Confucius Institutes have been welcomed by Australian universities who perceive them as a means of enhancing Chinese language and culture education and facilitating connections to China. Confucius Classrooms, their equivalents in primary and secondary schools, have likewise been welcomed by schools wishing to establish or enhance Chinese language and culture programs. Since Australia’s first Confucius Institute opened at the University of Western Australia in 2005, a total of 14 Confucius Institutes and 67 Confucius Classrooms have been established. This gave Australia the third highest number of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms in the world for a single country after the United States and the United Kingdom.

The concerns voiced by academics, journalists and members of the public resulted in a number of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms closing in North America and Europe. Such concerns also existed in Australia but did not result in any Confucius Institutes or Classrooms closing. Universities, state and federal governments appeared sanguine about their presence. A turning point came in 2018 when the New South Wales government decided to review, and eventually close, the Confucius Institute located in the state’s Department of Education and the Confucius Classrooms attached to it. Since then, tensions in the Australia-China relationship have further heightened suspicion of the Chinese government’s intentions. Confucius Institutes will most likely be targeted in the federal government’s investigation into foreign interference at universities currently underway.

How can the Australian government and universities deal with Confucius Institutes?

Any response should be based on the premise that Chinese language and culture education are in the interests of the Australian government and its citizens. The resources available through Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms have been used to compensate for insufficient and inconsistent government funding for Chinese language and culture education in universities and schools. If the government determines Confucius Institutes are no longer acceptable, it could provide funds itself. When the New South Wales government closed the state’s Confucius Classrooms, it provided $1.2 million to ensure students could continue learning the Chinese language. The federal government would need to do this on a national level, and this would require it to make a significant and long-term commitment to fund Chinese language and culture education.

If the Australian government is unwilling to do this, it should instead propose changes to Confucius Institutes which would make them acceptable, and communicate these to China. Most obviously, Confucius Institutes would need to be separated from the Chinese government. It is worth noting that in June, the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) changed its name to the Ministry of Education Centre for Language Exchange and Cooperation (教育部中外语言交流合作中心) and relinquished responsibility for Confucius Institutes. A new entity, called the Chinese International Education Foundation (中国国际中文教育基金会), is now in charge of the development and funding of Confucius Institutes. The Chinese International Education Foundation is described as a non-governmental organisation made up of universities and companies. Although it remains to be seen whether this amounts to a true separation between Confucius Institutes and the government in Beijing, this is a step in the right direction and demonstrates China is willing to make changes.

Another requirement for Confucius Institutes would be that they are located off-campus. This is in line with how other language and culture promotion bodies, such as the Alliance française, Cervantes Institute and Dante Institute, operate. The Confucius Institutes would still be able to conduct language courses and cultural activities aimed at the general public. They would also still be able to conduct the various extracurricular activities which benefit university students, such as conversation groups, language competitions and study trips to China.

In addition, Confucius Institutes should be reviewed on a regular basis. Each review should focus on the content of their courses and cultural activities, contractual arrangements and budgets, and seek input from students, academics and the public. This information should also be made freely and easily accessible to ensure transparency regarding all aspects of the Confucius Institutes in Australia.

For universities, there are practical and organisational issues surrounding Confucius Institutes including contractual obligations, hiring practices and curriculum content, as well as the relationship between Confucius Institutes and existing Chinese language and studies programs in some universities. Some universities seemingly entered into agreements to establish Confucius Institutes without properly considering these issues or how the Confucius Institutes would fit into the university.

If the government is willing to allow Confucius Institutes to continue, universities will need to address such issues if they want to keep their Confucius Institutes. Renegotiating contracts to ensure the university has sole control of Confucius Institute programming and operation is a necessary step, and some universities have done this. Another step is to clearly demarcate the role of the Confucius Institute and separate it entirely from university teaching and research in Chinese language and Chinese studies. This could be achieved through Confucius Institutes specialising in a particular area or theme. The Tourism Confucius Institute at Griffith University is one example. It teaches Chinese language and culture for tourism purposes and states on its website that it plays no part in the teaching or development of undergraduate or postgraduate courses at the university and does not commission research.

It is difficult to see how Confucius Institutes can continue unchanged in the current circumstances. The task ahead of the Australian government and universities is to work out exactly what role Confucius Institutes should play in the country’s Chinese language and culture education.

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Most of the world’s languages are written using a phonetic script such as an alphabet. In these scripts, each symbol represents a unit of sound. The Chinese writing system is one of few exceptions – it is logographic, which means each written symbol, or character, represents the meaning of a word (or part of a word) rather than a sound. 

As such, at least one character must be learned for each word, and this makes achieving literacy in Chinese a time consuming and onerous task. 

The challenges involved in learning and using characters for foreign learners of Chinese have been well-documented. These challenges are generally seen as insurmountable obstacles to Chinese ever becoming a global language. Geoffrey Pullman’s “The awful Chinese writing system” is a typical example of this position.  

But do such arguments hold up to scrutiny? 

Proponents of this view seem to think that for Chinese to become a global language, everyone would need to learn to read and write, and do so to a native level of proficiency. But this is not how English works as a global language. 

A cursory look at the use of English around the world shows not everyone can read and write the language, and certainly not to a native level. An important reason for this is that, generally speaking, people only learn as much English as is required for their purposes. 

The same applies to Chinese as a global language – not all learners need to know how to read and write the language, and not all of those who do need to do so to a high level.  

Furthermore, technology has changed the way characters are written, and this has important implications for the chances of Chinese becoming a global language.  

The Pinyin Romanisation system was developed in the 1950s to facilitate literacy for Chinese children and foreign learners. It uses the Roman alphabet to represent the sounds of Chinese. Devices like computers, mobile phones and iPads have software that converts Pinyin into characters. This process, which can be seen in this video, involves typing a word in Pinyin and then selecting the matching character from a list generated by the software. 

Such technology drastically reduces the time and effort needed to learn and use characters because people do not have to physically write them. Instead, they can learn how to write in Pinyin and how to recognise characters. 

Chinese characters have been used by people outside of China before, although not on the same scale as the Roman alphabet – used not only in English but most other European languages.

From approximately the third century to the second half of the twentieth century, scholars, officials and Buddhist monks in Korea, Japan and Vietnam used Chinese characters for reading and writing in administration, religion and many genres of literature. 

In addition, diplomats from these countries also carried out face-to-face communication with Chinese diplomats by writing characters – a practice known as “brush talk” (笔谈 bǐtán). Communication took place through written Chinese, rather than their respective spoken languages, which were considerably different from each other.   

Characters were used for these purposes out of the desire to emulate China, then seen as the most advanced and civilised country in the world. This provided the motivation to devote time and effort to learning and using characters. 

Finally, many of those who argue that a character-based writing system will stop Chinese attaining global language status focus on the linguistic features of Chinese. But linguistic features do not make a language into a global language – English’s high number of loan words, minimal inflections and lack of grammatical gender are not the reasons it is a global language today. English became a global language because it was the language of the two most powerful countries of recent centuries, Britain and the United States. 

There are also a number of discrepancies between how English sounds and how it is spelled. These present challenges to learners of English, but they did not prevent it from becoming a global language. This shows that concentrating on linguistic features can be misleading. 

If we accept that it is the power and influence of the countries in which a language is spoken that make it global, then as China’s power and influence continue to grow, so too will the global use and status of the Chinese language. 

This piece is based on the author’s recent article, “Will a character based writing system stop Chinese becoming a global language? A review and reconsideration of the debate”, published in the journal Global Chinese.

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