their Chinese language and studies offerings have undermined their academic integrity, autonomy and freedom by ceding control over staffing and content to a donor.

It’s not like the influence-wielding of the Confucius Institutes is something new. Diplomats and academics have been warning of it for more than a decade. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Yet, long time industry professionals say there are huge and largely untapped markets for Australian education right across the Americas, in the Middle East, Europe and Africa — as well as closer to home in southeast Asia. So ratcheting down a reliance on China in the $30 billion market would be good business practice for vice chancellors.

Concentrating on China has been an easy but lazy strategy, and has, if surveys are to be believed, been spoiling the university experience for Chinese and Australian students alike. The university sector needs to stand up to Chinese influence for the good of all in academia, showing the Confucius Institutes the door would be a good start.