UNESCO, the geopolitics of AI, and China’s engagement with the futures of education

ABSTRACT

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China’s use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national ‘branding’ in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI. We analyse the Chinese state’s engagement with UNESCO’s education work in the context of shifts in budgetary and political influence within the organisation, and of a growing ‘securitisation’ of education within China itself. We show how Chinese engagement with UNESCO’s educational agenda reflects both domestic political considerations and the ‘major country diplomacy’ of Xi Jinping, as manifested in the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and intensifying strategic competition with the USA. We conclude by discussing the implications of rising Chinese influence within the organisation for UNESCO’s capacity for articulating a coherent and consistently humanistic vision for education.

KEYWORDS:

• UNESCO
• education
• China
• East Asia
• STEM
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• geopolitics of AI
• SDG 4.7

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.unesco.org/en/member-states-portal/assessed-contributions

2 The Chinese search term is quanqiu jiaoyu zhili (全球教育治理).

3 Prior to the 2019 election for FAO director-general, China slashed $78 million in debt owed by the Cameroonian government, whose candidate subsequently withdrew his bid (Tung & Yang, 2020).

4 The present author, Vickers, attended this event.

5 An initiative of APCEIU, a UNESCO Category 2 institute in Seoul, in collaboration with Chinese, Japanese and Korean partners.

6 Qian Tang, a Chinese national, was UNESCO’s Assistant Director General for Education (2010-2018), having spent much of his career working on TVET (https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/tang_china_cv_en.pdf). UNESCO’s key ICT-in-education posts are currently held by Chinese nationals: Fengchun Miao, Chief of Unit for Technology and AI for Education; Libing Wang, Chief of Section for Educational Innovation and Skills Development at UNESCO Bangkok; and Tao Zhan, Director, Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE).

7 A ‘biennium’ is the standard term for calculating UNESCO programme funding. The Swiss commitment presumably equated to $800,000 per year for three years.

8 Although a UN-wide initiative, ESD was promoted almost exclusively by UNESCO (and by the UNU, which received funding from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment to promote the DESD). Although the Inter-Agency Committee (IAC) on the DESD was created (UNESCO 2007), UNESCO largely failed to mobilise other IOs to adopt the language of ESD in their programming.

9 https://globaleducationcoalition.unesco.org/

10 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7161857660160589824/ (accessed March 9, 2024).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yoko Mochizuki

Yoko Mochizuki is an associate member of the EDA (Éducation, Discours, Apprentissages) laboratory, an interdisciplinary research unit of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Université Paris Cité (formerly Université Paris Descartes). She holds a PhD in comparative and international education, with distinction, from Columbia University. Previously, she was Head of Policy at UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in New Delhi. Before that, she served as a programme specialist for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change at UNESCO Paris and an ESD specialist at the United Nations University.

Edward Vickers

Edward Vickers holds the UNESCO Chair in Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University (Japan), and is the President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia (2021-2025). He researches the history and politics of education in contemporary East Asia, and the politics of heritage in Asian societies. With Chen Sicong, he co-edited a recent special issue of Comparative Education (60.1) on ‘The Politics of Education on China's Periphery’ (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cced20/60/1?nav=tocList).