China is continuing to extend its "soft power" around the world through a number of carefully planned strategies, an exiled Chinese writer has claimed. Yu Jie, the U.S.-based author of a book about China's president titled "Chinese Godfather Xi Jinping," said that a key strand in wielding the influence of the ruling Chinese Communist Party on overseas university campuses is the more than half a million Chinese who study abroad.
Chinese students overseas, whose numbers are projected to swell still further in the next few years, are often members of the government-backed Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), which earlier this year slammed graduating student Yang Shuping for "insulting the motherland" in her commencement speech at the University of Maryland. Influence is also wielded via the network of Confucius Institutes, which have sprung up at hundreds of universities and teaching institutions around the world in recent years.
