Since mid-March, the brutal actions taken by the Chinese government to suppress demonstrations by Tibetans seeking religious freedom, cultural preservation and environmental protection have been in the news. Chinese behavior has been condemned around the world and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has issued a challenge for all of us to speak out: “If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.” (Journal-World, March 22)

While many have already answered Pelosi’s challenge, unfortunately, the person in Lawrence with the greatest obligation to do so, Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway, has remained silent. Why does Hemenway have an obligation to condemn Chinese government brutality? Simply said, that obligation comes from his leading role in making KU, and therefore all Kansans, partners with the Chinese government in that government’s global public relations campaign known as the Confucius Institute Program.

In 2006, KU received $100,000 from the Chinese government to establish a Confucius Institute at the KU Edwards campus and operate it for one year. In 2007, KU asked the Chinese government for $150,000 to operate the institute for a second year. For that amount of money the Chinese government has been able to place what the Journal-World editor, Dolph C. Simons Jr., likes to call the KU “brand name” in its service.

By putting KU’s brand name and KU resources behind a Chinese government program intended to improve that government’s standing in public opinion in Kansas and everywhere else KU is known, Hemenway placed himself and KU on the side of the Chinese government. Unless he now condemns the brutal repression of that government, his silence means that he, KU and all Kansans are now standing silently beside that government as it commits one outrageous act after another.

Of course, there are those at KU who say the university’s partnership with the Chinese government to operate the Confucius Institute is only about teaching Chinese language and culture and has no broader significance. In early 2007, the institute’s executive director, William Tsutsui, told the Journal-World that the institute’s focus was on Chinese language teaching, not politics.

Such a position, however, completely ignores what Chinese government officials in Beijing repeatedly say about the goals of the Confucius Institute program, which is that the program is designed to give people an “understanding of the true, real China.” This very same goal, by the way, is presented in the Chinese version of Hemenway’s remarks published in the Confucius Institute 2006-2007 Annual Report.

It is the pursuit of this goal which makes the Confucius Institute program a public relations program with strategic implications. For here one can clearly see the Chinese government’s desire to use the “true, real China” being depicted in KU’s Confucius Institute and Confucius Institutes elsewhere to cause people in the United States and other countries to look upon the Chinese government more favorably.

This situation makes it important that, along with condemning the Chinese government’s most recent widely publicized acts of brutality, Hemenway also ensure that the “true, real China” his Confucius Institute is presenting to Kansans conforms to the reality we are seeing in the news media and not the fictitious public relations China that his Chinese government partner has been presenting with his approval.

What will it take to have Hemenway speak out against Chinese government repression of human rights and give a serious look into how KU’s Confucius Institute is serving as a public relations agent for that government? Hopefully, he is not controlled by fear of losing an apparently reliable new funding source and will act soon. Certainly, the price the Chinese government paid for the use of the KU’s brand name was not sufficient to also buy his silence regarding his partner’s brutality. No matter how much money is involved, KU’s reputation as a positive moral force in Kansas, the United States and around the world, including China, should never be placed jeopardy.