America's 350000 Chinese Spies

China is using Chinese students to steal secrets
By Zachary Cohen and Alex Marquardt

Chinese "student" spies

"Student" spy Ji Chaoqun

Washington -- In August 2015, an electrical engineering student in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled "Midterm test questions."
More than two years later, the email would turn up in an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio involving a Chinese intelligence officer who was trying to acquire technical information from a defense contractor.
Investigators took note.
They identified the email's writer as Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese student who would go on to enlist in the US Army Reserve. 

His email, they say, had nothing to do with exams.
Instead, at the direction of a high-level Chinese intelligence official, Ji attached background reports on eight US-based individuals who Beijing could target for potential recruitment as spies.
The eight -- naturalized US citizens originally from Taiwan or China -- had worked in science and technology. 

Seven had worked for or recently retired from US defense contractors. 

All of them were perceived as rich targets for a new form of espionage that China has been aggressively pursuing to win a silent war against the US for information and global influence.

Ji was arrested in September last year, accused of acting as an "illegal agent" at the direction of a "high-level intelligence officer" of a provincial department of the Ministry of State Security, China's top espionage agency, the Department of Justice said at the time.
He was formally indicted by a grand jury on January 24. 

Ji appeared in federal court in Chicago and pleaded not guilty, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Chicago. 

While Ji has not been convicted, the circumstances outlined in his case demonstrate how China is using people from all walks of life with increasing frequency, current and former US intelligence officials tell CNN.
Beijing is leaning on expatriate Chinese scientists, businesspeople and students like Ji -- one of roughly 350,000 from China who study in the US every year -- to gain access to anything and everything at American universities and companies that's of interest to Beijing, according to current and former US intelligence officials, lawmakers and several experts.
The sheer size of the Chinese student population at US universities presents a major challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with striking the necessary balance between protecting America's open academic environment and mitigating the risk to national security.
While it remains unclear just how many of these students are on the radar of law enforcement, current and former intelligence officials told CNN that they all remain tethered to the Chinese espionage machine in some way.
It's part of a persistent, aggressive Chinese effort to undermine American industries, steal American secrets and eventually diminish American influence in the world so that Beijing can advance its own agenda, US officials, analysts and experts told CNN.
CIA Director Gina Haspel warned last year that China intends "to diminish US influence to advance their own goals."
China's approach to espionage is taking on added urgency as ties between Beijing and Washington sour over trade differences, cyberattacks and standoffs over military influence in Asia.

"China's intelligence services exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community, using a variety of means," according to the intelligence community's World Wide Threat Assessment.

Lawmakers are also sounding the alarm.
"There is no comparison to the breadth and scope of the Chinese threat facing America today, as they actively seek to supplant the US globally," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told CNN, noting that Russia and China have taken similar approaches when it comes to nontraditional espionage.

'Covert influencers'
For more than a decade, US law enforcement and intelligence officials have raised internal concerns about US universities becoming soft targets for Chinese intelligence services that use Chinese students and staff to access emerging technologies, according to multiple former US officials.
But in recent months, senior officials have expressed a renewed sense of urgency in addressing the issue and sought to increase public awareness by highlighting the threat during congressional testimony and while speaking at various security forums.
While US officials stress that they believe some Chinese students are here for legitimate purposes, they have also made it clear that the Trump administration continues to grapple with counterintelligence concerns posed by Chinese agents seeking to exploit vulnerabilities within academic institutions.
Rather than having trained spies attempt to infiltrate US universities and businesses, Chinese intelligence services have strategically utilized members of its student population to act as "access agents" or "covert influencers," according to Joe Augustyn, a former CIA officer with firsthand knowledge of the issue from his time at the agency.
Creating this degree of separation allows the Chinese government to maintain some deniability should an operation become exposed, Augustyn said.
"We allow 350,000 or so Chinese students here every year," William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said last April during an Aspen Institute conference. 

"That's too much. We have a very liberal visa policy for them. It is a tool that is used by the Chinese government to facilitate nefarious activity here in the US."
Chinese students now constitute the largest foreign student body in the US, according to data from the Institute of International Education.
US intelligence officials have taken note of the steady increase in Chinese students entering the country each year and are well aware of the challenges associated with that trend.
Along with cyber-intrusion and strategic investing in American businesses, senior US intelligence officials told CNN on Tuesday that China is tapping into its massive network of Chinese students to compress the time it takes to acquire certain capabilities.

"In a world where technology is available, where we are training their scientists and engineers, and their scientists and engineers were already good on their own, we are just making them able to not have to toil for the same amount of time to get capabilities that will rival or test us," a senior official in the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said.

Addressing that problem is difficult given the large population of Chinese student spies sent to the US each year.
"We know without a doubt that anytime a graduate student from China comes to the US, they are briefed when they go, and briefed when they come back," according to Augustyn.

"There is no question in my mind, depending on where they are and what they are doing, that they have a role to play for their government."

In Ji's case, he was first approached by a Chinese intelligence officer who, initially at least, used a false identity, according to FBI Special Agent Andrew McKay, who filed a criminal complaint against Ji in the US District Court in Chicago.
The complaint charges Ji with one count of knowingly acting in the US as an agent of Chinese government without prior notification to the attorney general. 

Ji has been detained since his arrest in September, according to his lawyer.
Like thousands of Chinese nationals who come to the US each year, Ji entered the country on an F1 visa -- used for international students in academic programs.
Citing immigration records, the complaint states that Ji's goal, when he landed in Chicago in August 2013, was to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he ultimately earned a master's degree.
By December, Ji had been approached by the high-level Chinese intelligence official, who presented himself as a professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Ji, now 27, eventually realized who this official and his colleagues really were, according to the criminal complaint.
Still, court documents say he would funnel them background reports on other Chinese civilians living in the US who might be pressured to serve as spies -- in this case, in the strategically critical US industries of aerospace and technology. 

And he would lie to US officials about it, according to the complaint filed by FBI investigators.
In their response, the Chinese government did not comment on the current status of Ji's case.
But in September, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told CNN he was "unaware of the situation" when asked about Ji's arrest during a press briefing.
According to the complaint, FBI agents discovered about 36 text messages on one iCloud account that Ji and the intelligence officer exchanged between December 2013 and July 2015. 

In 2016, after he graduated, Ji enlisted in the US Army Reserve under a program in which foreign nationals can be recruited if their skills are considered "vital to the national interest."
As part of his Army interview and in his security clearance application, Ji was asked if he'd had contact with foreign security services, the complaint says.
He answered "no."
The Washington Post previously reported that Ji's case has been linked to the indictment of a Chinese intelligence officer named Xu Yanjun.
Xu's indictment was unsealed in October after he was arrested in Belgium for stealing trade secrets from US aerospace companies. 

He is the first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited for prosecution in the US. 

He has pleaded not guilty.

Complex counter intelligence challenge
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in the past year, has sought to focus repeatedly on the threat from Chinese students in US universities trying to get access to sensitive military and civilian research.
"They're exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have," Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last year, expressing concern that academic officials aren't taking the threat from China seriously enough.
But Wray told Senate lawmakers he has seen reasons for optimism.
"One of the things that I've been most encouraged about in an otherwise bleak landscape is the degree to which -- as Director Coats was alluding to -- American companies are waking up, American universities are waking up, our foreign partners are waking up," Wray said.

Still, the issue continues to pose a complex counterintelligence challenge for the US.

The Chinese are notorious for appealing to the nationalism and loyalty of their citizens to coerce them into carrying out acts of espionage, lawmakers and intelligence officials say.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the leading Democrat on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, stressed that it is important to recognize "that the Chinese government has enormous power over its citizens."
"In China, only the government can grant someone permission to leave the country to study or work in the United States and we have seen the Chinese government use their power over their citizens to encourage those citizens to commit acts of scientific or industrial espionage to the benefit of the Chinese government," he told CNN.
The ruling Communist Party in China has tightened its grip over all aspects of Chinese society, including academia, under Xi Jinping, who has routinely said that "the Party exercises overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country."

The State Department has considered implementing stricter vetting measures for F1 Visa applicants like Ji in an effort to address the problem, administration officials have told CNN, though the details of that plan remain unclear.
The Trump administration has also insisted that any trade deal with China must address concerns about Beijing's use of covert operations to steal US government secrets and intellectual property belonging to American private-sector businesses.
Ahead of President Donald Trump's December dinner meeting with Xi in Buenos Aires, the top US trade negotiator released a 50-page report showing Beijing had done little to fix unfair policies and that it continued to conduct and support cyber-enabled economic espionage that has stolen trillions of dollars in intellectual property.
The Trump administration has said the huge waves of tariffs it has slapped on Chinese goods are part of an effort to stop Beijing from unfairly getting its hands on American technology.

Prior to releasing the National Intelligence Strategy, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued new warnings and information to technology and aviation companies believed to be targets to help the private sector guard against growing threats from Chinese intelligence entities.
A US intelligence official told CNN that American companies need to be alert to the growing threat. "Whether it is a Chinese national, student, businessman or through cyber means, companies need to know they are up against China who wants their information," the official said.
US authorities are also taking action beyond just issuing warnings.
Since August 2017, the Justice Department has indicted several individuals and corporations on charges related to economic espionage and intellectual property theft, predominantly in the aerospace and high-technology sectors.
One October 2018 indictment accused two Chinese intelligence officers of attempting to hack and infiltrate private companies over the course of five years in an attempt to steal technology.
The indictment also targeted six of what it said were the officers' paid hackers and two Chinese nationals, employed by a French aerospace company, who were told by the officers to obtain information about a turbofan engine developed in partnership with a US-based plane maker.

And prior to that, in September, US authorities arrested Ji for allegedly spying on behalf of Beijing.
McKay and the FBI used search warrants to scour emails and texts that were used to piece together what they claim is the story of how Ji was lured in and exploited by his Chinese spymasters.
They sent an undercover agent who pretended he'd been directed by Chinese intelligence to meet Ji after one of the student's alleged handlers had been arrested.
Video and audio recordings captured Ji telling the undercover FBI officer he knew he'd been helping a "confidential unit" of the government -- exactly the actions he'd denied in his interviews for both a student visa and his entry to the US Army Reserve program, according to the complaint.
"Ji specifically denied having had contact with Chinese government within the past seven years," the Department of Justice said in a press release, citing the complaint.

Still, US officials say addressing the issue requires striking a delicate balance and more than just outreach.
"Despite active engagement with academia, industry, and the greater public on this issue, however, Chinese efforts to exploit America's accessible academic environment continue to grow," E.W. Priestap, assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division, told lawmakers last year. 

"In particular, as internet access, cyber exploitation, transnational travel, and payment technologies proliferate, so, too, do Chinese options for exploiting America's schools for domestic gain."

No Country for Chinese Men

FBI Urges Universities To Monitor Chinese Students And Scholars In The U.S.
By EMILY FENG

University administrators say the FBI, whose headquarters are shown above, has urged them to monitor Chinese students and scholars.

U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia.
Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies.
Universities have been advised to monitor students and scholars associated with those entities on American campuses, according to three administrators briefed at separate institutions. 

FBI officials have also urged universities to review ongoing research involving Chinese individuals that could have defense applications, the administrators say.
"We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to," Fred Cate, vice president of research at Indiana University, tells NPR. 

In a statement responding to NPR's questions, the FBI said it "regularly engages with the communities we serve. As part of this continual outreach, we meet with a wide variety of groups, organizations, businesses, and academic institutions. The FBI has met with top officials from academia as part of our ongoing engagement on national security matters."
While law enforcement agents have discussed university monitoring of other nationalities as well, these FBI briefings addressed visitors from China in particular who are involved in science, technology, engineering and math.

Administrators say the universities briefed by the FBI have not yet implemented additional monitoring protocols. 

Separately, intelligence officers have also briefed hundreds of American CEOs, investors and think tank experts on Chinese cybersecurity and espionage threats. 

"What we provide them is the classified information that we get from the collection priorities of China specifically: What they're trying to collect on, what they're interested in our campuses," William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told NPR.
This March, U.S. intelligence officials briefed about 70 college administrators of the American Council on Education, according to university participants. 

The officials said the presidents should increase oversight of Chinese researchers and avoid research funding from Chinese firms like Huawei.
The nation's primary biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, is now investigating grant recipients for not disclosing collaboration or funding from China and for sharing peer-review grant material with Chinese researchers. 

"Chinese entities have mounted systematic programs to influence NIH researchers and peer reviewers," warned NIH Director Francis Collins in a memo sent to more than 10,000 research institutions last August.

In May, the Commerce Department put Huawei on a trade blacklist, which prevents U.S. companies from selling products to the Chinese telecom firm without federal authorization. 

But the pressure to divest from research collaborations with Huawei and ZTE, another telecom company, began early last year, said three university administrators.
"For months up until [May], government officials were saying, 'We really don't think you should be doing business with Huawei,' " says Cate. 

"We said, 'Why don't you put them on a list and then we won't do business?' And they're like, 'Oh, the list process is way too slow.' "
The FBI visits have caused uncertainty among U.S. academics about whether to accept federal grants for research that may involve Chinese scholars. 

"We don't say you can't, because we don't have any legal authority to say they can't," Cate says. 

"But we say you should be aware there may be some sensitivity about this."
Several university presidents have issued statements this year reaffirming their commitment to Chinese researchers and students.
Last month, pro-China Yale University's president, Peter Salovey, said he was "working with my presidential colleagues in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to urge federal agencies to clarify concerns they have about international academic exchanges. The AAU has encouraged agencies to use the tools already in place, such as export controls, while affirming the principle of open academic exchange for basic research."
Salovey's office declined to comment further when contacted by NPR.
Universities and companies use software that automatically reviews international research collaborations, commercial transactions and other exchanges and then matches them up with existing blacklists to ensure they do not violate export control laws.
Numerous universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Illinois, have already cut off research collaborations with Huawei.
Besides Huawei, no other Chinese entities singled out to universities by the FBI are currently on a trade blacklist, according to the three university administrators.
That means any monitoring of specific Chinese individuals at the university level would have to be done manually, when admitting or employing them, possibly leaving a wide margin of error during evaluation.
"You're really looking at compliance systems that have to be rolled out on a department-by-department basis and person-by-person level to see if you're sticking research data in an envelope and mailing it to China," Cate says.
The Trump administration has long accused China of stealing American technology, a key factor behind the trade war between the two countries.

FBI Director Christopher Wray addresses the Council on Foreign Relations on April 26 in Washington, D.C. Wray spoke about "the FBI's role in protecting the United States from today's global threats."

As the mood in Washington, D.C., becomes more aggressive toward China, intelligence agencies have been visiting not just universities but also American tech companies to dissuade them from collaborations with Chinese entities.
"We have to wake this country up to what China is doing," Sen. Mark Warner, Va.-D, said at the Brookings Institution last month. 

"For this reason, I have been convening meetings between the intelligence community and outside stakeholders in business and academia to ensure they have the full threat picture and, hopefully, make different decisions about Chinese partnerships."

China's 340,000 potential or actual spies
Chinese students have come under particular suspicion. 

More than 340,000 were studying in the U.S. last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Since last July, Chinese students studying, in particular, science and technology fields must undergo additional screening, resulting in delayed visas for hundreds of students.
In May, Republicans introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would deny visas to Chinese researchers affiliated with Chinese military institutions.
"The Chinese intelligence services strategically use every tool at their disposal — including state-owned businesses, students, researchers and ostensibly private companies — to systematically steal information and intellectual property," FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the Council on Foreign Relations in April.
Former FBI agents say the bureau's recent visits to universities are merely an extension of long-running efforts to collaborate with the private sector and academia on national security issues.
"What the FBI has been doing is really more of an outreach and education program," says Todd K. Hulsey, a former counterintelligence official who retired from the FBI in 2014. 

Hulsey explained that such meetings began as early as two decades ago over concerns that Chinese student associations were fronts for Chinese intelligence recruiting: "It's to let these universities know that there is an existing threat to our economy."
National security concerns at universities increased after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which sent a wave of former Soviet bloc researchers to the U.S., says Edward Shaw, a former FBI special agent who retired in 2014.
Even back then, however, government agencies contacted universities with specific individuals of concern rather than presenting a broad list of institutions.
"It's casting a wide net," says Shaw. 

"When you're getting information from various government agencies and other trusted sources that a specific person is in the country and you are more targeted, you're using your resources better."

Chinese Students Bring Threat of Violence to Australian Universities

A clash with Hong Kong supporters at an anti-China protest is a dark omen of what’s to come.

By Damien Cave

A group of violent Chinese students at the University of Queensland last week, before a scuffle with protesters who supported Hong Kong activists.

BRISBANE, Australia — The Chinese nationalists disrupting pro-Hong Kong democracy rallies at the University of Queensland arrived 300 strong, with a speaker to blast China’s national anthem. They deferred to a leader in a pink shirt.
And their tactics included violence.
One video from the scene shows a student from Hong Kong being grabbed by the throat.
Another shows a philosophy student, Drew Pavlou, 20, shouting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Xi Jinping has got to go,” until a counterprotester throws his megaphone aside.
The altercations, which took place last Wednesday in the main square of a major Australian university, were broken up by the police, but experts believe it could be a dark omen of what is to come as the passions of Hong Kong protesters ripple to other countries.
A similar scuffle broke out on Tuesday at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, when three Chinese men were filmed shouting down students from Hong Kong at a rally and pushing a young woman to the ground.
For Australia in particular, the past week signals trouble after years of gliding along and growing rich off China’s growth.
Australian universities have come to depend on Chinese donors, students and organizations that are loyal to Beijing and intolerant of dissent.
More collisions with China’s muscular nationalism now seem likely.
Racist chants and insults have been traded, along with punches.
The Chinese Consulate in Brisbane praised the “spontaneous patriotic behavior” of the pro-China activists — leading the Australian defense minister to take the extraordinary step of warning foreign diplomats against attempts to suppress free speech.
Deconstructing what led to the clashes on Wednesday, through interviews, online messages and videos, reveals just how volatile, racially charged and violent any reckoning with China may become.
“It would certainly be nice if it didn’t escalate, but I remain quite concerned that the entire way this has been handled makes copycat attacks inevitable,” said Kevin Carrico, a senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University in Melbourne.
“It’s quite worrying.”

New activists and new causes
The protest began with two students: Jack Yiu, 21, a quiet psychology major from Hong Kong, and Mr. Pavlou, a chatty grandson of Greek immigrants from Brisbane.
Both new to activism, they didn’t know each other until a few weeks ago.
Until recently, Mr. Yiu had led the university’s Hong Kong Student Association, holding benign activities like welcome dinners.
Mr. Pavlou was known on campus for starting a popular Facebook group for intellectual debate.
But recent events involving China, they said, forced them to act.
Mr. Yiu said he had friends in Hong Kong marching for democracy and against a bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China.
Mr. Pavlou said his own outrage was prompted by reading about Xinjiang, a region of China where the government has pushed minority Muslims into re-education camps.
“It’s cultural genocide,” Mr. Pavlou said.
Adding to his anger, he discovered his own university had cultivated close ties with Chinese officials.
While the University of Queensland is one of several universities with a Confucius Institute — officially a program to promote Chinese language and culture — the vice chancellor, Peter Hoj, has made more of that relationship than his peers have.
The institute at the university plays a broader role, emphasizing collaboration with China in science, engineering and technology.
Until late last year, Mr. Hoj was an unpaid consultant for the Confucius Institute headquarters.
This month, he granted a visiting professorship to the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, bringing a Communist Party official into university life at a time when the United States, Canada and several European countries have cut ties.
“It’s part of this China illiteracy, which is quite prevalent in Australia,” said Louisa Lim, a professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited.”
“In many cases,” she said, “the allure of Chinese investment and large numbers of Chinese students has been so overwhelming that educational institutions have just thrown their arms wide open without doing their due diligence.”

The University of Queensland's vice chancellor, Peter Hoj, right, with Xu Jie, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, Australia, in a photo released by the Chinese Consulate this month.

In a statement online, the University of Queensland said that the consul general would not be teaching and was one of 260 titleholders appointed in recent years.
But for Mr. Pavlou, who is majoring primarily in philosophy, his university’s warm welcome has legitimized a culture of disinformation and censorship. 
He said his anger crystallized after a student Facebook group, called StalkerSpace, filled up with pro-China statements around the 30th anniversary of the TiananmenSquare massacre in June.
“I saw all these people denying things that happened or stating the official government line on it, and like to me, that was really disgusting and horrifying,” Mr. Pavlou said.
A recent poll of Australians’ views on foreign affairs, by the Lowy Institute, found that many Australians were experiencing a similar shift: Only 32 percent of respondents said they trust China either “a great deal” or “somewhat” to act responsibly, a 20-point fall from 2018.
Mr. Pavlou said the recent protests in Hong Kong were an inspiration.
He found Mr. Yiu through other activists, and they agreed to back-to-back rallies on July 24: The Hong Kong students would start at 10 a.m.; Mr. Pavlou and his group, broadening the focus to the university’s China ties, would start at noon.
Mr. Pavlou posted a notice of the event on Facebook.
That’s when the trouble started.

Counterprotesters emerge
“Yo bro where u from? Australia?” said the Facebook message from an account with the name Frank Wang.
“If so u better want to stay away from political problem.”
“Cancel the event,” the message continued.
“If u keep doing this, uv gonna face millions of people on your opposite side.”
Other messages were more aggressive.
Mixing Chinese and English, some people called Mr. Pavlou a white pig, using a pig emoji.
One comment in Chinese said: “When will you die.”

A threatening message that Drew Pavlou received on Facebook.

Mr. Pavlou was drawn into trading insults with some of them.
“It was out of fear and anger,” he said.
“It was silly. I regret it.”
Nonetheless, he carried on.
The first protest was uneventful.
A wall filled up with sticky notes of support, mirroring those in Hong Kong.
But by the time Mr. Pavlou and a few others started their protest, a crowd had gathered.
Several people there estimated that about 300 people — appearing to be a mix of Chinese students and nonstudents — appeared suddenly.
Within minutes, someone had grabbed Mr. Pavlou’s megaphone, prompting him to jump up and push back.
Security guards intervened, but the leader of the counterprotesters demanded an apology on China’s behalf.
“We tried to talk to them,” Mr. Yiu said.
“On the megaphone, I told them, we’re just fighting for Hong Kong democracy, not independence.”
By 2:15 p.m., it had grown tense.
Mr. Pavlou, who had continued the protest inside the Confucius Institute’s offices, re-emerged to see 50 or so Hong Kong students surrounded.
Priya De, 22, a leader with the socialist group that connected Mr. Yiu and Mr. Pavlou, said she heard white Australians shouting “Go back to China” at the Chinese students, and “Deport them, deport them.”
A video shot by a Hong Kong student showed David Chui, 23, a business student from Hong Kong, being grabbed by the throat and thrown to the ground.
Christy Leung, 21, another Hong Kong student, said a sign was torn from her hands and her clothing ripped.
She and Mr. Chui went to the police to press charges.
They were told there was nothing they could do.
“I don’t know how to be hopeful,” Ms. Leung said.
“People told me to report it and I did, but it didn’t work.”

The aftermath
Mr. Pavlou’s group is planning another protest this week.
The university said that it opened an investigation into the clash, and it issued a statement defending free speech but proposing that the demonstration be held in a more remote area of campus.
“It’s simply a way to starve the protest of visibility,” Mr. Pavlou said.
Some students would rather see it canceled.
A half-dozen students from mainland China interviewed around campus on Tuesday called any demonstration against Chinese influence unnecessary and useless.
Some activists on the left, noting that the Hong Kong Student Association is not involved, said they worried that any protest led by Australians who were not from Hong Kong or mainland China would only contribute to anti-Chinese racism.
But for Mr. Pavlou, Mr. Yiu, and many others, there is no turning back.
A group of Tibetan students has aligned with Mr. Pavlou’s group, calling for the university to shut down its Confucius Institute.
Mr. Yiu and his fellow Hong Kong students are planning more rallies, coordinating with groups all over Australia.
“People in Hong Kong are risking their lives,” Ms. Leung said.
“The threats we faced last week are nothing compared to them. We have to stand up. With them.”

Rogue Nation

Systematic aggression by Chinese against our people, our business and jobs has rendered them unworthy of our trust.
By Charles Wallace

Copper plates move along a conveyor at the Jinguan Copper smelter, operated by Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Co., in Tongling, Anhui province, China, on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019. On the heels of record refined copper output last year, China's No. 2 producer, Tongling, says it'll defy economic gloom and strive to churn out even more of the metal in 2019. 

Tyler Cowan, an economist whom I normally greatly admire, has come out with his diagnosis of what ails the US-China relationship. 

It’s not trade, he says, but a “lack of trust.”
This has to qualify as an understatement of epic proportions. 

Here are just a few issues of note:

1. After joining the World Trade Organization in 2000, China heavily subsidized state-owned companies in the steel sector with the goal of taking over the world steel industry. It largely succeeded, despite having neither raw materials or a cheap labor way of making steel. The major price advantage was that it gave their steel companies free electricity with which to price US and European steel companies out of the market, in direct violation of WTO rules.
2. China has been feverishly building man-made islands in the South China Sea with the goal of vastly expanding its territory and threatening any country that has the temerity to believe in international waters and the law of the sea. Just ask Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines if there is a "lack of trust" over the Spratly Islands.
3. Chinese drug factories are cranking out tons of cheap fentanyl, a drug 10 times more potent than heroin, and using the US mails to distribute them to dealers in the US. Does anyone really think that China, which after all is still a closely controlled police state, doesn’t know who is doing this and could easily stop them?
4. Chinese army hackers are stealing not military secrets from the US, but private company information and turning it over to Chinese firms so that they can achieve a commercial advantage over foreign competitors. Now, I’m sure the US military does try to penetrate China’s military secrets, at least I hope they do. But I seriously doubt that the National Security Agency is helping Apple by stealing plans for the next Xiaomi.
5. China’s industrial policy known as “Made in China 2025” contains a prescription for taking over the global chip industry in the same way it has seized the steel industry. State owned companies will be sent out to buy up every Western firm they can get their hands on. Is it any wonder that the new US committee looking at these purchases is taking a dim view of them?
6. China is depending on the thousands of Chinese engineers who trained at US universities, which really have never dealt with a systemized program of economic warfare before. US universities were friendly, open and helpful to their Chinese students, as they should be, but they will find that this knowledge is being turned against the US with the goal of destroying key US industries. Did anyone mention artificial intelligence research?

Faced with the laundry list of aggressive behavior, it just plain silly to call this a “lack of trust.”
To his credit President Trump has been very vocal about what China was trying to do and has put in place trade restrictions in an effort to force Beijing to accept international standards for trade and navigation in the oceans, for starters.
The measures have had some effect -- China’s economy has slowed dramatically, not entirely due to tariffs from the US, but the taxes have begun to bite.
While China is often described as a market economy, consider this: shortly after Beijing put retaliatory tariffs on soybeans, Chinese imports of US soybeans went nearly to zero. 

Was this in reaction to a 10% tax, or did the government spread the word that US soybeans were not to be imported. 

I suspect the latter, which demonstrates that the term market economy really doesn‘t apply to a one-party system with no respect for the rule of law.
So my answer to Professor Cowan: it’s not a lack of trust but systematic aggression by China against our people, our business and jobs that has rendered them unworthy of our trust.
I hope the current round of negotiations will help restore that trust by curbing that aggression, but I seriously doubt it.

US law enforcers should stop China’s influence campaign

Michael Pillsbury, hailed by President Trump as the leading authority on China, says it is time to act against wicked Beijing
By Jun Mai

Michael Pillsbury, author the The Hundred-Year Marathon, has emerged as one of the most influential voices on China policy in the US. 

US law enforcement should step in to stop a Chinese government influence campaign in the United States, according to Michael Pillsbury, an influential American strategist hailed as “the leading authority on China” by US President Donald Trump.
Mr Pillsbury claimed the Chinese influence campaign dated back more than seven decades.
“A lot of people said words along this line: it should not be law enforcement, it should not be national security,” Mr Pillsbury said at forum on Wednesday at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based conservative think tank that has grown influential under the Trump presidency.
“I’m very scared when people think it should be a moral principle that US national security law enforcement or congress can’t get involved in these issues.

“We can protect the Chinese diaspora’s human rights and civil liberties, although we are going to have action by the US government.”
Mr Pillsbury was commenting on a massive influence campaign by Chinese embassies and consulates in the United States.
The campaign has included shaping discussions through Confucius Institutes, mobilising overseas Chinese students to improve the image of the Chinese Communist Party and silencing political dissent among overseas Chinese.
Mr Pillsbury, director of the Centre on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, is a former intelligence official and diplomat.
During the Reagan administration, he was an assistant undersecretary of defence for policy planning. He is the author of The Hundred-Year Marathon, a book much discussed both in China and the United States, amid tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
Mr Pillsbury’s influence in the White House was underlined by President Trump’s comment that Pillsbury is “the leading authority on China” during an interview last month.
US Vice-President Mike Pence name-checked strategist Michael Pillsbury twice during a speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington on October 4. 

His name was mentioned twice in a speech by Vice-President Mike Pence on China, dubbed by some the “new cold war speech”, which included a long list of criticism of Beijing’s policies, ranging from trade practices to human rights.
Vice-President Pence’s speech, delivered three weeks ago, was also made at the Hudson Institute.
During Wednesday’s event, Mr Pillsbury argued that influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party had started as early as the end of the second world war, when Washington sent five-star general George Marshall to stop China’s civil war.
“This debate about how to handle the influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party – what if what Dr Pillsbury says is true, that it first began in 1944?” Mr Pillsbury said.
Summarising Marshall’s unsuccessful mission to broker peace between China’s Kuomintang and the communists, Mr Pillsbury said the Communist Party had “successfully manipulated the US embassy and people back in DC”.
Marshall’s mission was to force the warring parties into a coalition government and to absorb Mao Zedong’s army into Chiang Kai-shek’s, with the dangling carrot of billions of dollars of US military and financial aid to smooth the way. 

After Marshall’s failed mission, the Communist Party took over China in 1949.
“Yes, I welcome all the new enthusiasm of all the young people who are discovering this just after Xi Jinping took over, just the last couple of years, but I think it goes way back,” he said.

Gauging China's Influence and Interference in U.S. Higher Ed

Report catalogs complaints and interventions by embassy officials and Chinese students on American campuses. 
By Elizabeth Redden 

Concerns about Chinese government interference in American higher education seem to have become ubiquitous over the past year.
Lawmakers have lambasted universities for hosting Confucius Institutes, outposts for Chinese Communist Party propaganda or intelligence collection, and their complaints have prompted several of the institutes to close.
Congressional committees have held hearings about Chinese espionage efforts to infiltrate U.S. higher education.

The Trump administration in June moved to restrict the duration of visas for Chinese graduate students studying certain sensitive fields. 

Chinese student-spies

President Trump himself told a group of CEOs in August that almost every student from China in the U.S. is a spy.
Western scholarly publishers have blocked access to journal articles within mainland China to comply with government censors. 

And two new reports -- one a scholarly paper based on a survey, the other journalistic-- found that self-censorship is a widespread problem in the China studies field, though the reasons cited for this vary.
It’s in this context that the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars released its report “A Preliminary Study of PRC Political Influence and Interference Activities in American Higher Education” (throughout the report the author uses the acronym for the People's Republic of China in favor of the adjective "Chinese"). 

The study, which is based largely on interviews of more than 180 people, including more than 100 professors, documents alleged attempts to infringe on academic freedom at U.S. universities on the part of both Chinese embassy officials and individual Chinese students over the past two decades.
The study, authored by Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic, a Schwarzman Associate at the Wilson Center for 2017-18, concludes that "over the past two decades, PRC diplomats stationed in the United States have infringed on the academic freedom of American university faculty, students, administrators, and staff by: complaining to universities about invited speakers and events; pressuring and/or offering inducements to faculty whose work involves content deemed sensitive by the PRC authorities … and retaliating against American universities’ cooperative initiatives with PRC partner institutions."

Chinese students, meanwhile, have in various cases infringed on academic freedom by “demanding the removal of research, promotional and decorative materials involving sensitive content from university spaces”; “demanding faculty alter their language or teaching materials involving sensitive content on political rather than evidence-based grounds”; “interrupting and heckling other members of the university community who engage in critical discussion of China”; and “pressuring universities to cancel academic activities involving sensitive content.”
In addition, the report documents cases in which Chinese students have “acted in ways that concerned or intimidated faculty, staff, and other students at American universities,” such as by “monitoring people and activities on campus involving sensitive content”; “probing faculty for information in a suspicious manner”; and “engaging in intimidation, abusive conduct, or harassment of other members of the university community.”
The highly sensitive nature of the subject comes across in Lloyd-Damnjanovic’s methodology section, in which she writes that many potential respondents did not return her emails, or sent back what she described as "curt remarks alleging that the premise of the study was political, alarmist, or racist."
To such responses Lloyd-Damnjanovic countered, “It is essential that studies of PRC influence be conducted in an objective, balanced and responsible fashion. Broad brushes, generalizations and policy in the absence of a substantial empirical foundation are problematic. But to dismiss concerns about PRC influence and interference without even considering whether there is evidence is tantamount to burying one’s head in the sand.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington condemned the report's conclusions Monday, saying, "This allegation of the report you mentioned is totally groundless, full of prejudice, discrimination and hostility."
The following are a few of the specific cases and issues highlighted in the Wilson Center report.

Hosting of speakers and events. 

The report states that "PRC diplomats have since at least the early 1990s made official expressions of displeasure to American universities for hosting certain speakers and events." 

In the cases discussed, which mostly happened at major research universities, Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote that these requests were seen as "propagandistic" and duly if politely rebuffed. 

But she raised the question of whether smaller institutions more reliant on Chinese students and cooperative initiatives with Chinese universities for revenue would disregard the complaints of embassy officials so easily.

Retaliation and the Dalai Lama. 

The report describes retaliation against universities that play host to speakers the Chinese government doesn’t like. 

Richard Daly, who formerly headed the Maryland China Initiative at the University of Maryland and now works at the Wilson Center -- he wrote the foreword to the report -- said that groups of municipal- and provincial-level PRC officials stopped attending the university’s executive training programs for a period of time after the Dalai Lama gave a speech at Maryland's College Park campus in 2013.
The report also says that executive training programs organized through Maryland’s Office of China Affairs -- a successor office to the Maryland China Initiative -- have “experienced disruptions” since 2017 when a Chinese student, Yang Shuping, gave a controversial commencement speech praising the “fresh air of free speech” in the U.S. 

Maryland's media relations office declined to comment.
The report further describes retaliation against the University of California, San Diego, after it invited the Dalai Lama to give a commencement speech in 2017. 

The report cites faculty members who say they heard from their colleagues at Chinese partner institutions that universities were ordered by a government entity -- believed to be the Ministry of Education -- not to collaborate with UCSD. 

Among other retaliatory actions, a faculty member told Lloyd-Damnjanovic that the ministry blocked funding of a joint research center operated by the University of California's 10 campuses and Fudan University. 

UCSD's media relations office did not comment on the report.

Pressures on faculty. 

The report also describes attempts by embassy officials to pressure or induce U.S.-based faculty who study topics the Chinese government deems sensitive in order to influence their research. 

As one example, the report cites the case of a City University of New York professor, Ming Xia, who said he received a call from an official at China’s New York consulate in 2009 demanding he withdraw from a project to create a documentary about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. 

“‘We know this movie may give you financial rewards but we can give you much more,’” Xia recalled the official as saying, according to the account in the report, which he confirmed for Inside Higher Ed. 

“He also told me that I would pay the price if I went ahead with the movie and emphasized that [they] are going to do everything [they can] to stop this film.” Xia rejected the officials' request.

Chinese students' reluctance to speak. 

The report details concerns by some professors that their Chinese students feel unable to speak freely about sensitive topics in an American classroom.
Lloyd-Damnjanovic summarized an interview she conducted with Jason McGrath, an associate professor of Asian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. McGrath described being “met with silence” when he attempted to facilitate a discussion about a film about corruption in China. 

"Frustrated," Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote, "McGrath gently scolded the class until a student from the PRC who normally participated spoke up. ‘We’re uncomfortable talking about that because we don’t know who might be listening to us,’ the student said. 

For McGrath, ‘that was the first time that I sort of suddenly had the realization that the students in my class, some of them at least are very aware -- if it’s a large class with a lot of Chinese nationals and they don’t know them all -- that they might be self-censoring what they say because they’re worried about who else in the class might be listening, and who they might be talking to.’”
McGrath confirmed via email this account was accurate. 

Monitoring. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote that "numerous faculty and students reported experiences in which they felt they were being monitored by students or campus actors who appeared to be from the PRC while engaging in sensitive academic activities." 

For example, she wrote of a case at Harvard University where a faculty member said that two of her colleagues, both visiting scholars from China, "confided in her that they had caught another visiting PRC scholar searching their offices after hours and heard him openly discuss writing periodic reports to the government during the 2016-17 academic year. 

The faculty member’s colleagues said they thought the reports pertained to the political views and activities of ethnically Chinese faculty, visiting scholars and students at Harvard. 

"They warned the faculty member to refrain from discussing sensitive political issues in front of unfamiliar ethnic Chinese," Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote.

Abuse by Chinese students. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic's interviewees also described experiencing harassing or abusive behavior on the part of Chinese students. 

In one example, an ethnically Chinese professor identified only by his former affiliation at Indiana University described his experience after speaking on a 2008 panel organized by a student organization, Campaign for Free Tibet.
Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote, "After the event, the faculty member noticed that he and his background had become a topic of discussion among members of the [Chinese Students and Scholars Association] email Listserv. A week later, the faculty member was walking in the park with his children when someone of student age who appeared to be a PRC national approached, pointed, and called him a 'dog' in Chinese. During a trip to the local farmer’s market several days later, the faculty member noticed someone of student age who appeared to be ethnically Chinese approached with a camera and took a close-up photograph of his son’s face. The faculty member said that the photographic activity made him fear for the safety of his son, a toddler at the time, and for his family."
“It is intimidating,” the faculty member told Lloyd-Damnjanovic. 

“You can never be 100 percent sure it is related to the [Tibet] speaking event, but it happened right after.”

Self-censorship. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic also asked her faculty interviewees about the issue of self-censorship. 

Varying reasons they gave for self-censorship include concerns about being denied a visa to enter China and the effects that would have on their career and concerns about the safety of their research subjects. 

Some scholars who are Chinese citizens or of ethnic Chinese heritage said they self-censored out of concern for family and friends in China.

The Wilson Center study came out several days after two professors published a paper based on their survey of more than 500 China studies scholars. 

About 68 percent of respondents to that survey identified self-censorship as a problem in the field.
The survey, conducted by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and Rory Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, also documented the real risks China scholars can face in conducting research. 

Greitens and Truex found that about 9 percent of China scholars reported having been “taken for tea” by Chinese government authorities to be interviewed or warned about their research, 26 percent of scholars who conduct archival research reported being denied access and 5 percent reported difficulties obtaining a visa. 

In addition, 2.5 percent -- 14 individual scholars -- reported experiencing temporary detention by police or physical intimidation.

Chinese Students Protest in America, Face Danger at Home

One mainlander’s story of resistance and risk.

BY QIU ZHONGSUN

I took one final look at the posters I had just taped to the bulletin board in a student lounge at the University of California, San Diego. 

Superimposed over the face of Xi Jinping were three simple words in red: Not My President. 

My own face had been concealed under a hoodie as I put the pictures up — and I’d waited, along with a friend, until late at night to make sure no one saw us.
I had to take these measures to protect my identity because for mainland Chinese like myself, the oppression we face at home follows us abroad. 

The Chinese Communist Party has learned how to project its regime of surveillance and coercion deep inside the borders of liberal democracies. 

Initiating a campaign of political resistance, even in a Western country, meant risking my safety and that of my family back in China.
Just a few days earlier, on Feb. 25, the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislative body, had announced a proposal to remove constitutional term limits on the presidency, which since the 1980s had been limited to two five-year terms. 

Chinese presidents aren’t elected, but the selection process, ever since reformer Deng Xiaoping, had been a matter of consensus among the top echelons of the party, deliberately limiting the strength of any one individual. 

After the proposal inevitably passed, it would smooth the course for Xi, chosen for the critical roles of both party chairman and president in 2012, to become president for life instead of quitting in 2022.
News of the proposal swept China’s social media, and posts expressing frustration, shock, and helplessness flooded online platforms — but only for a few short hours. 

Then, all the discussion was deleted as the myriad censors who now police the Chinese internet kicked into high gear.
That was when I and two of my friends finally decided to act. 

As mainland Chinese studying and living in Western countries, we’ve been watching with dismay from afar as Xi has cracked down on human rights activists, nullified Hong Kong’s democratic promises, and revived a personality cult that reminds some Chinese of what China experienced under former leader Mao Zedong. 

Xi’s power grab was the last straw. 

We were raised to embrace the Communist Party, but now we felt it was time for those of us who live overseas to speak up for those silenced at home.
So we decided to start a Twitter campaign called #NotMyPresident and encourage like-minded Chinese students at universities around the world to print out our posters and put them up on their campuses. 

Within a month, Chinese students at more than 30 schools around the world had joined us, including at Cornell University, London School of Economics, University of Sydney, and the University of Hong Kong, expressing their disapproval for a Chinese president for life. 

After Foreign Policy’s initial coverage, Western media outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC featured our campaign.
But we had to be extremely cautious in making our voices heard. 

Putting up posters is a common political activity on college campuses in democratic countries. 

But for Chinese studying at these same campuses, it is dangerous to publicly express opinions that go against the party line. 

We know that our career prospects back in China are likely to suffer if we are publicly known to have criticized the party; it will be more difficult for us to make connections, snag interviews, and receive job offers and promotions. 

Chinese authorities have also been known to harass the families of outspoken Chinese students abroad, to interrogate Chinese returnees, or, in extreme cases, even kidnap Chinese abroad
Cand force them back to China.
So we planned carefully and took steps to protect our identities. 

The first challenge was to set up secure communication among the organizers. 

We avoided discussing anything regarding the campaign on WeChat, the most popular instant messaging application in the Chinese-speaking world, because it is rigorously monitored by the Chinese government. 

That means that Chinese security officials may read WeChat messages sent between people who aren’t even in China.
But even with encrypted messaging applications backed by Facebook and other Western technology companies, we still used burner phones to sign up as we were afraid that eventually companies behind the service would hand over the control of the user data to Chinese authorities — just as Apple did in February, when it agreed to house all Chinese users’ data locally.
The consequences if our identities got out could be dire. 

Organizing a campaign that questions the fundamental legitimacy of China’s top leader is a punishable crime in China. 

Citing the designated charge of “inciting subversion of state power,” Chinese authorities can arrest and prosecute citizens who dare to disagree without due process — and that would include us, although the protest took place thousands of miles away from home.
As we publicized the campaign, we encouraged potential participants to put up the posters under cover of darkness and to wear masks in order to protect their own identities as well. 

We have learned from previous incidents that the Chinese community abroad is unlikely to support dissident speech — and that Chinese student groups effectively serve as watchdogs for the "motherland" on foreign campuses. 

Many Chinese students remember the Shuping Yang incident in May 2017. 

An undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, Yang criticized environmental problems in China and praised democratic values during her commencement speech. 

Her speech was recorded, put online, and went viral in China. 

Chinese state media labeled her speech as “anti-China,” and angry netizens dug up her parents’ address and posted it online. 

Throughout the incident, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) at the university did not provide any support to Yang. 

Rather, the CSSA denounced her speech as “intolerable” and questioned her real motives. 

Yang eventually posted an apology on Chinese social media. 

In 2008, a Duke University student named Grace Wang attempted to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-Beijing student protesters and was subsequently attacked on the Chinese-language internet; she received violent threats, and her parents back in China went into hiding.
As more and more schools joined the campaign, our Twitter account started to garner attention — both wanted and unwanted. 

On the one hand, we tried to discourage students in mainland China from participating. 

With the help of deep learning and artificial intelligence, the government has put into place sweeping public surveillance technology.
We also faced a barrage of phishing attempts. 

Every day, we received dubious password reset requests in the inboxes of each campaign-related account: Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, even the Dropbox account we used to host our posters for download. 

Some of these were from unknown parties, claiming that our Twitter account was blocked and inviting us to click on the “unlock” button. 

Other, more subtle attempts would appear as emails from potential campaign participants — but instead of sending a picture of the posters they put up on campus, as we requested from all our participants, a suspicious link was included.
Despite the risks that every participant faced, the support we received greatly exceeded our expectation. 

One participant at the University of California, Irvine sent a moving message: “I struggled for a while about whether to put those posters up because I was worried that I might get caught by someone who disagrees with my action. Yet, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ So I decided to take the risks because what Xi did is absolutely wrong, and people are being silent for too long. I hope this can make a difference and pray that things will get better.”
When we put up posters at UC San Diego on that cold early spring night, we hoped it would be a small rebellion, a personal farewell to the ideology of party supremacy we were raised to believe. 

It turns out we are not alone.

Chinese Students in America Say ‘Not My President’

Young overseas Chinese make a rare show of dissent against Xi Jinping's power grab.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

One of the posters made publicly available by #NotMyPresident organizers.
The first posters appeared on a bulletin board at University of California, San Diego on March 1.
Two days later, they popped up at Columbia University and New York University. 

Now they’ve spread to nine more colleges across the United States, Canada, Australia, and United Kingdom.
The twin posters — one in Chinese, one in English — read, “Not my president,” the words superimposed over a photo of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
The signs are part of a small but growing campaign among Chinese university students abroad to express their opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s proposal, announced last week, to scrap presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to stay in power indefinitely.
“The single most important driving force behind China’s growth in the past 30 years has been the check on the party leader’s power on the institutional level,” the organizers, told Foreign Policy in a message, after being contacted initially through a Twitter account associated with the campaign.
The organizers, who say they come from mainland China but live in Western countries, requested anonymity, citing concerns about retaliation from the Chinese government.
“It’s definitely not our wish that an unelected strongman become a de facto lifetime dictator,” they wrote in a message.
It’s a rare show of direct resistance. 

Even far away from home, Chinese students are reluctant to criticize their government publicly, fearing that their words will make it back to party officials in China, dampening their job prospects back home or even risking their safety.
Since he assumed office in late 2012, Xi has consolidated power through sweeping anti-corruption campaigns that have felled rivals, establishing himself as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. 

Rumors have swirled for more than a year that Xi might attempt to stay in power longer than the two five-year terms that recent Chinese presidents have served. 

In that way, last week’s proposal, virtually guaranteed to pass into law later this month, wasn’t a surprise.
Even so, many Chinese took the move as a betrayal that harkens back to Mao’s legacy. 

The late party secretary, who led China from 1949 to 1976, crushed opposition and vilified criticism to such an extent that few dared speak out when he adopted catastrophic economic and social policies that thrust the country into decades of chaos, famine, and deadly social conflict. 

After Mao’s death, the party adopted a model of collective leadership designed to prevent any one man from holding too much power, essentially promising the Chinese people that such a disaster would never happen again.
The party’s move to dismantle the tradition of collective leadership feels to many like a slap in the face. 

It has mobilized many Chinese, even those who usually avoid politics, to speak out on social media and, in some cases, to even publicly state their lack of consent. 

The slogan “I disagree” appeared widely on Chinese social media platform Weibo before the phrase was blocked, along with many other similar posts, by the government’s internet censors.
“We think a lot more attention should be paid to this proposal as it might plunge us into another round of the Cultural Revolution,” the organizers told FP, referring to the chaotic decade when party fanatics killed or imprisoned many people across the country.
The student organizers chose #IDISAGREE as one of their hashtags, along with #NotMyPresident, publicizing the campaign on Twitter, creating a poster template available for download, and reaching out to Chinese students at many schools to encourage them to join.
It’s a big risk, as they are well aware. 

The Chinese government keeps close tabs on Chinese students studying at American universities, as a recent FP investigation revealed. 

Back in China, criticizing party policies and leaders can result in detention, stymied careers, and jail time. 

And many Chinese students, raised in an education system steeped with patriotism and party propaganda remain genuinely nationalist during their time abroad.
At least one of the Chinese-language posters, though not its English counterpart, was torn down soon after being posted, according to a photo posted on Twitter.
But the organizers said that they have been encouraged by the response they’ve gotten from Chinese students both in the United States and in other Western countries. 

More importantly, however, the campaign leaders feel they can’t just do nothing.
“We as a group of Chinese citizens overseas already enjoy the privilege to study and work in countries where free speech is not only protected but also encouraged,” said the organizers.
“If we don’t speak up for our people at home, who would?”

China's Subversion Machine

CHINA’S LONG ARM REACHES INTO AMERICAN CAMPUSES
Beijing is stepping up efforts to inject party ideology into student life. 

BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

When Xi Jinping visited Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 on a state visit, hundreds of Chinese students lined the streets for hours, carrying banners and flags to welcome him.
It was a remarkable display of seemingly spontaneous patriotism.
Except it wasn’t entirely spontaneous.
The Chinese Embassy paid students to attend and helped organize the event. 
Working with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) at local universities — a Chinese student organization with branches at dozens of schools around the country — government officials from the office of educational affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Washington collected the contact information of about 700 students who had signed up to attend.
Embassy officials communicated with students via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, during the event and into the night, responding to messages as late as 3 a.m.
According to a Chinese student at George Washington University who attended the event, participants each received about $20 for their effort, distributed through the CSSA a few months later.
This wasn’t an isolated example of paid political mobilization.
A similar arrangement had occurred in February 2012, when Xi visited Washington as vice chairman. In that case, it took almost a year for the embassy to transfer the promised funds to the George Washington CSSA.
In January 2013, the student group sent a message, recently reviewed by Foreign Policy, to its members saying the compensation from Xi’s welcome the previous year was finally available, and they could come pick up the cash at the campus community center if they brought a photo ID. 
The George Washington CSSA did not respond to a request for comment.
And when then-President Hu Jintao visited Chicago in 2011, the University of Wisconsin-Madison CSSA bused in Chinese students, excited about a free trip to the city and a chance to glimpse the president.
The association also surprised the students at the conclusion of the trip with a small cash payment. The CSSA president told students not to speak to the media about the money.
The association did not respond to a request for comment.
The embassy-sponsored welcome parties, which lend an aura of power and popularity to the visiting leaders, are just one example of the close relationship that the Chinese government maintains with Chinese student groups across the United States.
In the past few years, as Xi has strengthened the party’s control over every aspect of Chinese society and sought to extend his power abroad, consular officials have markedly increased their efforts to exert ideological influence over students — leaving some CSSA members wary to speak out against what they see as unwanted government intrusion.
Chinese students at George Washington University line the streets of Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 to welcome Xi Jinping during his state visit.

While many countries, including the United States, fund educational activities abroad, the Chinese government’s direct control over student groups is unique. 
Beijing’s influence over these groups is also beginning to raise questions and concerns among students on American campuses, who fear they will be accused of being agents of espionage.
The growing ties are also concerning U.S. government officials, who are wary of China’s political and economic reach in the United States.
At a security hearing last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that American universities are naive about the intelligence risk of Chinese “nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting,” and claimed that China poses a “whole-of-society threat.”
Although the extent of Chinese government funding and oversight of these organizations is not entirely clear and appears to vary from group to group, it seems to be more significant than previously known — and growing.
FP spoke to more than a dozen members of the group across the country (including four current or former presidents), was given access to internal messages and documents, and reviewed the publicly available charters of dozens of these groups, in Chinese and English.
All of the students who spoke to FP requested anonymity for fear of potential reprisals.
FP found that CSSAs regularly accept funds from their local consulates and many officially describe themselves as under the “guidance” or “leadership” of the embassy. 
Internal correspondence reviewed by FP also show that consular officials communicate regularly with CSSAs, dividing the groups by region and assigning each region to an embassy contact who is responsible for relaying safety information — and the political directive — to chapter presidents. 
CSSAs explicitly vet their members along ideological lines, excluding those whose views do not align with Communist Party core interests.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment on any of the issues raised in this article.
Chinese Communist Party influence within the United States is a real concern, and the vessels of that influence “should be transparent and it should be disclosed,” says Bill Bishop, author of the influential Sinocism newsletter, which offers insights into Chinese politics and government.
The number of Chinese students studying in the United States has skyrocketed from tens of thousands a decade ago to more than 330,000; nearly one in three international students is Chinese.
Numerous CSSA members, including two current chapter presidents, say that they are uncomfortable with what they felt was growing ideological pressure from the embassy and consulates. 
That pressure has become more apparent since 2016, when the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive ordering schools to instill greater patriotism and love for the party in students of every age — including Chinese students studying abroad.
Pressure on CSSAs to promote “patriotic” ideas was particularly acute in October 2017 during the 19th party plenum, the key national planning session held every five years at which top officials are selected and new policies are announced.
Consular officials sent out requests to CSSAs around the country to hold events related to the plenum. One such message, viewed by FP, encouraged groups to organize viewing sessions for their members to watch the opening ceremonies together, and requested that they send photos or reports of the event back to the consulate.
Consular officials also requested that CSSAs across the United States post articles praising Xi’s vision for the country and touting other party propaganda. 
Officials asked groups to organize study sessions to discuss the party pronouncements coming out of the plenum. 
Articles and invitations to plenum-related events appeared on the WeChat accounts of CSSAs at University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Georgetown University, and other schools around the country.
These and similar requests have troubled some CSSA leaders.
“I really don’t want CSSA to have any relationship more than basic etiquette with the Chinese Consulate,” says the president of a large CSSA at a major university, speaking to FP.
“I try to reject any sponsor from the embassy, financial wise, since I want our club to be able to make our own decisions.”
The student says that the requests feel to him like an attempt to inject a political ideology where it doesn’t belong.
He says he tries to keep the consulate at arm’s length, offering bare minimum compliance with its requests in order to keep up a good relationship.
He does not post the pro-party articles that the consular officials send to him, though he knows other CSSA presidents do.
“I feel like the tendency is that the consulate tries to control CSSAs more and more,” says the CSSA president.
“I don’t think this student group should be involved with government in any way.”
The CSSA president emphasizes that while he is concerned about the increasing control the Chinese government tries to exert over student organizations, he is not deeply alarmed yet.
“The current situation is not that Chinese students don’t have freedom after they come to the United States,” he tells FP.
“If something bad is happening, it has not happened yet.”
But the association president feels he must at least make a show of complying with embassy requests, citing a sense of peer pressure that exists within the CSSA.
A consular official often asks him for evidence of compliance, such as photos or a brief report, to show to superiors, and the student doesn’t want to get the consular officer in trouble.
“The people inside [the consulate], I feel most of them are good, they’re just doing their jobs,” said the student.
“But I do feel like there is an invisible hand behind them, saying they want more than this. Maybe the policymaker is in Beijing, or in D.C.”
The president of a CSSA at a small liberal arts college expresses similar reservations, telling FP that he also chose not to post the articles the consulate had sent him.
“I personally disliked those content. I felt it’s wrong to do it,” the student tells FP.
Chinese consular officials often communicate with CSSA leaders through group chats in the Chinese messaging app WeChat.
Consular officials divide the regions into different umbrellas, with specific officials responsible for certain regions, and then create WeChat groups for the presidents of all the CSSAs in the region, with a consular official also a member of each group. 
This allows officials to communicate announcements and requests directly to dozens of CSSA presidents by sending a single message. 
FP viewed a screenshot of one group that included nearly two dozen regional CSSA presidents receiving messages from a Chinese Consulate official.
The West Coast region has more institutionalized oversight.
An umbrella organization called Southwest CSSA was founded in 2003; the organization itself is not affiliated to any university, and oversees the CSSAs at universities in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Hawaii. 
In some ways the umbrella group functions as a regional office to increase coordination and cooperation among campus CSSAs, holding annual elections from among its member CSSAs for its board of officers, and holding joint events.
But Southwest CSSA’s ties to the consulate are far closer than those of the individual groups at universities. 
Its bylaws state that all presidential candidates must first receive approval from the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles before the election can take place. 
Southwest CSSA sometimes holds events inside the consulate itself.
Southwest CSSA also openly supports party ideology. 
Its stated goals, according to its website, include “promoting the spirit of ‘studying abroad to serve the country’” — a direct quote from a letter Xi Jinping sent to Chinese students studying in Moscow in December.
This letter has been the subject of a major push, with consulates encouraging Chinese students around the world to study and learn from the president’s words. 
Other stated goals include “promoting patriotic feeling” and helping Chinese students “serve the motherland in many ways even while they are studying in America.”
In 2016, Southwest CSSA filed for tax-exempt status as a public charity with the IRS.
According to its tax forms, it reported $107,304 in gifts and contributions, but no money from fundraising or membership dues.
Its list of donors is not publicly available.
Neither Southwest CSSA nor the Los Angeles consulate responded to a request for comment.
Chinese consular funding of CSSAs is widespread, and any CSSA is eligible to apply for government funds.
Many CSSAs tout their relationships and financial ties to Chinese consulates on their websites, usually only in Chinese, omitting this connection from the English translations on the website.
The financial relationship between the Chinese government and the CSSAs is not always well advertised.
In June 2017, the president of the University of Pittsburgh’s CSSA wrote on her Weibo account that the group received $6,000 a year from the Chinese Embassy; she later deleted the post.
Others are more open.
The goals of the Harvard Medical School CSSA, according to its charter, include “loving the motherland” and “uniting” the Chinese students and researchers at Harvard Medical School with the Chinese Embassy “for the prosperity and strength of the motherland.” 
The charter also mentions funds received from the “embassy sponsor.”
Many other CSSAs, from those at small liberal arts colleges to prestigious private universities to major public research institutions, openly accept consular funding as well.
Onlookers wait to catch a glimpse of Hu Jintao in Chicago on Jan. 20, 2011.

In some cases, the consulate deposits the money directly into the personal account of the CSSA treasurer or other officer, rather than the official CSSA account, according to three association members.
A separate, unofficial CSSA bank account is sometimes set up to receive the funds. 
In either case, the university administration may be unaware that the organization is receiving funding from a foreign government. (The Columbia University CSSA was briefly shuttered in 2015 for rules violations; the school administration allowed the group to resume operations within a year.)
Receiving money from a foreign government or officials could trigger the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is designed as a transparency mechanism for organizations attempting to influence American opinion.
Normally, academic organizations are exempt from FARA registration, says Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the nonprofit Center for International Policy.
That means, for example, that Chinese graduate students studying in the United States on Chinese government scholarships do not have to register.
And FARA only applies to advocacy conducted with the American public in mind, according to Freeman.
“If the Chinese government is paying a Chinese group here to do advocacy to influence other Chinese, that would not trigger FARA,” he says.
But what might trigger registration as a foreign agent is if a Chinese government-funded group attempted to change the behavior of U.S. government officials or to sway American public opinion at large, he says.
In at least one case, the Chinese government, through a local CSSA, appeared to do just that. 
In late 2017, the Wayne State University CSSA in Michigan was involved in an ethics investigation into the local city council after the CSSA offered four scholarships to the Ypsilanti mayor and three other local officials to fund travel to China. 
After the trip took place, it was discovered that the Chinese Consulate had provided the money to persuade Ypsilanti city officials to support a $300 million Chinese-funded development project. 
The Wayne State CSSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Some CSSAs have accepted money directly from high-ranking Chinese government officials.
In February 2017, Hong Lei, a former Chinese foreign ministry spokesman and now a diplomat at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, made a personal donation to the CSSA at the Washington University in St. Louis, according to an article posted to the group’s WeChat account.
The consulate’s website mentioned his visit to the school, but not the donation.
The association did not respond to a request for comment.
For Chinese students, however, a more important concern is potential political pressure, which can come in the form of explicit ideological vetting.
In a March 2016 message to students announcing upcoming elections, the University of Minnesota CSSA stated that candidates for president who were Communist Party members would receive preferential consideration for the post (FP viewed a copy of the message).
The group’s website states that the group receives “strong financial support” from the Chicago consulate.
In some cases, the CSSAs make the ideological requirements for membership clear.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville CSSA charter states that members are required to “love the motherland” and to “protect China’s honor and image.” 
The Chinese-language version of the charter, which differs from the English-language version, also states that members must hold Chinese passports; that students or researchers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau who do not have Chinese passports must uphold the “one-China principle” and support “national unification” in order to be a member; and that ethnic Chinese students without Chinese passports can join if “their heart belongs to the motherland.”
Embassy officials have also coached CSSAs how to respond during a public relations crisis, like what happened at the University of Maryland in May 2017, when Yang Shuping, a Chinese undergraduate, praised American democracy and criticized Chinese government oppression during her commencement address. 
Her remarks went viral on the Chinese internet and Yang became the subject of virulent online attacks from patriotic Chinese netizens.
The University of Maryland CSSA, rather than supporting her, posted a video criticizing her remarks.
Shortly after the incident, an embassy official met with CSSAs from 14 schools from states near the Washington metro area, including the University of Maryland CSSA. 
In the meeting, the official praised the group’s response and encouraged other CSSAs to follow suit, according to typed notes from the meeting reviewed by FP.
The official recommended that CSSAs, if faced with a similar crisis, should contact the embassy as soon as possible and provide a detailed report, issue a public statement immediately, and avoid violence and personal attacks.
In 2017, widespread opposition among Chinese students at the University of California, San Diego over an invitation to the Dalai Lama to give the commencement address sparked suspicion that the Chinese Embassy was behind the protest.
The UC San Diego CSSA issued a strongly worded statement and requested a meeting with the administration, in which it asked university officials to ensure that the Tibetan spiritual leader would not address politics in his speech.
In May 2017, shortly after the Dalai Lama’s visit, Chinese diplomatic officials gave an award to the UC San Diego CSSA at an annual CSSA conference held inside the consulate itself, according to a post on the group’s WeChat account.
The close ties between the student groups and the consulates keep Chinese students mindful that government officials are just one WeChat message away.
One Chinese student at a large university in the south says the CSSA’s links to the embassy bothered them, and that since 2015, the ties have become more obvious. 
“Self-censorship in authoritarian states is usually a state of being constantly careful about what you say and do,” the student says.