CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association) has been publicly stating that they are a group directed, supported or funded by the local CCP consulate. Some U.S. scholars have recently revealed that CSSA is nominally a social outlet for Chinese students adjusting to life in a foreign country, but in reality it is a long-standing Chinese Communist Party organization that conducts intelligence gathering and espionage in the U.S. through control of international students.
According to the investigation, CSSA controls Chinese students and suppresses freedom of expression on U.S. college campuses. Currently, the association has chapters at more than 100 universities in the United States. According to the charter of the CSSA at Saint Louis University in Missouri, the organization is “directly led and supported” by the Chinese Communist Embassy and the Chinese Communist Consulate in Chicago; the charter of the CSSA at 26 universities in the Southwest region specifies that the Chinese Communist Consulate in Los Angeles serves as the point of contact and that the CSSA must receive instructions from the Consulate, and that candidates for the presidency must also receive instructions from the Consulate. The University of Tennessee’s CSSA constitution also includes a reference to “receiving funding from the Chinese Communist Embassy.
Xie Tian, now an associate professor in the School of Business Administration at the University of South Carolina at Aiken, said that the Communist Party’s control of the CSSA is not recent. Professor Xie said he came to the United States in 1986, when he was a doctoral student in chemistry at Purdue University in Indiana. He was shocked to find that the CSSA there was “tightly controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party’s consulate in Chicago.
Professor Xie said that at that time, the CCP consulate had sent people to spy on him and other pro-democracy-minded students on campus. Their identities and activities were reported to the consulate.
Dissatisfied with the tight control of the CCP, he began pushing for reforms at the CSSA, eventually becoming vice president. Two years later, he led the CSSA to cut off the control of the CCP consulate. Once the student union became independent, the CCP consulate ended funding and other support.
Professor Xie also said that after 8964, some Chinese students became independent from the control of the CCP consulate. However, as that group of international students graduated, the groups fell back into the hands of the CCP. He said that after the CCP regained control of the CSSA, it developed a “plan to improve control and influence over international students in the U.S.” and that international students were again monitored by the CSSA and the consulate, and freedom of speech was suppressed.
He said he was teaching at Drexel University in Pennsylvania around 2004. He helped arrange a lecture by renowned economist He Qinglian at the university’s Chinese Students’ Economics Club, however the club’s president was pressured to cancel the lecture. “While the president won’t admit that anyone pressured him, it was clearly the work of the CSSA or the Chinese Communist Consulate.”
Professor Xie added that in 2017, Chinese student Yang Shuping gave a speech at the University of Maryland’s graduation ceremony, praising the freedom of the United States and saying she could find “fresh air of free speech” that she could not enjoy at home. This sparked a fierce backlash from some Chinese students, represented by the university’s CSSA, who called her remarks traitorous and forced her to publicly apologize.
A 20-year-old Chinese female student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania criticized the school’s CSSA for promoting a violent video game in a private WeChat group after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Epoch Times reported in 2018. She was then warned to stay out of trouble and asked to apologize for her comments.
Jacob Kovalio, an associate professor of Asian history at Carleton University in Canada, said the CSSA, which is overseen by the local Communist Party consulate, is the “main tool” for the Communist Party to promote Communist ideology on U.S. campuses, as well as to suppress speech critical of the regime, with a focus on intelligence gathering and espionage.
Xin Wang, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, concealed his identity as a Communist Party military officer and has been gathering information in a university lab; Chaoqun Ji, an electrical engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, tried to enlist in the U.S. military but concealed the fact that he was secretly working for Communist Party intelligence officials and recruiting engineers and scientists in the United States to serve as Communist Party spies.
According to the Voice of America, Yuhao Wang and Jielun Zhang, college students at the University of Michigan, drove their private car to Naval Air Station in Key West, Fla. Although local security patrols asked them to turn around and return, the two drove onto the base to take a sneak peek, despite being prevented from doing so.
In the past year, the U.S. has reportedly taken a number of precautionary measures to stop the theft of U.S. research by the Chinese Communist Party, including prosecuting academics who deliberately conceal their ties to the Chinese Communist Party, barring graduate students with ties to the Chinese Communist military from entering the country, and investigating scientists from the Chinese Communist military who work at U.S. universities. The U.S. also closed the Chinese Communist Party’s consulate in Houston last July, which served as a base for Communist Party spying in the United States. In addition, the U.S. government has shut down several Confucius Institutes that were known for spreading Chinese culture.
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