Director of Slovak Confucius Institute Allegedly Threatens Independent Scholar

Then-Chinese vice chair Xi Jinping unveils a plaque at the opening of Australia's first Chinese Medicine Confucius Institute at the RMIT University in Melbourne on June 20, 2010. William West/AFP via Getty Images

Ľuboslav Štora, the former director of the Confucius Institute (CI) in Slovakia’s Bratislava, drew attention for sending intimidating messages in emails to Matej Šimalčík, one of the key independent experts on China in Central and East European countries.

Štora had served as the head of the Slovak branch of communist China’s tech giant ZTE before he worked for the CI, which was founded in 2007 on basis of an agreement between China’s Tianjin University and the Slovak University of Technology.