Chinese International Students’ Interference of Free Speech on US Campuses Casts Spotlight on CCP Infiltration

Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia in 2005, speaks at a Sydney rally in 2015. Chen says that CSSAs are supported by the Chinese regime and are used to control and spy on Chinese students and scholars outside China. Shar Adams/The Epoch Times

Two consecutive incidents of Chinese students disrupting democracy commemorations on U.S. college campuses in June have renewed concerns about the infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the United States.

According to Radio Free Asia on June 9, Kinen Kao, a Hong Kong student at Cornell University, was putting up posters with “Free Hong Kong” and “Free Uighurs” in a neighborhood near his school at 6 p.m. on June 8 when a young Chinese man approached him, tore down the posters, and threateningly said, “Don’t you dare put them up again!”

When Kao took out his cell phone to record a video, the man pushed him to the ground and tried to grab his cell phone but was unsuccessful at the grab.

This is not an isolated occurence.

Four days before, on June 4, activists at the University of California, San Diego, spontaneously commemorated the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre by displaying “Don’t Forget June 4” signs, placing flowers, and lighting candles in an open space in front of the university library. Late at night, a Chinese man ripped down a poster and threw it to the ground, and a Chinese woman kicked over a candle, Radio Free Asia reported on June 7.

June 9 marks the third anniversary of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, a massive social movement that erupted in June 2019 in protest of the government’s amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance that would allow for the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to Mainland China for trial. The public feared that the law would undermine Hong Kong’s system of “one country, two systems” and independent jurisdiction.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre refers to students from universities in mainland China staging a pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989, and Chinese Communist troops driving tanks into Beijing and Tiananmen Square to oust the protesters by force in the early hours of June 4,.

This year’s June 4 marks the 33rd anniversary of the massacre that shocked the world. The exact number of deaths remains unclear, and the June 4 incident is one of the sensitive words censored by the CCP to this day.

Over the decades, the CCP’s iron fisted dictatorship has extended from the mainland to Hong Kong. At the same time, it has never stopped its efforts to further infiltrate Western countries.

In a report by Propublica.org on Nov. 30, 2021, earlier in November, Kong Zhihao, a Chinese student at Purdue University, was harassed for “praising the heroism of the students killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.”

Kong received intimidation from other Chinese students in the same school, saying they were to report him to the Chinese Embassy and the CCP’s National Security Bureau.

Not long after, security agents approached his parents in China and warned them that their son should not participate in activities abroad.

“They told us to make you stop or we were all in trouble,” Kong’s parents told him.

Students at the University of Washington are on campus for the last day of in-person classes on March 6, 2020 in Seattle, Washington.Karen Ducey/Getty Images

Even those Chinese students who do not engage in high-profile political activities are worried about scrutiny from those around them, leading to self-censorship in the classroom on topics that the CCP might see as sensitive.

Wilson Center, a U.S.-based think tank, indicated, in a 2019 report named “A Preliminary Study of PRC Political Influence and Interference Activities in American Higher Education,” that some faculty members say they believe many Chinese students are afraid to discuss sensitive topics in class because they fear someone will report them to the CCP authorities.

The report cited an example of University of Minnesota teacher Jason McGrath trying, in a 2014 class, to encourage Chinese students to participate in a discussion about a film criticizing China’s corruption, and being met with silence.

After some urging by the teacher, one Chinese student finally said, “We’re uncomfortable talking about that because we don’t know who might be listening to us.”

Another example was provided by a teacher at Indiana University. He said that when he began showing a film about Falun Gong in an Asian religions class in 2012, a Chinese student asked him to close the door. When the teacher asked why, the student said he didn’t want other Chinese people to see him watching the movie.

What Chinese students worry about is is not irrational. The experience of Yang Shuping is an example of what can happen to any Chinese student who studies abroad.

At a 2017 graduation ceremony at the University of Maryland, Yang gave a speech saying she enjoyed the “fresh air of free speech” in the United States and was quickly rebuked in China, Yang’s family address in China was published in China Daily, a CCP-owned newspaper, and her family was attacked online, VOA reported on Jan. 14, 2020.

The Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), a tool of the CCP used to control Chinese students studying abroad, has allegedly close ties to the Chinese Embassy in the United States and receives monetary support from the Chinese Embassy, according to a 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission of the U.S. Congress.

In the spring of 2007, the night before the Falun Dafa club, a belief group based on “Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance,” at Columbia University was about to hold a panel discussion on live organ harvesting that is part of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, the club received an email from Xu Kai, a mechanical engineering graduate student and then-president of the Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CUCSSA), revealing plans to organize an attack on Falun Gong practitioners. On the day of the seminar, 20 people showed up with banners and flags to interfere with the event, as reported by The Blue and White, a Columbia University’s online magazine, in December 2018.

The U.S. government is well aware of the CCP’s infiltration into U.S. campuses.

Early in October 2018, in a speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., then-vice president Mike Pence directly accused the CSSA of alerting “Chinese consulates and embassies when Chinese students, and American schools, stray from the Communist Party line.”

In February 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress about the intelligence risks posed by Chinese students to U.S. national security, saying that across the country, in large cities and small towns, and especially in academic settings, “the use of non-traditional collectors” can be found in all fields of study and that these include professors, scientists, and students, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, a news media that focuses on higher education, on Feb. 15, 2018.