Making Sense of China’s Confucius Institutes

The National Interest (Online), August 4, 2015

Inside a modern lecture hall at The George Washington University (GW), a well-respected guest lecturer from China addressed me and the other women in his audience as “female comrades.”

I nearly spat out my tea.

It was a lazy April Saturday afternoon in Washington, DC. I had come to GW to attend a symposium sponsored by the university’s Confucius Institute, a Chinese language and cultural center. Meant to be a vehicle for exporting China’s soft power, Confucius Institutes—funded by Beijing and numbering over four hundred—have sprung up around the world during the past decade.

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