Chinese officials press TDSB not to abandon Confucius Institute
COLIN FREEZE AND KAREN HOWLETT
The Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
Chinese officials are writing members of Canada’s largest school board to warn them against backing out of a partnership with a Beijing-sponsored cultural centre, suggesting that doing so would impair Chinese-Canadian relations.“If the Confucius Institute in Toronto was suspended, there would be a great damage to the relationship between the two sides, which is hard for us to accept,” reads one of two nearly identical June 17 letters sent this week from Chinese government education officials to members of the Toronto District School Board.
Chinese officials are writing members of Canada’s largest school board to warn them against backing out of a partnership with a Beijing-sponsored cultural centre, suggesting that doing so would impair Chinese-Canadian relations.“If the Confucius Institute in Toronto was suspended, there would be a great damage to the relationship between the two sides, which is hard for us to accept,” reads one of two nearly identical June 17 letters sent this week from Chinese government education officials to members of the Toronto District School Board.
“We hope [school board] Director Donna Quan and the trustees would proceed the situation from the perspective of friendship between China and Canada.”
The letters obtained by The Globe and Mail contained some identical language and were sent by both the Hunan Provincial Department of Education and the Confucius Institute Headquarters in Beijing.
Both of these organizations have been partnering with the Toronto board to open the city’s first Confucius Institute – which was inaugurated last month at Central Commerce Collegiate Institute, a high school near Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood.
On Wednesday evening, school trustees will vote on a motion that would suspend the institute so that board staff can investigate concerns about censorship by the Chinese government.
Trustees who have read the letters from Chinese officials said the communications would not affect their votes. “I don’t feel any pressure whatsoever,” trustee Shelley Laskin said in an interview Wednesday. “I feel we will make the right decision.”
Dozens of Confucius Institutes have been established in North America in recent years, the majority on postsecondary campuses, not elementary schools.
They are seen as a global “soft-power” outreach effort by China government, funding foreign centres of Chinese language and cultural learning to foster good will.
Critics of the Confucius Institutes suggest there is another agenda. This month the American Association of University Professors warned U.S. universities to put restraints on where the institutes operate and what they teach. “Confucius Institutes [are] now established at some 90 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada,” the report concluded. “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”
Negotiations to bring a Confucius Institute to Toronto have been spearheaded since 2007 by Chris Bolton, the TDSB chair who resigned suddenly last week.
Some school trustees told The Globe that they were told very little about the agreement between the school board and the Chinese government. Lately, though, they say they have been inundated with questions from parents.
The letter from the Chinese education department points out that Chinese officials have gone to great lengths to pick the right people for the Toronto facility. “We elaborately selected a director as well as skilled teachers and volunteers from schools and colleges throughout Hunan Province,” the letter says. “They are prepared and invested a lot for working in Canada.”
One trustee who spoke to The Globe stressed that Wednesday’s motion is to suspend the rollout of classes through the Confucius Institute, rather than to cancel the contract with the Chinese government.
The TDSB had been planning to introduce Mandarin courses to elementary students in September through the institute.
As is typical with similar Confucius Institute contracts negotiated by the Chinese government, the TDSB contract is confidential and contains penalty clauses in the event one side unilaterally backs out.
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