Confucius Institutes v2 (1)

40 CONFUCIUS INSTITUTES AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF CHINA’S SOFT POWERChina. 12 Their responses to the program reinforced instead their ownstructural “whiteness” as members of a middle class who, similar totheir Caucasian counterparts, failed to engage with the CIs’ affectiveofferings that were intended to produce appreciation.Here the forms of practice intended to produce admirationand thus soft power backfired in multiple registers, removingthe phenotypically Asian students as valid objects of a politicsof affect. At the same time, effectiveness was limited throughdefining authenticity as “Culture with a capital C,” in the form ofthe wearied traditional art project that failed to produce admirationand appreciation. In contrast, students were hoping for “culturewith an anthropological lower case c,” that conflicting momentof particularity through which, as is described below, studentsconstructed value, but not in the form the CI program intended and/or desired.Evening activities helped illuminate some of the disparateassumptions and objectives of the China tour. Highly-scripteddaytimes often ended with students, tired and frustrated, wanderingaround the hotel hallways in search of experiences that seemed lessderivative and indistinct. Our hotel was located in a newly emergingarea of town, affording little in the way of entertainment andcommerce. An outdoor night market at the end of the road sellingstreet food offered one of the few local diversions other than anadjacent convenience store. I found myself the frequent leader ofunscripted nighttime excursions to the market, a place understood bystudents as authentic “China.” On one level, the market excursionsprovided students with an opportunity to experience what theyperceived to be a form of Chinese authenticity in which snackingon unidentified creatures roasted on a stick stood in for the “real.”Such experiences provided value and desire, but not of the sortintended by CI efforts to turn culture into soft power. Value herewas indicated by a margin of difference that could not be overcomeby the host university’s endeavors to render students comfortableand compatible through providing them with the familiar. This“familiar” included not only the ultra-modern university campus and