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She said Xi Said's avatar

Unfortunate on all levels:

1) the Chinese learning material distributed by the PRC is the absolute worst. I am not talking about insidious infiltration here, I am talking about boring, clunky and totally interest-killing in all respects. Here’s looking at you, 济南大学 textbooks.

2) the outlandish levels of suspicion directed at CI programs ended up being an own-goal by the West. They got shut down without any replacement funding so, now we are training very few Chinese-speakers when PRC is supposedly our biggest rival.

3) my kids also go to a school that had a good Chinese program originally funded by CI but isn’t any more. The school is now struggling w funding but also with enrollment since the admins don’t really understand bilingual education or how to promote it, and a few parents in the district who wouldn’t know a Chinese character if it bit them are showing up at school board meetings “worrying” about a) bathrooms b) “Communist” teaching material.

4) My high school Spanish teacher was obsessed with Julio Inglesias. We listened to him in class, learned lyrics to his songs, his posters were on the wall. I emerged with OK Spanish and haven’t given one thought to Julio in the 30 years since. Any CI attempts at indoctrination could have been just as easily shaken off.

5) it was very dumb of (a very few) CIs to attempt to get involved in issues like the Dalai Lama visiting a college campus. But also college administrators could and should have just told them no, end of story.

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David Moser's avatar

A brutally frank and important article. As you point out, you can't buy soft power with money. The Chinese government needs to realize that soft power is a bottom-up phenomenon, not top-down. I know some American professors who used to collaborate with CIs in the US, while CIs still existed. From what I learned, it seems the CI budgets were boundless. The professors would ask for, say, 50 textbooks, and would receive 150. As big as their budget was, they were quite stingy in paying their teachers, and thus had a high turnover rate. I participated in some CI events in Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. Most of them were embarassingly propagandistic, cloyingly shallow, and inevitably presenting the usual calligraphy, paper cutting, and classical poetry memorizing. I met a couple of young men who worked for Hanban in Beijing. They told me about some computer/AI multmedia teaching tools they were developing. I expressed an interest in seeing this technology, and they promised to invite me to the Hanban HQ near Deshengmen for a demonstration. Time went by, and they never got back to me. When I contacted one of them to ask when I could visit the building, they told me the organization didn't want to give demonstrations of technology that was still in development. I haven't heard from them since. They obviously don't need more money. They need more creativity.

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