Miradie Tchekpo biggest dream has come true: She has landed a job as an interpreter working for a trading company in her home country of .
“In middle school, I watched Chinese TV channels and dreamed of traveling to China and getting to know the culture,” she told DW. “So I studied Chinese … and attended courses for three years to gain a professional qualification in Chinese,” she adds with an unmistakable sense of pride in her voice.
After finishing school, Tchekpo enrolled at the Confucius Institute — China’s government-run institute for the promotion of its language and culture — at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin.
However, she hopes that one day she will get to look back at this as only being the beginning of big dream:
“I want to realize my dream of international trade by bringing tropical products from Benin to China and products from China to Benin,” says Tchekpo.
“If possible, even to the whole of Africa.”
Soft power made in China
Expanding across Africa appears to be a dream she shares with the Chinese government: Since 2004, when the Confucius Institute was first founded, Beijing has been investing rather heavily in the worldwide expansion and export of its culture.
In Africa alone, there are Confucius Institutes offering courses in 49 countries.
“One of the ways in which China is expanding its soft power on the African continent is not only economic, but also socio-cultural, especially through the spread of Chinese language teaching,” says Simbarashe Gukurume, a social scientist and lecturer at Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, South Africa.
Few actual career prospects
But there are caveats attached to learning Mandarin at any of the countless Confucius Institutes, which are attached to the Chinese Ministry of Education.
While Beijing awards students in Africa with generous scholarships, there are hardly any job opportunities waiting for them in China, says Gukurume.
He believes that compared to many Africans, the Chinese have better overall language skills, especially bridging the gap between their own language and those of their major trade partners.
Maradie Tchekpo is the exception, even if her job is based in Africa; Chinese companies and government firms are known across the continent for primarily that the Beijing is invested in — such as building ports, roads or airports.
Gukurume adds that in fact after graduation, many former students end up becoming teachers of Mandarin:
“Almost the entire faculty and staff of the Confucius Institute at the University of Zimbabwe is made up of local academics who teach Mandarin and have received some financial support for their studies in China.”
Mixing language class with Mao, Hu and Xi
According to Gukurume, there’s also a more sinister side to this power differential: “China benefits significantly from this, as most of these institutes and other cultural exchange activities are based on bilateral agreements between governments, and sometimes come with unrestricted Chinese access to African resources,” he emphasizes.
He argues that therefore, China’s cultural activities and its in Africa are ultimately two sides of the same coin.
In fact, the Confucius Institute has faced repeated criticism for not even trying to hide its aspirations of helping the Chinese government bolster its economic and political influence across Africa:
Compared to other countries’ institutions for the promotion of language and culture, China’s Confucius Institute stands out for the fact that its local branches are often based at universities and other higher education establishments.
regarding the direct influence of the Chinese Communist Party among educational elites.
“They interfere with the academic freedom within universities and indoctrinate students with Chinese political systems that could be seen as authoritarian or undemocratic. Young people who familiarize themselves with this political system [will] adopt undemocratic principles,” the social scientist explains.
Gukurume also believes that and provides further proof for an agenda that is built on the intertwining of the cultural and the political values of China — one that apparently is solidly rejected by Western democracies while tacitly tolerated in parts of the developing world.
China: no longer a ‘sleeping giant’ in Africa
In fact, the number of Confucius Institutes in Africa continues to grow rapidly — and with it, so does China’s soft power: With ten institutes, South Africa is now considered a major center for learning Mandarin on the African continent.
South African private language schools, which previously used to attract South Americans and Asians with their affordable offerings for English classes, are now diversifying into Mandarin, often using the skills of those who were educated at Confucius Institutes before.
Many private schools and even some public ones in South Africa now offer Mandarin as a foreign language.
Even the landlocked mountain kingdom of Lesotho with a population of less than 2.4 million people, which is wholly enveloped by South Africa, has not one but two Confucius Institutes.
At the same time, China is also investing more into theaters, museums, exhibitions, the film industry and other media enterprises in Africa; the Asian nation, which is known for burning books during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, is even opening libraries in some parts of the continent.
A different cultural revolution?
In a 2023 study titled “China’s institutionalized cultural presence in Africa,” researcher Avril Joffe examined how different African actors perceive the role of these growing cultural offerings from China — a giant nation, which only decades ago was barely on the radar of many of Africa’s then-newly independent governments.
Joffe, who heads the Cultural Policy and Management Department at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says that her studies reveal that China’s interests in Africa go well beyond economic, political and security issues; she thinks that China’s desire to expand its soft power on the continent can even come at the cost of even pushing out local culture and content.
“In order to mitigate the potentially negative effects of this institutionalized cultural presence, more targeted recommendations need to be made, especially to civil society, artists, creatives, filmmakers, musicians, as well as governments,” Joffe told DW.
The steep increase in numbers of African students enrolling at Chinese universities — up from less than 2,000 in 2003 to over 81,500 in 2018 — therefore comes as no surprise as a consequence of China trying to infiltrate African culture, she says.
‘African agency’ for African needs and cultures
Joffe criticizes the lack of boundaries and rules of engagement to rein in China’s influence in Africa while admitting that “(w)e do not have clarity yet about about whether China’s anti-demoractic ideology is filtering into all these investments.”
“These corrective measures are needed to ensure that this does not happen,” she stressed, highlighting that African countries need to step up their own national funding and cultural scholarships to reduce China’s funding monopoly.
Joffe passinately pleads for “a unified policy that allows each African country to strengthen their bargaining power and enhance the positive effects of China’s investments.”
“One way is to ensure that the AU [African Union] and other regional bodies really insert African agency into their negotiations around the investments from China.”
Rodrigue Guezodje contributed reporting to this article.
Adapted from German by Philipp Sandner
Edited by: Sertan Sanderson
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