No Blanket ban
After Stark-Watzinger’s statement, the German Rectors’ Conference spoke out against a blanket ban on Confucius Institutes at German universities. The Saxon Ministry of Science refers to the freedom of research and science. Its spokesman Falk Lange says that it is “primarily the responsibility of the university and the researchers and teachers to assess the opportunities, benefits and risks of cooperation”. So far, the Ministry of Science has no knowledge “that the freedom of science, especially at the Confucius Institute in Leipzig, is being disturbed or restricted by political influence.”
Both the university and the ministry are very sensitive when it comes to security, says Lange. The Chemnitz FDP politician Frank Müller-Rosentritt does not see the topic quite so relaxed. He is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag, where he is the rapporteur for Asia. He has been involved with the Confucius Institutes for a long time. “The Confucius Institutes are an essential pillar of Chinese foreign policy. They are intended to influence our society. But much more than that. The propaganda of the Communist Party is to be imposed on us.”
Müller-Rosentritt: Germany needs China expertise
According to Müller-Rosentritt, the secret services report that many students are Chinese spies. Since Germany still needs a great deal of China expertise, the foreign policy expert advocates cooperation with partner universities in Taiwan. This is also what Anna Marti of the FDP-affiliated Friedrich Naumann Foundation has in mind.
Marti, who heads the Taiwan office of the foundation in Taipei, said: “Mandarin is also spoken in Taiwan. And the Taiwanese government is currently working on perhaps offering an alternative. So you could also see Germany as a democratic territory Don’t look at Taiwan as a state – cooperate and rely on language training.”
According to a spokesman for the Thuringian Ministry of Science, there is no longer any official institutional cooperation between universities or colleges and the Erfurt Confucius Institute. A collaboration that once existed at the Erfurt University of Applied Sciences was dissolved about two years ago. There is no Confucius Institute in Saxony-Anhalt.