Updated 11/12
An affiliate of China’s government has been sponsoring a new Columbia institute, raising questions about whether Columbia can balance unbiased scholarship and its relationship with China.
The quasi-governmental Chinese organization Hanban pledged Columbia $1 million in 2010—to be distributed over five years—to begin a “Confucius Institute,” which funds research projects and events on campus to explore Chinese culture.
According to a recent article in Bloomberg News, Hanban has given money to some universities with the expectation that they won’t publish information about Tibet, a region that has long wanted to secede from China. China has cracked down on the separatist movement, sometimes violently, and limited media access to the region.
But Chinese language professor Lening Liu, director of the Confucius Institute, said that Columbia’s CI is committed to academic integrity and that it would reject any attempt by Hanban to censor its research. The CI will review all research proposals, including those that mention Tibet, he added.
“If that’s their [Hanban’s] intention, they will not be successful,” Liu said. “If they really try to interfere with the independence of the American institution, I think they will be out of business relatively soon.”
Liu added that China is sponsoring many Confucius institutes and that just because censorship has been an issue elsewhere doesn’t mean it will happen at Columbia.
“Though many Confucius Institutes in the United States—I think there was more than 60—share the same name, Confucius Institute, each of them has unique focus and negotiated individually with Hanban,” Liu said.
SIPA professor Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program, said that when it comes to Tibet, there hasn’t been much debate at Columbia.
“Domestically, Columbia has been very supportive of openness and freedom of discussion on the Tibetan issue,” Barnett said. “But when it comes to internationally, when Columbia is arranging events in China … it’s just an absence of discussion.”
Columbia’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program was the first in the West. Barnett called the program a good first step but said there needs to be more debate about Tibet.
“Columbia’s been extremely good on these kind of issues here at Columbia, but it might be setting itself up for quite serious problems in the future,” he said.
A University spokesperson could not be reached for comment on Hanban’s relationship with Columbia Tuesday afternoon.
The Confucius Institute is still working to define its relationship with Hanban. Despite the Hanban funding, the Institute doesn’t have much space—its headquarters are currently in Liu’s office in Kent Hall. Liu is running the institute on his own, with the guidance of a board of directors, and he said that he hopes it will have access to its own space by the spring.
“The University committed to provide an office for the institute. The sixth floor of Kent Hall will undergo renovation,” Liu said.
Until the institute has its own office space, it will not have fulfilled its agreement to Hanban. Hanban will send Chinese textbooks once the institute has enough space, but Liu said that although it will make the textbooks available to students, they will not be used in Chinese courses.
“If you send them over, that’s fine, we can put them there, and if students need to take it as a reference or something, that’s fine. We will give it away,” Liu said.
Columbia’s relationship with China is not limited to Hanban’s sponsorship of the Confucius Institute. Columbia has a global center and various summer programs in Beijing, and China has the largest representation among international students on campus.
“I am in favor of as much U.S.-China academic and cultural exchange as possible. I think it is good for everybody,” SIPA professor Andrew Nathan said in an email. “I think it’s appropriate for Columbia to play a leading role in those exchanges between the two societies.”
But some professors say that the relationships that Columbia is forming with foreign governments as it expands globally may lead to research dilemmas, like the issue of research concerning Tibet.
“There is this strange silence about Tibet and other sensitive issues when it comes to Columbia, academics, and talks of China,” Barnett said. “The silences are a worry because they could be self-censoring.”
“The issue is not that China wants to promote itself and pay for Chinese to be taught,” he added. “The issue is that it wants to have a presence in the campus and much more than that. It wants to have a presence in the faculty and in teaching departments.”
Others have asked what the University’s role should be when foreign governments limit academic freedom abroad. The Chinese government shut down the Modern Tibetan Studies Program’s study abroad program in Tibet in 2006, and several Columbia faculty members have been denied visas to China—including Nathan, ever since the publication of his 2001 book, “The Tiananmen Papers,” which included leaked Chinese government documents.
Nathan said that Columbia officials have spoken to Chinese government representatives on his behalf, although he added that Columbia should not attempt to chastise China for its actions.
“What I do think is appropriate is for university personnel … to say that they think the government’s visa denials are counterproductive or whatever they want to say along those lines,” Nathan said in an e-mail.
Update: In a follow-up email, Barnett wrote that the "strange silence about Tibet" he identified referred specifically to Columbia-organized events in China, not to all of Columbia's academic programs relating to China.
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