The Chinese Communist Party, through the China Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), controls Chinese students and suppresses free speech on U.S. college campuses. The photo is of a U.S. university campus and is not related to this article.
As the Trump administration’s campaign to stop the Chinese Communist Party from subverting the United States deepens, the CCP’s clandestine activities at U.S. universities are attracting increasing attention. Through the China Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), the CCP controls Chinese students and suppresses free speech on U.S. college campuses.
Secretary of State Pompeo specifically addressed the CCP’s suppression of Chinese students staying in the United States in a speech at Georgia Tech last December, calling on the U.S. education community to take immediate action and not allow the CCP to destroy academic freedom in the United States.
In the past year, actions taken by the U.S. to stop the CCP from stealing U.S. research have included prosecuting scholars who deliberately conceal their ties to Beijing, barring graduate students with ties to the CCP military from entering the country, and investigating undercover CCP military scientists working at U.S. universities.
The U.S. also closed the CCP consulate in Houston last July, which was a base for heavily recruiting local scientists into the CCP’s talent program. More recently, the U.S. government has urged universities to review their partnerships with Confucius Institutes.
Yet the CCP’s suppression of free speech on U.S. campuses has not received enough attention. The Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), which has chapters at more than 100 U.S. universities, provides a social outlet for Chinese students adjusting to life in a foreign country, but analysts say the organizations have a more insidious function: to advance the Chinese Communist regime’s interests in U.S. academia.
Jacob Kovalio, an associate professor of Asian history at Carleton University in Canada, said, “CSSA is an offshoot of a very powerful tree – one that centers on Chinese Communist intelligence gathering, espionage, propaganda.”
Chinese consulate directly controls student union
Covalio said that CSSA is overseen by the local CCP consulate and that these groups are the “main vehicle” for the CCP to deliver its propaganda on U.S. campuses, while also suppressing speech critical of the CCP regime.
Many CSSA’s have publicly stated or have stated that they are directed, supported, or funded by local CCP consulates.
For example, the charter of the CSSA at Saint Louis University in Missouri states that the organization is “directly led and supported” by the CCP Embassy and the CCP Consulate in Chicago. The University of Tennessee’s CSSA stated in its constitution (which has since been taken down) that the organization receives funding from the CCP Embassy.
The Communist Consulate’s control of the Southwest Region CSSA, which covers 26 universities in the region, is even more blatant. The organization’s bylaws state that candidates for CSSA president must be approved by the CCP consulate in Los Angeles. It also says the organization receives instructions from the consulate and lists it as a point of contact on its website.
Students briefly broke away from the control of the Chinese Consulate during the 89
The CCP’s control of the CSSA is not a recent development. Xie Tian, now an associate professor in the School of Business Administration at the University of South Carolina at Aiken, came to the United States in 1986 as a doctoral student in chemistry at Purdue University in Indiana. He was shocked to discover that the CSSA there was “tightly controlled” by the Chinese Communist Consulate in Chicago.
Xie Tian said, “I didn’t think that in a free society, it would be so tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and I was very unhappy about that.”
So Xie Tian began pushing for reform at the CSSA, eventually becoming vice president. Two years later, he led a “coup” that cut off the control of the CCP consulate. He said the CCP consulate ended funding and other support after the student union became independent.
It was then that Xie Tian discovered that the CCP consulate had sent Chinese students to spy on him and other pro-democracy-minded students on campus. He said, “They reported our identity, our activities to the consulate.”
Professor Xie also said that after the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy student movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, Chinese students in the U.S. took control of all the CSSAs in the country in solidarity with the protesters and became independent from the CCP consulates. However, with the graduation of that group of Chinese students, these groups fell back into the hands of the CCP.
CCP takes control of student unions again
Since then, Professor Xie said, the CCP has “perfected this program of control and influence over Chinese students in the United States. Chinese students are aware that they are being monitored by the CSSA and consulates, and that their loved ones back home may be threatened by authorities if they publicly express views that do not align with those of Beijing.
In 2017, Chinese student Yang Shuping gave a commencement speech at the University of Maryland, praising the “fresh air of free speech” that can be found in the United States but not at home. This sparked a fierce backlash from the university’s CSSA, as well as other Chinese students and netizens, who called her remarks traitorous; she was forced to publicly apologize.
The Epoch Times reported in 2018 that a 20-year-old female Chinese student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania who criticized the university’s Chinese Student Association for promoting a violent video game in a private WeChat group among friends in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was warned by members of the university’s Chinese Student Association to stay out of trouble, asked to apologize for her comments, and told her. “You can’t talk like that in your circle of friends.”
Student government repeatedly cancels dissident group events
The CSSA in the United States and other countries has repeatedly drawn criticism for canceling events or speeches held by overseas dissident groups, including Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, and Falun Gong practitioners.
In 2017, when the Dalai Lama was scheduled to speak at the University of California-San Diego, the CSSA said on social media that it had asked the Chinese Communist Consulate in Los Angeles for instructions on how to stop the event.
2 In September 2019, Canada’s McMaster University banned the university’s CSSA, citing the club’s violation of rules prohibiting behavior that endangers people’s safety. The move was sparked by a protest by the CSSA against human rights activities on campus several months earlier. The event discussed the persecution of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region by the Chinese Communist Party.
According to a WeChat group chat transcript seen by Epoch Times at the time, the CCP consulate in Toronto had asked students to report the rally to them and for CSSA to complain about the event to campus officials.
But many of the CSSA’s activities to publicly suppress free speech were not reported. Professor Hsieh recounted an incident that occurred around 2004.
At the time, he was teaching at Drexel University in Pennsylvania. There, he met the Chinese Students’ Economics Club at the University of Pennsylvania and helped arrange for the famous Chinese economist He Qinglian to give a lecture to Chinese students. However the president of that club was pressured to cancel the event. Although the president would not admit who pressured him, Professor Xie said it was clearly the work of the CSSA or the Chinese Communist Consulate.
Chinese Communist Spying and Repression on Campus
In his December 2020 speech at Georgia Tech on “The Chinese Communist Party’s Challenge to U.S. National Security and Academic Freedom,” Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo noted that as a dictatorial regime, the CCP knows it will never match U.S. innovation, so it pursues a strategy of “rob, copy, replace.”
Xin Wang, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who concealed his identity as an officer in the People’s Liberation Army (CCP military), has been collecting information from UCSF labs. And Ji Chaoqun, who studied electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, tried to enlist in the U.S. military, but concealed his ties to Communist Party intelligence, which put him in charge of recruiting engineers and scientists.
Pompeo alleged that many U.S. universities have been bought by Beijing. Instead of protesting the Communist Party’s naked theft, academics at universities and research institutions, who are considered freedom-loving, are censoring themselves. President Raphael Reif even hinted that Pompeo’s views could be insulting to their Chinese-American students and professors. “We cannot allow the Chinese Communist Party to use political correctness against American freedom. We must protect and preserve freedom.” Pompeo said.
The U.S. Department of Education has found in the past few years that U.S. schools have received about $1.3 billion in funding from China since 2013. Many more universities, such as Columbia University, have not reported the true figure.
Vera Zhou (周月明), a senior at the University of Washington, was put in a re-education camp in 2017 after accessing the school’s website through a VPN during a trip back to China to visit her father. While people from all sides ran to help, the University of Washington stepped in to offer help because it had a multi-million dollar deal with China.
Pompeo called on the education community to act and unite against the Communist threat, “This brutal regime cannot be allowed to steal from us, build their military power, and brainwash our people or buy our institutions to help them cover up these activities.” “The Chinese Communist Party cannot be allowed to destroy academic freedom.”
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