In little more than a decade, a shadowy arm of the Chinese state has established a foothold in hundreds of university campuses across the world.
Confucius Institutes, named after China’s most famous philosopher, claim to model themselves on western programmes such as France’s Alliance Fran?aise and Germany’s Goethe Institute - organisations ostensibly engaged in nothing more than cultural diplomacy.
But the ballooning network, which has a presence in more than three-quarters of the world’s countries, is raising alarm that Beijing is subverting traditional values of academic freedom in western universities as part of China’s global soft power push.