NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE F riends of a woman stalked by a Chinese student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music last fall say the school failed to protect her. While the Justice Department has brought a case against the suspect, the school itself has yet to take serious action to specifically address pro–Chinese Communist Party harassment on campus, the victim’s friends told National Review.
“She’s very hurt and very disappointed by the way that Berklee has been handling it,” said one of the friends. NR granted them anonymity to discuss the victim’s perspective, considering the Chinese government’s intensifying surveillance and harassment of Chinese students in the U.S. The victim is a Chinese national who graduated from Berklee five months before the stalking took place.
The university maintains that it acted appropriately: “We cannot share details about the specific incident in question, but Berklee has a thorough and objective investigative process led by trained professionals. We are confident appropriate attention was given to this matter and that we took appropriate action,” a Berklee spokeswoman said.
Last December, federal prosecutors brought stalking charges against Xiaolei Wu, a 25-year-old Chinese national studying at Berklee. Since then, he has been suspended from the school and as part of a bail agreement is prohibited from returning to campus.
Prosecutors alleged that Wu had threatened and stoked a harassment campaign against the woman after she had posted flyers supportive of China’s “white paper” movement against the Chinese government’s draconian zero-Covid policy last fall. Despite his pro-CCP stance, he is not alleged to have acted at the direction of the Chinese government.
“Post more, I will chop your bastard hands off,” he allegedly wrote in a WeChat group chat for Berklee’s Chinese students.
Wu said, in a group chat for students at the school, that he had tipped off the Chinese authorities about the victim’s activities. The FBI said in the complaint that it believes he contacted them to cause legal trouble for the victim and her family.
According to the friends, a second student led the harassment of Chinese students who expressed views contrary to the Chinese regime’s political sensibilities, but he was not charged. That second student also said in a Berklee student group chat that others should help “escalate the attack” against the victim, according to a message viewed by NR.
Most of these activities took place in group chats run for the Chinese student community by Berklee’s chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association — a type of student group at schools across the country reported to be linked to Chinese diplomatic outposts. The victim’s friends said 30 to 40 other students in the group chat joined in on the harassment — digging up her possible address and her private social-media accounts — and that she provided evidence of the other messages to the Berklee administration. Some of the other students called the victim a “nasty American pet dog.”
The sources told NR that although the CSSA didn’t coordinate the harassment, its leadership did urge students not to express political views in the group chat during the white-paper movement, thus furthering the CCP’s clampdown on conversation about the demonstrations.
Neither Wu’s lawyer nor the Berklee CSSA responded to requests for comment.
As Wu’s case plays out, members of Berklee’s large Chinese population say they still believe they are at risk and that the school’s administration needs to do more.
A small group of students protested on campus in early April, and they also organized an online petition, asking Berklee to craft a policy to counter future harassment cases and to issue a statement specifically about the Wu case. That petition has racked up more than 700 signatures since April.
In an email, the victim asked Berklee president Erica Muhl to issue such a statement when the stalking began last October. In that message, whose subject read “Desperate Help Needed,” the victim explained that she was a student from China who has been threatened for posting a sign about seeking art and freedom in China. The email went to an account monitored by Muhl’s staff, though not directly by Muhl.
“I am getting phone calls I don’t recognize and strange friend requests. There have been attempts to hack into my email and personal accounts,” she wrote. She also wrote that the university’s conflict-resolution process had instructed her only to stay away from Wu, and she asked Muhl to directly address the topic of harassment of students from China by their pro-Beijing classmates.
“It is very important that you say ‘China’ because some of these students believe they can do no wrong as long as they act in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party,” the victim wrote.
She also mentioned the second alleged harasser’s role in stalking other Chinese students.
The school’s associate vice president and dean of students, Chris Reade, subsequently contacted her to discuss the case after the message was forwarded by members of Muhl’s staff. Muhl did not respond because it was not elevated to her.
According to the victim’s friends, Reade said, during a meeting in person last fall, that Berklee could issue only a general statement about protecting all students’ freedom of speech, rather than specifically mentioning the situation that many Chinese students find themselves in.
In the end, Berklee didn’t release a statement mentioning China, though its Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion released a guide for combating hate, bias, and harassment a few days after the on-campus protest in April. That guide, however, made no specific mention of the difficulties faced by Chinese students.
The Berklee spokeswoman said the school remains vigilant for future harassment cases: “We continue to strongly encourage any member of our community who witnesses or experiences harassment or discrimination to report it, so we can provide immediate support, resources, and accommodations.”
But the victim suspects that Berklee is hesitant to speak up for Chinese students who defy the regime because that could subject it to a boycott by pro-CCP individuals. “Chinese officials might take action to prevent Chinese students from enrolling at Berklee,” if the school spoke out, said one of her friends. “And also students who are fans of the CCP might choose not to enroll in Berklee anymore.”
Despite the increasing prevalence of similar cases, only a few universities have responded by directly addressing the Chinese state’s involvement. In one noteworthy case, Purdue University explicitly and publicly addressed the issue of these harassment campaigns after a Chinese graduate student was targeted by pro-CCP classmates for writing an open letter about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Purdue’s then-president, Mitch Daniels, wrote a letter to all students and staff calling the intimidation “unacceptable and unwelcome,” adding that students who report their classmates to the authorities of foreign regimes “will be subject to significant sanction.”