Teacher resilience and triple crises: Confucius Institute teachers’ lived experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic

1 Introduction

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in learning Chinese as a foreign language. There are an estimated 25 million overseas Chinese learners, and 4,000 universities across 70 countries and regions offering Chinese language courses (Centre for Language Education and Cooperation 2020). The spread of Chinese language learning in contrast to the overall decline of language learning in schools and universities in English-speaking countries is largely due to the growing status of China as a global economic and political power and the Chinese government’s substantial investment in Confucius Institutes (CIs) and Confucius Classrooms (CCs), an educational institution named after the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius (551–479 BC). Since the opening of the first Confucius Institute in Seoul, South Korea in 2004, the number of CIs and CCs has reached 541 and 1,170 respectively, covering 162 countries or regions (Ministry of Education of China 2020). The early success in CIs’ global expansion has earned it the reputation of “the most famous brand that embodies China’s soft power” and “a symbol of contemporary China’s entering the world strategy”, the very phrases used by Xu Lin, the former Director-general of Confucius Institute Headquarters (CIHQ, also known as Hanban – the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language).

While there is no question about its success in promoting the teaching and learning of Chinese worldwide, CIs have attracted a substantial amount of scrutiny and criticism from the media, politicians, higher education policy makers and researchers in the West. The title of a featured article in the Financial Times in 2017, Confucius Institutes: Cultural asset or campus threat?, succinctly summarised the polarising positions in perceived influence of CIs on campus (Pong and Feng 2017). With the first closure of the CI at McMaster University, Canada in 2013, CIs have experienced considerable setbacks in North America and Europe. In 2020, Sweden closed all its CIs and severed all the existing twin-cities partnerships between China and Sweden, reportedly out of its growing concerns over national and regional security (Myklebust 2020, see further in Section 3).

Amongst all the debates and criticism related to the CIs, however, very little attention has been paid to the experience of CI ‘gongpai’ (公派, sent abroad for public duties by the state) teachers and managers who find them caught in the middle during the soft power struggle. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the rising racism towards the Chinese people following the outbreak have only exacerbated the tension and the crisis. Emerging reports suggest the decline in the studying of Chinese language is the result of the geopolitical tension coupled with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic (The Economist 2020). We are interested in understanding CI teachers’ experience during the triple crises, i.e., the broken partnership, the pandemic and racism, through the notion of teacher resilience. The combination of a focus on lived experience and resilience allows us to go beyond what has gone wrong and to foreground flexibility, strength, and agency of those who find themselves in adverse conditions.

We will first provide a review of the notion of teacher resilience, followed by a brief account of the changing socio-political context of CIs and the changing dynamics in the CI partnership. We then examine the lived experience and resilience of CI teachers in the new conditions. The implications for policy and practice are discussed in the final section.

2 Teacher resilience

While resilience has been largely conceived as a coping mechanism in the literature in early days, its conceptualisation has evolved over time. Rather than regarded as a reactive human capacity to threat and adversity, resilience constitutes a dynamic process of positive adaptation whereby individuals mobilise internal and external resources (e.g., Masten 2001; Pan 2011; Ye 2016). Gu and Day (2013) summarise three key considerations in the way resilience is conceptualised: its presupposition of the presence of threat, its developmental nature (i.e., not something innate or stable) and its relationship with personal characteristics, competence and the environment where people work and live. This notion has been applied in a number of contexts where people face changes and adversity such as migration (e.g., Ehrensaft and Tousigant 2006) or intercultural adaptation (e.g., Komisarof and Zhu 2016; Pan 2011; Ye 2016).

In the context of teacher education, Gu and Day (2013) normalise ‘resilience’ as part of teachers’ everyday toolkits. They reconceptualise ‘teacher resilience’ as a capacity essential to teachers who need to manage uncertainty and unpredictability increasingly characterising their everyday professional lives. In their words, teacher resilience is about how “to maintain equilibrium and a sense of commitment and agency in the everyday worlds in which teachers teach” (p. 26). They further propose a contextual approach to understanding factors contributing to resilience. Different personal, relational and organisational conditions of teachers’ work and lives and the socio-cultural and policy contexts of teaching all make a difference to resilience.

Our exploration of the experience of CI teachers during the triple crises in this article is informed by these conceptualisations and the growing literature on the importance of resilience in all aspects of lives ranging from healthcare to organisation, as we learn from our experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., Bryce et al. 2020). Seeing resilience as a dynamic process of positive adaptation relevant to everyday practices gives agency to the social actors concerned and moves away from a focus on what has gone wrong. We are also interested in understanding how increasing hostility towards CIs in the West impacts on CI teacher resilience, what can be learned from teacher resilience during the triple crises and what transformative effects the experience may have on teachers’ professional competence. While the notion of resilience has been used in understanding CI teachers’ process of intercultural adaptation in the host countries in Ye (2016), our exploration is the first attempt to investigate factors contributing to CI teachers’ resilience in a crisis situation.

3 The changing socio-cultural context

To understand the changing socio-cultural and policy context of CIs, we need to start with its operational model. Most CIs are built on a joint venture/partnership model which brings together local partners/host universities, Chinese university partners and the CI Headquarters. Confucius Classrooms are junior versions of CIs, working with local schools and affiliated to CI networks. A standard CI agreement covers a five-year initial period with the Hanban providing start-up funding, teaching materials and one or two CI gongpai teachers, and the host university providing accommodation, infrastructure and administrative support. Apart from access to financial and teaching resources, for many host universities, the main attraction of CI is the opportunity to develop close links at the institutional level (including research collaboration). For Chinese partnership universities, it is a way of “improving academic performance and level of internationalisation” (Starr 2009: 69, citing the words of Chen Jingyu, the former Vice-Chair of the CIHQ/Hanban).

However, the apparent warm reception towards CIs in North America and Europe in the early days quickly gave way to concerns for academic interference and for security. In 2013, the first CI closure was announced at McMaster University, Canada, reportedly due to the host university’s concerns about the screening process in China for the selection of Chinese gongpai teachers, which was claimed to be in consistent with the “University’s values of equality and inclusivity” (McMaster University 2013). This was followed by further closure of eight CIs in the US and Europe from 2013 to 2014. After the Trump administration came into power in the US, China was labelled as a “long-term strategic competitor” and identified as a threat to America’s foreign policy and security in the US government’s strategy (Lippert and Perthes 2020: 5). Michael Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, threatened to shut down all CIs in the US by the end of 2020 accusing them of spying at the American universities (Brunnstrom 2020).

In parallel, CIs in Europe have also experienced setbacks. Taking Sweden as an example. The Confucius Institute at Stockholm University was set up in 2005 and was the first CI in Europe. Ten years later, in June 2015, Stockholm University announced its closure. The reason given by the then Vice-President of the University, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, when interviewed by the Swedish media, was that “establishing institutes that are funded by another nation, within the framework of a university, is rather a questionable practice” (ScandAsia 2015). When later pressed by the Chinese media about what she meant by ‘the questionable practice’, the Vice-President referred to Swedish laws and regulations on higher education (Wang et al. 2015). The Chinese media was quick to point out that no regulations or laws prohibit the establishment of educational institution with foreign funding in Sweden. The closure was in fact a response to growing concerns for academic independence and the perceived interference of CIs in academic matters as reported in the Swedish media in the lead-up to the closure. These concerns about CIs, according to Cui Hongjian (the then Head of Europe Studies at the China Institute of International Studies) are due to “ideological bias against China” and the assumption that ‘the government-led Confucius Institute is a tool for China to export its ideology” (Qu 2015).

The fall out with Stockholm University was only a precursor to what was to come as the relationship between Sweden and China began to deteriorate. In 2020, Sweden not only closed all the CIs, but also put an end to the existing ‘twin-cities’ partnerships between China and Sweden (Flittner 2020; Fu 2020). This time, the English media attributed the closure to “growing concern in Sweden over security, human rights and the jailing in China of a Chinese-born publisher with Swedish citizenship” (Myklebust 2020). In response, the Chinese Embassy in Stockholm urged the Swedish politicians to “abandon bias and prejudice [against] China, stop smearing and attacking China, refrain from building barriers between the two countries and peoples, and truly do something in the fundamental interest of Sweden and Swedish people” (Myklebust 2020).

In Europe, in addition to the cases in Sweden documented above, CI closure was also reported in the University of Lyon, France (Gu 2015), the Free University of Brussels, Belgium (Galindo 2019), and the University of Basel, Switzerland (Sharma 2020), etc. Although these universities still offer Chinese language courses, they no longer ‘outsource’ it to CI. The irony is that while intended to promote mutual understanding, CIs are caught in the cross-fire of ideological warfare and have become the first casualties. It has to be said that compared to the trend in North America and Europe, CIs’ expansion in Africa is a different story. In the past decade, the number of CIs in Africa has grown to 48 (Lijadu 2018). CIs are seen to have contributed to capacity development of local teachers as well as the success of China’s foreign policy towards Africa (Li 2021).

In July 2020, Hanban was rebranded as the Centre for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC), affiliated to the Ministry of Education of China, while the Confucius Institute Headquarters became a part of a newly established non-governmental organisation, the Chinese International Education Foundation (CIEF). The latter is set up by a group of universities, enterprises and community groups and aims to support Chinese international education projects worldwide. According to CLEC, this change is an effort to refine the focus of CI programmes, to develop a pragmatic and efficient new model, and to disperse misinterpretation and misleading rhetoric (CI U.S. Center 2021). This was speculated to be a response to the large-scale CI closure in the US and Europe and an attempt to depoliticise CIs (Peterson 2020).

Several studies have sought to probe the apparent hostility towards CIs in the West from a historical or comparative perspective. Hubbert (2014), for example, discusses how the cold war rhetoric, coupled with the fear of rising China as a threat to American economic and political power, has created a local perception of an authoritarian Chinese state, and conflicting expectations towards learning Chinese language in CIs. Liu (2019) argues that despite similarity in CI’s missions to other language and culture organisations, cultural hegemony and the ensuing different power positions have converted these similarities into differences and turned CIs into an “imagined propaganda vehicle” (p. 271).

For CI teachers who are directly involved in the day-to-day running of CIs and CCs, the real challenge is how to navigate between the CI’s mission of enhancing understanding of Chinese language and culture and the perception of CIs as a tool of the Chinese government’s propaganda amongst growing hostility towards China. This is in addition to the challenges facing teachers in the CI partnership who tend to be on one or two year fixed-term contracts. They include, for example, lack of institutional, cultural or local knowledge; lack of professional development opportunities; lack of support, teaching facilities or suitable teaching materials, etc. (Ye and Edwards 2018; Zhu and Li 2014).

With the outbreak of Covid-19, the CI teachers found them facing the ‘perfect storm’ of growing hostility against CIs, wide-spread anti-China xenophobia and professional and personal life emergencies. Our investigation of CI teachers’ experience during the pandemic is guided by the following research questions:

1. What challenges and difficulties did CI teachers face in their professional and personal lives during the pandemic?

2. How did they respond to these challenges and difficulties?

3. What implications do the lived experience of CI teachers have for policy and practice?

4 Methodology

The project idea was developed in October, 2020, shortly after the first author arrived in the UK as a visiting scholar from China. At that time, many universities in North America and Europe were bracing themselves for a second wave of the coronavirus and adapting to online teaching and learning. This was also the time that further closure of CIs was announced in various parts of the world in addition to frequent reports of racist attacks against Chinese people.

To better understand the lived experience of CI teachers and to discern the meaning that they ascribe to their experiences, we collected the primary data through semi-structured interviews. We prepared a list of open questions based on our own lived experiences in the pandemic and observations along the themes of online teaching, impact of the pandemic on everyday life, impact of changing political dynamics and racism. The interviews were conducted one-to-one between the first author and the participants in Chinese, the first language of the authors and the participants between November 2020 and January 2021. The interviews were approached as conversations, drawing techniques from narrative inquiry which positions the interviewer as a listener and the interviewee as a narrator (Allen 2017). Participants were encouraged and given plenty of space to tell their stories and experiences. The interviews were conducted and recorded via the social media platform, Wechat. The audio recording was transcribed through the App Iflyrec V4.0.2529 (讯飞听见) and then checked by the first author. The transcripts were then imported into NVivo 12 for data coding and analysis.

Identification and analysis of themes took multiple rounds: they were first coded by the first author, and then talked through between the authors before the authors went back to the transcripts individually again and carried out several rounds of deep reading. Our initial aim was to investigate the challenges facing CI teachers in the pandemic. However, our sense-making of the data showed that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic was a game-changer not only in the CI teachers’ experience, but also in their way of coping and managing the crises, characterised by their resilience, resourcefulness and professional commitment. This process of sharpening our focus is similar to the process of a grounded theory study, in which researchers start with openness to new data and gradually move to a focused probing as the study progresses (Foley et al. 2021). In the following data analysis section, we will present the data alongside the three key considerations associated with the notion of resilience: threat (crises), its emergent and developmental nature and its influential factors.

Participants were recruited through the first author’s personal contacts at first and then via the combined techniques of snowball and typical case sampling targeting the geographical areas where there were reported CI closures. A total of nine participants from Spain, Germany, UK, Australia and USA agreed to take part. Two of the participants took part in follow-up interviews four months later when news about the increasing scrutiny and control over their CIs were announced. The profiles and professional experience of the interviewees are largely consistent with the overall profile of the CI gongpai teachers reported in Ye (2014, cited in Ye 2017). A majority of the participants are between 30 and 50 and have over five years’ Chinese teaching experience. All of the participants apart from one are female. Among the participants, two are the CI Co-directors and two are CC teachers working in US. Most of them were in their overseas post for one or two years at the time of their interviews. The short residency is in line with the practices of the CIs: the CI gongpai teachers are on a fixed term basis, usually one or two years. Detailed information is presented in Table 1.

In addition to the interviews, we also collected the available documents and the teachers’ notes and observed closely the media reports and the social media posting regarding CIs and racism. These help us to contextualise the interview conversations and subsequent data interpretation.

5 Triple crises and teacher resilience

6 Discussion and implications for policy and practice

Our exploration is the first attempt to investigate factors contributing to CI teachers’ resilience in a crisis situation. It is evident that the triple crises has brought unprecedented challenges to CI teachers in many aspects of their professional and personal life. They have become frontline workers in every sense. In addition to professional emergency facing university and school teachers, CI teachers had the additional challenges of navigating their vulnerable position of ‘being caught in the middle’ exacerbated by the changing political dynamics, rising anti-Chinese racism and cross-cultural differences in heath behaviours. In the West, CI teachers are perceived as part of the Chinese government’s propaganda apparatus and part of the Chinese collective; and in China, they are tasked with the mission of disseminating language and culture and promoting mutual understanding.

Despite these challenges and tension, CI teachers develop and apply their resilience and remain committed to their professional values. Facing professional emergencies, they engaged in the process of pedagogical adaptation, learning by doing and learning together. In the context of changing socio-cultural and political dynamics, they focused on their professional selves and duties and developed a pragmatic approach to depoliticise language teaching. The ‘safe’ cultural activities organised by CI teachers, while appearing to operate under a narrow definition of culture served to sustain CI’s presence and to connect with their students and the local. To some extent, they constituted grassroot resistance towards politicisation of CI. The same applies to depoliticising language teaching, a pragmatic attempt to tread the ideological fault line, which in itself raises the question of to what extent language learning and use can be free from ideologies. With regards to discrimination and racism, our participants showed reflexivity and skills of pulling back from the position of victimisation. Resourcefulness, pragmatism and pulling back demonstrated in CI teachers’ response to the crises had a transformative effect on their professional competence, as confirmed by our participants in their reflections.

Our findings demonstrate how teacher resilience, as a multi-faceted and dynamic construct, offers an analytical stance of understanding how teachers respond to uncertainty and unpredictability in their professional lives. Importantly, in understanding CI teachers’ experience amongst the triple crises, our investigation shows that co-learning, mutual support and solidarity play a significant role in enabling teacher resilience. This complements the previous observation on the role of personal, relational and organisational conditions in teacher resilience (Gu and Day 2013).

Our research raises questions about the CI operational/partnership model. The success of joint ventures rests upon trust and commitment among the partners, a shared focus on what is best rather than individual objectives, and a clear division of responsibilities (Beamish and Lupton 2009). CI teachers’ lived experiences during the pandemic exposed systemic problems in all these key requirements. CI has been put under increasing scrutiny and control from the authorities in the host countries through curriculum audit, rejection or cancellation of visa and termination of agreement as well as negative media coverage. Little effort has been made from the parties involved to ensure that CI teachers will not be undermined or discriminated against in their professional activities. CI teachers’ multiple lines of responsibilities to the Chinese university, the UK host university and the local primary or secondary school do not mean a layered guarantee for their interests or support either. When differences occur in health practices between two sides, CI teachers were pressured to comply with the local stakeholders for fear of bringing damage to the collaboration, as seen in the case of the no face mask requirement reported by one of our participants. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of our participants stressed the need for a more fine-tuned, transparent management approach. A radical rethink about the nature and the extent of collaboration is imperative, not least because the organisation relationship conditions teacher resilience (Gu and Day 2013). Policy makers and senior managements need to put teachers’ and students’ needs first in making decisions regarding CIs. CI teachers are not a threat. They are professionals doing their jobs and they deserve respect and care.