Confucius Institutes: Getting Schooled By Beijing

Chinese regime uses academic institutes to expand its soft power

TORONTO—When Chinese authorities sent in paramilitary troops to quash Tibetan unrest just months before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, one University of Waterloo instructor rallied her students to “work together to fight with Canadian media” who reported the regime’s heavy-handed tactics.

Ms. Yan Li, a former reporter with the Chinese Communist Party’s official Xinhua News Agency, recounted her efforts to confront media sympathic with “Tibetan separatists” in a story posted on website serving Chinese literature scholars in North America.

“Under her influence, some Canadian students bravely debated with anti-China elements on the Internet, some wrote to television stations, and newspapers to point out that their reporting was not according to the facts,” the report said.

Eventually, one major Canadian television station even apologized for its coverage as a result of “the combined efforts” of Yan and her students.

And none of this would have been possible without Beijing’s efforts to establish Confucius Institutes, like the one Ms. Yan directs at the University of Waterloo.

Besides his explosive comments that some Canadian politicians could be under foreign influence, CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) Director Richard Fadden recently exposed the danger posed by the quiet expansion of Confucius Institutes in Canadian post-secondary schools.

Read more: Epoch Times