SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1521819
Administrative Practices to Promote Chinese Language Education and Cultural Exchange at Confucius Institutes Around the World: A Systematic Review
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
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As an intercultural educational program to promote Chinese language education and cultural exchange worldwide, the Confucius Institute (CI) has operated through specific managerial models since its establishment in 2004. This contribution reports the results of a systematic review conducted on the contents relevant to CIs' administration in the post-2010 literature, aiming to map the status quo and the salient issues of CIs' administration and provide take-away messages for administrators and researchers. Following PRISMA guidelines, 94 publications in English with research cases from 38 countries/regions were selected for thematic analysis conducted in NVivo. The analysis has revealed that CIs' achievements of official administrative objectives are mainly situated in higher-order aspects (e.g., policies), whereas the practical sides (e.g., daily management) are prone to challenges. The lack of localization is also a recurring issue. To tackle the challenges, suggestions are provided for strengthening localization, improving educational leadership, and enhancing the cultivation of intercultural competence. The research outcomes emphasize significant theoretical advancements, including an improved theoretical framework for studying the administration of CIs and localization guidelines. These guidelines offer structured frameworks for administrators and researchers to systematically localize and conduct research on onsite operations at CIs.
Keywords: educational leadership1, Confucius Institute2, Chinese language education3, culturalexchange4, administrative practices5, managerial advice6, systematic review7
Received: 03 Nov 2024; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Song and Sercu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Meng Song, meng.song@kuleuven.be
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