WASHINGTON—The Chinese regime’s repeated harassment of a Georgetown University law student’s family members back home sent a clear message: He must refrain from speaking out against Beijing.

“In early July, national security officers came knocking on my parents’ door and hauled my father away in front of my terrified mother for interrogation,” Zhang Jinrui said at a December 2023 congressional hearing about transnational repression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“They asked my father extensively about my political convictions and eventually let him go on the condition that he makes me ‘love the country and love the Party’ with a threat of ‘or else.’”

From what Chinese authorities had told his sister and father, Mr. Zhang knew he was targeted because the CCP suspected him of being a member of a pro-democracy Chinese student group in Washington.

After he told the media his story, his family was harassed twice more. The most recent time was in late November 2023, when a CCP official showed his father a printed copy of Mr. Zhang’s text messages with his mother and sister on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, and accused him of supporting democracy.

During these interrogations, Mr. Zhang said his father was “under tremendous pressure.”

“The interrogation process is a process that’s designed to wear you down, to wear your mental stamina down, and also to break up the kind of sense of unity that’s between the family members and the dissidents,” he told lawmakers at the hearing.

When asked if the CCP coerced his father to tell him about the psychological suffering to dissuade him from speaking out against the Party, Mr. Zhang told The Epoch Times: “Right now, I cannot tell.

“I cannot tell which part is forced or voluntary. I don’t know because we’re all just talking through the online calling platforms of China, and there’s censorship for that, too. So I’ll never know until maybe one day I meet him somehow.”

Through online groups in Washington, Mr. Zhang learned that he was among a dozen Chinese students in the Washington area whose families were harassed in 2023. Most of them are studying at George Washington University (GWU), where pro-democratic Chinese students have clashed with members of the pro-CCP Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA).

Eventually, the pro-democratic students formed the GWU Independent Chinese Student Union (ICSU) in March 2023. The Chinese name of the organization is “Torch on the Potomac,” which refers to the river that runs through the nation’s capital.

The CCP suspected Mr. Zhang of being a member of Torch on the Potomac—even though he wasn’t.

He’s still baffled about how he was identified as a member. He said he didn’t attend any events organized by the group but may have incidentally joined an event where some ICSU members also participated.

Last June, two months after the GWU ICSU announced its founding on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr. Zhang’s sister messaged him on WeChat. She told him that a police officer called her and asked about him.

“Is he in Washington? Did he participate in or create a Torch on the Potomac organization? We’ve learned that he is a core member,” the officer told his sister.

Several days later, national security officers visited his father and asked him to make Mr. Zhang “love the country and the Party.”

By comparing notes with others whose families were also harassed, Mr. Zhang summarized a “streamlined repression process” that he shared with lawmakers.

“From oral accounts, we can see how the CCP has a sophisticated system to repress people who are outside of China,” he said at the hearing.

Mr. Zhang identified two types of repression carried out by Chinese authorities: informal and formal.

Regarding formal repression, he said that “there are social media teams, teams to spot potential troublemakers, liaison teams that send orders to local police departments to get the addresses of the people’s families, and there are teams that get sent out to do the interrogations and deliver the threats.”

Informal repression is “carried out organically by CCP supporters who are emboldened by the CCP,” according to Mr. Zhang.

He experienced informal repression in late 2022 when he distributed fliers against Beijing’s zero-COVID policy on Georgetown’s main campus.

The policy that involved strict lockdowns had claimed scores of lives in a fire in China’s Xinjiang region in November 2022; the lockdown blocked a fire truck’s access to victims. The tragedy sparked nationwide protests in which people held up a blank sheet of paper, representing all they wanted to say but couldn’t. 

Chinese students in the United States, including Mr. Zhang, undertook their own efforts to raise awareness and show solidarity.

Within 40 minutes of his flier distribution, a Chinese student scolded him for being a “traitor” and “scum of the Earth” and accused him of taking money from the U.S. government to pass out the materials.

He said the Chinese student was on the phone but turned the phone camera on him and told the party on the other end of the call to report him to Chinese police, saying, “This is an anti-government person.”

The FBI calls Mr. Zhang’s experience “transnational repression.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP, explained the regime’s modus operandi. 

“The CCP actually seeks to surveil, influence, punish, and coerce people all over the world. They want to silence their critics, control politics, and police thought far beyond China’s borders,” the congressman said at the December 2023 hearing. 

“And one of their coveted targets is U.S. universities.”

Chinese Student Convicted

When lawmakers asked Mr. Zhang about the most severe student case he had heard about, he mentioned a pro-democracy student in Boston who was stalked and threatened for posting a piece of paper on a window near campus that read, “Stand with Chinese People” “We Want Freedom,” and “We Want Democracy.”

The student, Zooey, who used a pseudonym, was subsequently threatened in a 300-member chat room by Wu Xiaolei, a student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, according to court documents.

“I already called the tipoff line in the country; the public security agency will go greet your family,” Mr. Wu wrote in the chat room.

“Post more, I will chop your [expletive] hands off.”

Prosecutors said Mr. Wu posted Zooey’s email and home addresses online. At a hearing on Jan. 23, Zooey said she thought Mr. Wu made her information public to encourage others to beat her up.

“I remain terrified until this day,” she said.

On Jan. 25, Mr. Wu was found guilty of cyberstalking and also interstate transmissions of threatening communication, crimes that carry up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for April.

Prosecutors, viewing Mr. Wu as a flight risk, asked the judge to detain him until sentencing, citing information from the FBI that Chinese authorities had expressed interest in the case multiple times.

When the judge rejected that request, prosecutors requested Mr. Wu be put under ankle bracelet monitoring and that his travel be restricted to the state. The judge approved the travel restriction.

Mr. Wu showed no reaction when the jury’s verdict was announced. His lawyer, Jessica Hedges, patted him on the back as a gesture of comfort. He didn’t seem deterred by the ruling; outside the courthouse, he gave reporters a middle finger as he left.

Berklee confirmed to The Epoch Times that Mr. Wu is no longer enrolled at the school.

“His actions are contrary to Berklee’s fundamental principles and values. Berklee supports the right of all to express their opinions on matters of public concern and does not condone threatening behavior by anyone,” a college spokesperson wrote in an email.

“No one in this country should ever be subjected to threats of violence or a cyberstalking harassment campaign for expressing their political views,” Joshua S. Levy, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in a statement on the day of Mr. Wu’s conviction.

“Mr. Wu now stands as a convicted felon for his illegal efforts to suppress speech by a fellow Berklee School of Music student who was critical of the government of China. This type of conduct will never be tolerated.”

Chinese Student Groups as CCP Proxies

A key incident that sparked the formation of the GWU ICSU was an awareness campaign carried out at the start of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

On Feb. 3, 2022, the day before the Games began, students posted on campus artwork highlighting the CCP’s human rights abuses of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, and Beijing’s zero-COVID policy.

Within 24 hours, the GWU CSSA responded, stating that the posters had “serious racist views” and that they were “a naked attack on the Chinese nation.” The message called for others to help pressure the school to force a public apology from the students involved and called for the school to “punish them severely.”

In an email responding to a Chinese student’s complaint about the posters, GWU’s then-interim president, Mark Wrighton, wrote back that he was “personally offended” by the posters and “saddened by this terrible event.” He promised to “undertake an effort to determine who is responsible.”

Days later, under media scrutiny and protests by human rights organizations, Mr. Wrighton issued a statement acknowledging that his initial response was a mistake. He said the school wouldn’t investigate students who displayed the posters or take action against them.

Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit organization for freedom in education, said that even though GWU dropped its investigation, it still had the power to look through security tapes to identify the students critical of China.

After speaking to some involved students, she wrote an in-depth report of the GWU incident.

“Just how scary it is for students this idea that, in the United States, on a campus where their speech rights should be protected, they might have to ask themselves, ‘Am I really free?’” she told The Epoch Times.

CSSAs are known for acting as on-campus proxies to the CCP.

A 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government, named CSSAs as an example of quasi-official entities in the CCP’s network to “influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies.”

The Commission’s 2023 annual report states that CSSA members might be used as informants to surveil Chinese dissidents in universities.

There are about 150 CSSA chapters across the United States; many of which obtain funding from the Chinese Embassy or its consulates. The Georgetown University CSSA got about half of its annual budget from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, according to a report in Foreign Policy.

Ms. McLaughlin said the close alignment between Chinese consulates and CSSA chapters raises a significant concern.

She said the biggest fear of Chinese international students is: “I’ve crossed countries and oceans to get here. But how far am I really from the Chinese government and from people who might be watching very closely what I’m doing?”

Ms. McLaughlin said censorship affects everyone.

“I tell people that they should understand that when one person can’t speak, that affects them, too,” she said. “Speech isn’t just about what someone can say; it’s also about what someone can hear.

“Because what the Chinese government does, what the country of China does, is a really big part of the world that we all live in.”

Last October, in a speech to 70 university presidents, Mr. Gallagher said Congress should stop the operations of student groups that take guidance or money from foreign governments.

Persecution Exported to the US

In another example on a campus in Nebraska, a Chinese doctoral student was left wondering whether he was truly free.

At an on-campus festival in August 2019, a group of Chinese students covered Wang Jianghao’s booth with a giant, 12-foot-wide Chinese national flag.

Mr. Wang, a computer science major at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, was there to introduce his student club to Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that the CCP has persecuted since 1999.

The red flag “carried a threat in a direct dialogue fashion,” he told The Epoch Times. “The message I received was, ‘Even though you are in America, a land of freedom and peace, we can still reach you.’”

He said it felt like the message came from the CCP itself.

“'You cannot escape its claws.’ It was that kind of a message,” Mr. Wang said.

He recalled realizing that he wasn’t completely safe in the United States.

Mr. Wang said he knew he was the target of an organized intimidation and harassment effort because a Chinese student had warned him about what was going to happen half an hour earlier. Acquiring a Chinese national flag of that size in or outside of China usually takes political backing.

He recalled that the group with the red flag took photos and videos of him and his friends with professional cameras. He wondered if those pictures and footage ended up in a nearby Chinese consulate.

Before the Chinese group showed up, Mr. Wang and his friends had been demonstrating the Falun Gong exercises and passing out flyers about the practice to passersby.

They had been focusing on the practice itself, rather than the CCP’s ongoing persecution of it in China, which felt so far removed from the Midwestern city. Compared to other public universities on the East and West coasts, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln isn’t a top destination for international students from China.

However, the giant red flag thrust the persecution into the conversation.

The number of Falun Gong adherents had reached 70 million to 100 million in China at the cusp of the persecution in 1999, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks human rights abuses against the spiritual practice group. The organization’s statistics show several million detained and hundreds of thousands tortured, with 5,000 documented deaths as a direct result of the persecution.

Mr. Wang said that while people have the right to speak against Falun Gong and express their views by creating a club or having their own booth, what happened at the festival was harassment to silence others with opposing viewpoints—a classic CCP tactic.

The CCP’s influence on campuses, he said, is like “pollution” to American communities.

Ms. Li, an undergraduate student at an elite liberal arts college, said she experienced such communist pollution in her Chinese language class. She used a pseudonym for fear of reprisal from the CCP.

During the 2022 fall semester, she realized that some of her Chinese course materials promoted communism. The “Discussing Everything Chinese” textbook used in her Chinese language course talks about “love of the Party.”

Ms. Li recalled “very jarring” content in the curriculum.

A lesson in the textbook repeats CCP propaganda used to justify the regime’s decadeslong persecution of Falun Gong. The book whitewashes the state-sanctioned repression campaign, which has been described by some analysts as a genocide, casting it as a mere “restriction of Falun Gong’s development.”

“I was pretty upset to see it portray practitioners and the practice as something strange, violent, and dangerous because I know that that is definitely propaganda from the CCP,” Ms. Lim who has been practicing Falun Gong with her mother since childhood, told The Epoch Times.

“I think it perpetuates CCP propaganda in a way that shouldn’t occur on our campus, especially as a school that prizes intellectual freedom and in a country that values religious freedom.”

The book author claims Ms. Li’s university as one of her many clients.

According to Ms. Li, her instructor said at the beginning of the course that the textbook was for language learning only and was sympathetic to her concerns but he didn’t change the textbook.

“Just knowing that very smart, very intellectual people in my class that I know are going to become leaders in the future in our country are being exposed to China and its culture and history through the lens of the CCP was pretty disheartening,” Ms. Li said. “I was definitely upset to see that being taught at our school.”

Her case was listed in an April 2023 Falun Info Center report, which also includes cases of interference with student events related to Falun Gong, with the majority of them involving CSSAs.

Funding With Strings Attached

Critics say U.S. universities aren’t more proactive in guarding their campuses from CCP influence because of money.

“When foreign governments give money to our universities, they don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts; they want something in return,“ Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) said in December 2023 during a floor vote. ”Whether it’s terror-friendly states like Qatar and Iran, or brutal human rights abusers like the CCP, our campuses must not become puppets of countries who hate America

On the same day, legislation that Ms. Steel proposed to lower U.S. colleges’ reporting threshold to $0 from $250,000 on funding from China was approved by the House. The bill has yet to pass the Senate.

Although the Higher Education Act requires these institutions to disclose any foreign money donations above $250,000, a Department of Education investigation in 2020 discovered unreported college funding totaling more than $6.5 billion from China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

Over the past decade, U.S. universities have increasingly depended on Chinese funding sources for tuition and grants. According to 2020 statistics by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chinese students pay about $12 billion in tuition annually. Since 2013, donations and contracts with Chinese sources have amounted to $1 billion.

In October 2023, Stanford University settled with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pay $1.9 million for failing to disclose foreign funding that 12 faculty members received for their research programs with federal grants.

One involved Stanford professor was also employed by Fudan University, a prominent school in Shanghai, according to the DOJ. Stanford admitted no liability and promised to work with the National Science Foundation on the “best practices in the areas of gifts funding research projects” and “current and pending support disclosures,” according to the DOJ statement.

Ms. McLaughlin said self-censorship, which is “notoriously difficult to track,” is a significant risk associated with Chinese funding.

Despite the CCP’s seemingly iron grip on its populace, Mr. Zhang is hopeful. He said his confidence comes from being able to see through the CCP.

“Their action, from my perspective, shows either fear or anger—and anger is also linked to fear,” he said.

The CCP goes after dissidents because “a lot of activists are posing a real kind of threat to their power, to their control,” according to Mr. Zhang.

“It’s a game of chicken,” he said. “Whoever gets so afraid, gets fearful enough to back out, that person loses.

“Because what they are—doing [what] they’ve always been doing—they’re not changing. If I change, I’m just letting them win. So I'll continue doing what I’m doing, and maybe someday change will happen.”