China slams US visa ruling for Confucius Institutes - Jakarta Post

A United States clampdown on visas for instructors at Chinese Confucius Institutes has incensed Beijing, with the state media pouncing on it as an attempt by Washington to curtail China's best-known attempt to promote its image abroad.

The crisis flared up last week with a directive from the US State Department criticizing the centers for violating “categories of exchange” by allowing teachers who were admitted as “professors” or “research scholars” to teach in primary and secondary schools.

The memorandum by the State Department, dated May 17, said such teachers may complete their current tour but will need to return to China at the end of this academic year next month and reapply for US visas if they wish to continue teaching.

It also said all Confucius Institutes must apply for US academic accreditation.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which carried a report on the new directive this week, said it is unclear what prompted the State Department to issue such a policy statement, as Confucius Institutes have been on American campuses for nearly a decade.

About 60 universities in the US now host the centers, which are found in 96 countries and regions.

Chinese state media reacted swiftly, calling the restrictions an anti-Chinese witch-hunt meant to distract Americans from a bleak economic picture in a presidential election year.

Under the headline “US suddenly finds fault with Confucius Institutes”, the state-run Global Times said in an article on Thursday that Washington was worried about the rising influence of the US-based Confucius Institutes.

The paper's editor-in-chief, Hu Xijin, wrote on his microblog that the US seemed to be using the visa issue as an excuse to “limit the growth” of the institutes.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said earlier in the week that the government was in emergency consultations with the US over the issue.

A dispatch by state news agency Xinhua on Thursday quoted an official with the headquarters of China's Confucius Institute as saying the directive “may harm the Sino-US friendship”.

The unnamed official added that the institutes are usually developed at the request of US partner institutions.

Xinhua carried a report hours later quoting US Department of State spokesman Victoria Nuland as saying the department is going to sort out the “mess-up in the visa processing issue”.

She said on Thursday that the agency was working on ways for the teachers to update their visas while remaining in the US. She said Washington supported people-to-people exchanges, and the visa directive was not targeting the institutes.

“This is also not about the Confucius Institutes themselves. It is simply about whether the right visa status was applied in these cases,” Nuland said.

The Confucius Institutes are sponsored by Hanban, an organization affiliated with China's Ministry of Education, and are similar in aim to other government-sponsored cultural outreach programs such as Germany's Goethe Institut and Spain's Instituto Cervantes.

Hanban said the visa issue appeared to have been resolved, but the row has underlined the sensitivity towards the more than 300 Confucius Institutes that China has opened worldwide in less than a decade.

Criticized by some as propaganda machines of the Chinese Communist Party, the institutes are popular with cash-strapped US universities eager to take advantage of the subsidized language instruction.