China’s Confucius Institute, a controversial arm of the Chinese regime’s public diplomacy apparatus, is coming under pressure in Russia, with prosecutors from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far east of the country calling for the local branch to be closed because it is not properly registered with the authorities.
In a complaint to the city court on July 27, a Blagoveshchensk prosecutor said that the Confucius Institute branch in the local Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University (BSPU) should be formally registered as a foreign cultural center, reports Moscow Times. He added that the institute is presently violating Russian law because it is avoiding taxes in hiring foreign teachers as an unregistered non-commercial organization. There are 11 native Chinese teachers, of whom 4 are volunteers, at the Blagoveshchensk Confucius Institute, according to its website.
In response, BSPU says that the institute, which is run as a joint project with a college in the neighboring northern Chinese city of Heihe, is part of its own organization, according to a statement on Amur.info, a local news website. Also, “the institute’s activities do not pose any threat to the social and political structure of Russia,” the BSPU statement read.
