Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

The analyst Christopher Walker has coined the term “sharp power”—neither “hard” military power nor “soft” cultural power—to describe the Chinese influence campaigns that are now felt in many different areas of culture, media, academia, and even sports. Many are coordinated by the United Front, the Chinese Communist Party’s most important influence project, which creates educational and exchange programs, seeks to control Chinese exile communities, builds Chinese chambers of commerce, and, most notoriously, helps run the Confucius Institutes, situated within academic institutions all over the world. Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies, not unlike the Goethe Institute run by the German government or the Alliance Française, the Confucius Institutes were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion by policing Chinese students at American universities, seeking to block public discussions of Tibet or Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. Although mostly disbanded in the United States, Confucius Institutes flourish in many other places. There are several dozen in Africa alone.