A recent State Department policy directive was not intended to disrupt the activities of Confucius Institutes, the university-based, Chinese-sponsored language and cultural centers, but rather was an effort to ensure that foreign academics and teachers at the institutes come to the United States under the correct visa categories, a State Department official said on Tuesday.
And the department appears to be backpedaling from its insistence in the memorandum, issued late last week, that the centers must be part of the sponsoring college's foreign-language program or apply for separate accreditation, a stance that had greatly troubled both American institutions and the Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, which oversees Confucius Institutes worldwide. ...