The U.S. Department of State is backing down from its insistence that 600 Chinese-language schoolteachers affiliated with university-based Confucius Institutes leave the country by the end of June because of visa problems.
The State Department’s chief spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said at a news briefing Thursday that department officials were “going to do our best to fix this without having anybody have to leave.” Ms. Nuland also said the department would conduct an investigation to determine how the “mess-up” occurred.
The State Department issued a policy directive a week ago to the roughly 80 American universities that host Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-government-sponsored language and cultural centers. The statement, first reported in The Chronicle, said that Chinese elementary- and secondary-school teachers on university-sponsored visas were in violation of regulations governing J-1, or exchange, visas, and would have to leave the United States by the end of June.
Because foreign professors, academics, and students at the university level are prohibited from teaching in elementary and secondary schools, the schoolteachers would have to reapply for the correct visa to return to this country, which would also entail finding a new sponsor, the policy directive said.
The policy statement caused consternation on U.S. campuses and in China, where an official with the Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, which oversees Confucius Institutes, told The Chronicle that the State Department’s action could “harm” Sino-American exchanges.
The teachers came to the United States with a “friendly heart” but were abruptly told they had to leave, said the official, Wang Yongli. “Isn’t this a form of harm to the friendship between Chinese and American people?” he said. Confucius Institutes are a key part of China’s cultural diplomacy.
The Confucius Institute controversy made headlines in China, and at Thursday’s briefing, Ms. Nuland was repeatedly asked about the teachers’ status. The State Department, she said, was working to find a solution so that the language instructors would not have to leave the country.
“My understanding is that at the current moment, we’re trying to size the problem, we’re trying to figure out how many people are affected, and then we’re going to—and we’re in the process of reissuing instructions that are a little bit clearer and a little bit more easy to manage. Let’s put it that way,” Ms. Nuland said.
While a State Department official earlier this week laid blame for the visa mix-up on sponsoring universities, Ms. Nuland declined to say who was responsible, characterizing the situation repeatedly as a “mess-up.”
“We’re going to clean it up so that everybody’s in the right visa category,” she said.
That news will be welcomed by the universities who host Confucius Institutes, who had worried how they would be able to continue to provide language instruction, one of the chief missions for many of the centers.
This is the second time this week that the State Department has retreated from its policy directive. The original document also said that Confucius Institutes must be part of university foreign-language departments or be separately accredited. But on Tuesday, a State Department official said as long as the centers were part of accredited universities, they would comply with visa regulations.
