The UK government is set on shutting down Confucius Institutes on 30 university campuses across the country, but legal roadblocks, opposition in Scotland, financial shortfalls, and wider threats to university-China ties stand in the way. The institutes are funded by the Chinese government to promote its language and culture, but are increasingly seen as Trojan horses for spreading Communist Party influence and monitoring Chinese students studying abroad.
The need for the exemplary display of patriotic fervour over and above personal sentiments and familial cronyism has been elevated to the front burners of national discourse in the conversation around the belated repatriation of artefacts looted from their ancestral homesteads in Old Benin Kingdom during the dark period of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and