I don't want to sound anti-American or anything I just have trouble distinguishing elements of what you're talking from how things work in the United States.
The people who work at Hanban, the organization in charge of CI, always stress that their work is non-political, and that there are no strings attached, but these people are career bureaucrats, and their first priority is to please the party leadership. They send poorly trained, poorly paid teachers to schools around the world, and make them waste time teaching kids to sing, dance and paint Chinese-style, because Chinese leaders like to see foreigners drawing cute pandas.
How is this any different than any other state-funded program? I mean, countless English speaking instructors that are shipped over seas are poorly trained, poorly paid, and offering their students a fairly shallow understanding of Western countries. I mean, are Chinese kids learning from twenty something Americans studying Tocqueville or something? Every State expects programs they are funding to be beneficial to the State.
They clash with their partner schools, protesting when they host Chinese dissident lectures or cover controversial topics in other departments.
I don't think the United States government would be too pleased if American professors and students were in say - Venezuela or Iran - bad mouthing the United States.
But these must be applied for, and government meddling in the types of content to be offered means that these book fairs are full of repetitive titles, basically piles of glossy coffee table books of Great Wall photos and books about Chinese folk art. The way these grants are given means that the focus is on what the party wants foreigners to read, rather than what foreign readers actually want.
Foreigners don't want photos of the Great Wall and Chinese Folk Art? I don't think I've ever been to a Chinese owned story that didn't sell exclusively that kind of stuff. Or any country for that matter. When I goto a store that sells Mexican things, they aren't displaying dissident Zapatista literature or the kind of consumer goods that most Mexicans have in their homes. No, they're selling blankets and Day of the Dead crap.
A budding independent film scene has also been quashed in recent years as independent film festivals have been shut down across the country in favor of showcases of China's most mainstream films, attended by Hollywood executives eager to get their next film approved for mainland release. Chinese independent films are a powerful force on the international film festival circuit, but you wouldn't know it from reading the Chinese press.
Again, how is this different than the United States? Americans have been decrying the obsence number of sequels, remakes, braindead action flicks, and absence of truly unique and thoughtful movies for decades now. One of the primary reasons for the sharp decline in deep movies is because....Hollywood wants to create flashy movies that are easier for foreign audiences to get into.
. These shows rarely do any community outreach or education, and do little to extend their reach or cultivate their audience.
Does the United States have a gigantic opera scene that is doing community outreach and education in China that I simply don't know about?
The US government has also given support to Hollywood and other industries as they spread around the world. But in all of this, the US government was decidedly hands-off. They didn't force a particular type of content, nor did they act to stymie the types of content and producers they didn't like.