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We often hear arguments about how foreign students pose a national security threat or take opportunities from young Americans. And while there’s truth to these claims, much less has been said about how mass enrollment of foreign students (e.g., Harvard currently ~30% international students) has fragmented campus culture and...

112,385 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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Shiva Amini 🗽⚽️

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In Aug 2025, Elsa Johnson, a Stanford student, wrote a piece for The Times about how members of the CCP tried to recruit her as a spy. Since then, the junior, who is majoring in East Asian Studies, has faced a wave of harassment from Mandarin speakers who have called her and threatened her and her family. The FBI also informed Johnson that the CCP is physically monitoring her whereabouts on campus — making her fear for her own safety. On Mar 26 she testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, urging Congress to do something to protect America’s students who “face transnational repression”, given that Stanford “has chosen not to address this problem at all”. Here is an abridged and lightly edited version of her testimony. ======= After I wrote a first-person account of my experience in The Times of London, the repression only worsened. Last summer, while conducting research on China in Washington, DC, I began receiving regular phone calls from unknown US numbers. When I answered the calls in English, the callers would switch to Mandarin. In one case, the caller referenced my mother. These bizarre calls were intimidation attempts, designed to remind me that neither my family, nor I, is safe from transnational repression by the CCP. Then, this past fall, the FBI informed me that I am being physically monitored on Stanford’s campus by agents of the Chinese Communist Party. They told me that my family is also at risk and is being monitored. As a 21-year-old who grew up loving the Chinese language and culture, I never imagined that studying it would put me in a position where a foreign intelligence service is tracking my movements on my own campus and monitoring my family. I fear for my safety and for my family’s safety. The intimidation calls have not stopped. Just this week, I received another call from a US number. After exchanging hellos, the caller switched to Mandarin and asked whether I had finished dinner. That cannot be a coincidence. It is happening to me on American soil because I reported on the activities of a foreign government at an American university. My experience is disturbing, but it reflects a much larger pattern playing out on campuses across the country. According to Freedom House, the Chinese government is the greatest perpetrator of transnational repression targeting students and scholars in the United States. Their 2024 report found that international students and faculty face surveillance and coercion by foreign governments. More than 1.3 million international students study at American colleges and universities, yet many are unable to exercise the freedoms that are supposed to define an American education. There is also infrastructure already embedded on American campuses that facilitates this system. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) exist at roughly 150 American colleges and universities, including Stanford. The US State Department has stated plainly that the CCP created the CSSA to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the Party’s stance. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission found in 2018 that CSSAs receive guidance from the CCP through Chinese embassies and consulates, and that they are active in carrying out work consistent with Beijing’s United Front strategy. In some cases, the local Chinese consulate must approve CSSA presidential candidates. Documents obtained by Foreign Policy showed that at Georgetown, the CSSA accepted embassy funding amounting to roughly half its total annual budget. The Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford, or ACSSS, is a recognized student organisation that receives university support and funding. The CCP’s United Front uses these organisations as vehicles for surveillance and influence. American universities are supposed to be places where people can think and speak freely. Right now, for too many students, they are not.

Byron Wan

24,185 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten