CHINA--PROPAGANDA: CONFUCIUS INSTITUTES
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A Wall Street Journal article published on August 7, 2014, which addressed the Presidents of Stanford, Columbia, Michigan and some 100 other American universities that host Confucius Institutes funded by the Chinese government, quoted an report released on August 1 by the European Association for Chinese Studies. According to this report, trouble began when Vice Minister Xu Lin, Director-General of Confucius Institute Headquarters, arrived at the conference venue in Portugal on July 22. Her agency had helped fund the event, and she decided that some of the professors' published abstracts "were contrary to Chinese regulations." She also decided it was unacceptable for the conference program to describe the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation -- an affiliate of the Taiwanese government-- as the other sponsor. Vice Minister Xu Lin therefore "ordered her entourage . . . straight away to remove all the conference materials from the conference venue" and returned them two days later with the offending pages having been torn out. Prof. Roger Greatrex, of Sweden's Lund University and President of the European Association for Chinese Studies, objected and ordered the pages reprinted which he then offered to the Confucius Institute leadership.
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