It has been revealed in the past number of days that the Irish Department of Education has an agreement with the Chinese state education authorities to administer the teaching of Mandarin Chinese in Irish schools. Standardised Mandarin was placed on the Leaving Certificate curriculum last September.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which sets out the arrangement was the fruit of a meeting held on July 3 2019 between Department officials and the First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy in Dublin, Dawai Zheng. However, the minutes of that meeting and the actual MOU were only placed on the government information site on Tuesday following news reports on the matter.
The Memorandum allows for the selection of teachers from China to teach in Irish schools along with a “language advisor if required.” While it refers to the need for the teachers sent from China to fulfil Departmental requirements, the position of Language Advisor will be selected by the Chinese authorities.
That is crucial as the advisor will have effective control over all aspects of the programme including the “orientation and induction” of the teachers and within their “Communities of Practice.” That might sound pretty innocuous NGO speak from where it originates, but it is a key element in how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engages with countries it has targeted as places to increase its influence.
There is a substantial body of research regarding how this operates in African and Asia. Those appointed to such “Community” positions are loyal Party members, and occasionally exposed as intelligence operatives. Those entrusted with the supervision of Chinese citizens working abroad, particularly in sensitive areas or studying in universities, are expected to report back to the state authorities through local embassies.
The teachers will be paid by the Chinese, and provided with a maximum €10,000 allowance by the Department. There is a clause related to the provision of equal rights to the Chinese teachers, which is interesting given that teachers in China enjoy none of the basic legal rights they would enjoy here, including membership of a non-state controlled representative body. It would be interesting to hear the views of the Irish second level teachers unions on all of this.
One clause in the memorandum cautions Chinese participants in the programme “to not organize or attend any activities that conflict with this MOU.” This would suggest that the Irish government is at least formally aware of the aspects of Chinese overseas engagement referred to above.
In the minutes of the July 2019 meeting, it was stated by the by Secretary Dawai that while the proposals would be sent to the Chinese Education Department that “resources would be delivered through the Hanban and the Confucius Institute (Cis).” Perhaps in response to a query, the Embassy “clarified that the Hanban is not a government body.”
But it is. It comes directly under the control of the Chinese State Council for Education. It in turn controls the Confucius Institutes and, as detailed by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg in ‘Hidden Hand’, they are regarded as part of the CCP’s overseas propaganda and united front network designed to promote the interests of the Party in host countries.
The minutes of the Department/Embassy meeting record that it was joined by two representatives of the Confucius Institute, Professor Liming Wang of University College Dublin and Dr. Catherine Xu of University College Cork. Liming Wang informed the meeting that the Confucius Institute had already surveyed schools on the provision of Chinese as a subject.
We have previously referred to Liming as one of the key promoters of closer Chinese Irish relations. He is a former Chinese government official and was at one time a director of Mainstream whose founder Eddie O’Connor is a leading member of the China Ireland Institute and a fulsome admirer of “Mr. Xi Jingping’s great $7 trillion achievement.” O’Connor and other well known chaps like former Taoisigh Enda Kenny and Brian Cowan and former Tánaiste Ruairí Quinn are advocates of the Irish bourgeoisie joining in the Belt and Road Initiative.
What Hanban and the Confucius Institutes do primarily is to promote the Party ideology. Where they are well established in overseas academia they have not been shy in ensuring that Universities and other institutions do not pay any attention to what have been referred to as the “Three Ts – Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen.” Which is code for all things the CCP demands silence on, including the genocide of the Uyghurs.
In December 2019, as the people of Hong Kong protested against the increased repression there by the Chinese Communists, the RTÉ website solicited a piece by Kiri Parramore of the UCC Confucius Institute. He managed to portray the protests as a reflection of Hong Kong’s having raised a generation of pampered students with too high expectations – presumably including the right to vote, use the internet, freedom of religion, and all those trivia that had been reduced to ‘emotionalization’.
Even apart from the fact that Hanban and the Confucius Institute are central to the operation of a totalitarian regime, what are the educational criteria underlying this surely unique arrangement to have a foreign language taught here as part of the Leaving Cert? Does the German government have any role in the appointment of German teachers? Do the Japanese appoint commissars to monitor teachers teaching Japanese? Does the French intelligence service operate state controlled “institutes” to ensure that no-one learning French gets to hear anything bad about their wine or makes Macron jokes?
Chinese is of course a language that is both difficult to learn and requires the input of native speakers. However, there are many speakers and teachers of Chinese who neither live in the Peoples Republic of China, nor are employed by the Chinese state. There are surely no shortage of teachers in Hong Kong or Taiwan for example who might be engaged by the Department of Education here.
There is also the fact, as reported this morning, that the Department in response to concerns raised over the arrangement with Beijing, stated that the Chinese had no part in designing the curriculum. This is significant as the Leaving Cert written exam will be in what is known as “simplified Chinese” Mandarin, Putonghua, which is the official language of state.
The importance of that is that while it had been estimated that around a third of the mainland population do not speak it, that it has been enforced on speakers of other Chinese dialects and on other ethnic groups in a deliberate attempt to make it the only language with which it is possible to engage in most aspects of life.
There are tens of millions of Chinese people living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and in other countries who do not conform to the linguistic demands of the Chinese Communist Party. I fail to see any good reason why the Irish Department of Education ought to either.