Taiwan will seek to expand its influence in overseas Chinese-language education, a government department said, following tightening controls on mainland China’s state-sponsored cultural institutions in Western countries.

There are close to 500 overseas schools, over 9,000 Chinese-language teachers and over 600 teachers of Taiwanese descent at mainstream schools in Europe and the United States, and Taiwan could use these resources to expand into the Chinese-language and cultural education marketplace, according to a report by the island’s Overseas Community Affairs Council.

However, it was not easy to promote Chinese language and culture to foreign countries, and the OCAC should instead concentrate on winning the support of overseas Chinese, said Dr. John Lim, a former associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica.

China’s state-sponsored Confucius Institutes have been subject to increasing scrutiny in Western countries. The U.S. Senate passed a bill earlier this month that would withhold federal funding from American universities that host Confucius Institutes, unless a university could demonstrate that it had full managerial control over the institute.

The OCAC’s report said that it would adopt three strategies in its expansion plan, including helping existing overseas schools transform into community centers for Chinese language and literature.

The other strategies involve strengthening ties with teachers of Taiwanese descent working at mainstream schools in Europe and the U.S. as well as strengthening the cooperation between Chinese-language educational institutions and the smart education industry.

Lim said that if the OCAC intends to replace Confucius Institutes in promoting Chinese culture overseas, it should note that Confucius Institutes are aimed at foreigners rather than overseas Chinese communities.

Lim added that it required a huge amount of resources to teach Chinese to young people in foreign countries, and the council may need to raise the foreign language proficiency of the teachers it worked with.

Lim also mentioned that the OCAC identified with the Republic of China, an identity that Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party has been unwilling to embrace during its years in power.

This has resulted in a distance between the council and the ruling party, Lim said, which is disadvantageous to Taiwan’s aim of expanding its influence in overseas language and cultural education.

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