In June of 2004, a pilot program for a new method of Chinese diplomacy began in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

This pilot was successful enough that the Chinese government decided to invest in the first of what would become many Confucius Institutes in Seoul, South Korea, in November of that same year.

The second Confucius Institute also opened in November of 2004 at the University of Maryland

campus in the United States. And in subsequent years, hundreds of these institutes opened

in countries around the world with a

particular focus in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. By 2019, there were 530 Confucius

institutes in several dozen countries on six continents, and the goal as of 2019 was to have

one thousand of them open by 2020. The Confucius, in the name Confucius Institute, was a Chinese

philosopher who lived from 551 to 479 BC, and his outlooks and ideas were considered to be valuable to,

and representative of pre-20th century Chinese ambitions.

His work was heavily criticized and, to some degree, clamped down upon, during the Cultural Revolution era, beginning in about

1912 and continuing until the 1970s, however, because of his perceived connection to a previous

model of Chinese rule, organization, and values, and the so-called feudal mentality he supposedly espoused, was said

to be holding back the glorious communist revolution that China might otherwise enjoy.

Interestingly, one of the more prominent anti-Confucianists was a Chinese scientist,

philosopher and author named Chung,

who promoted, among other things, a deviation from the traditional adherence to Confucian values

to focus instead on traits and goals, like independence, progress, aggressiveness, cosmopolitanism, utilitarianism, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge,

as opposed to ideas promoted and reinforced by Confucianism, like servility, passivity, and obedience,

conservatism, traditionalism, ritualism, and the idea that some people are visionaries with

natural, prophetic, and leadership gifts, and should thus be followed and obeyed, unquestioningly,

by everyone else. Chen was, in other words, a big fan of individualism, democracy, humanism, and the scientific

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