Transnational repression an “everyday threat” on U.S. campuses
A federal jury has convicted a Chinese student at the Berklee College of Music of stalking and threatening a fellow student and activist who posted fliers in support of democracy in China.
Prosecutors said Xiaolei Wu, 26, sent the activist a series of messages on email, Instagram, and WeChat, writing, “Post more, I will chop your bastard hands off.” Wu also published the victim’s email address online and said he had reported the student’s actions to security officials in China who would question their family.
Wu, who was found guilty last week after a four-day trial, is part of a troubling trend in which authoritarian governments harass, intimidate, and surveil international students, visiting scholars, and foreign-born faculty members on American campuses, according to Freedom House.
In a report released today, the nonprofit human-rights group warns that transnational repression on American campuses is an “everyday threat” and that college leaders are not doing enough to protect vulnerable students and scholars and safeguard academic freedom.
“Universities and colleges are supposed to be places where we can have conversations about democracy and other sensitive issues,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director for strategy and design at Freedom House and one of the authors of the report. “It’s hard for people to understand that foreign governments can reach you if you live in the U.S. or Canada.”
In recent years, American colleges have become increasingly international, forming research partnerships, joint academic programs, and other collaborations with universities overseas. More than one million foreign students studied in the United States last year, and as many as one in five professors was born in another country.
These international linkages have important benefits, Gorokhovskaia and her co-author, Grady Vaughan, a research associate at Freedom House, said, exposing domestic students to global perspectives, expanding access to American degrees, and improving the quality of education and research. But the ties also have a downside, making colleges more at risk to repressive activity from abroad.
The report — the latest exploring the impact of transnational repression on particular sectors or communities, including journalism — catalogs a number of incidents, such as a firestorm in 2022 over posters critical of China’s human-rights effort at George Washington University and efforts in 2019 by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at McMaster University, in Canada, to work with local embassy officials to disrupt a campus speech by an activist from China’s Uyghur Muslim minority. The group was banned from McMaster’s campus later that year.
Episodes involving Chinese students have been more prominent, both because of Chinese-government efforts to limit dissent and because of the large number of Chinese students at American colleges — about one of every three international students. But Vaughan and Gorokhovskaia said other governments, including India, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia, have sought to exercise control over students and scholars abroad.
Some incidents are the result of direct government action, such as a graduate student in a human-rights seminar who was asked by officials at her country’s embassy to report on classroom discussion by fellow students from her country. (The Freedom House report does not name the country.)
In other cases, the pressure is less explicit, with government policy encouraging students, like Wu, to keep tabs on their classmates. Some students and scholars engage in self-censorship, like a student journalist at Yale University who was afraid her reporting on anti-Chinese-government protests in New Haven could endanger her family back home in China.
Gorokhovskaia noted that the students, professors, and administrators who spoke with Freedom House asked to do so anonymously because of concerns about the risk of being publicly identified.
Still, such incidents can fly under the radar because they can be hard to spot, like digital harassment, or appear minor, like removing fliers. But repression doesn’t just affect those who are its targets but everyone on campus, by narrowing academic freedom and silencing open discussion. “It worsens the climate for Americans,” Vaughan said. “It hurts the dialogue in the classroom.”
The report said that a lack of attention to transnational repression has left students and scholars to deal with its impact on their own, calling the lack of reporting mechanisms “by far the biggest weakness in existing campus responses.” It makes several recommendations for actions college leaders can take, including:
- Adopting a standard definition for transnational repression and identifying common tactics. Doing so will raise awareness among students and professors, the report said.
- Creating a mechanism for reporting incidents of foreign influence or harassment. The system should include safeguards for the rights of those accused of acting on behalf of foreign governments.
- Issuing statements of support for students and scholars affected by transnational repression, underscoring institutional commitments to free speech and academic freedom.
- Incorporating transnational repression into existing student and faculty codes of conduct. Modules on the issue can be included in student and professional orientations.
- Working with other colleges and academic associations to discuss experiences with transnational repression and share best practices.
The authors note that there have been some efforts to raise awareness of and combat transnational repression. The International Safety and Security Office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has created an information guide outlining the purpose and tactics of transnational repression and offering resources. Yale includes discussions of the issue during new faculty orientation. A joint commission of higher-education and government officials in Australia drafted guidance to protect students and scholars from foreign interference while retaining academic openness.
Gorokhovskaia and Vaughan acknowledge there may be limitations to institutional policies — for instance, some people may be hesitant to report incidents because of past experience with police in their home countries or concern that doing so could trigger unwanted scrutiny from law-enforcement or immigration officials. Colleges could make clear that mechanisms for reporting transnational repression don’t automatically notify law enforcement.
Still, Gorokhovskaia said it was important to bring more attention to the issue. Of affected students and scholars, she said, “they need our support. They need our awareness.”
As for Wu, the Berklee student, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a written statement that he would be sentenced at a later date by a federal judge. Each of the counts of which he was convicted include maximum penalties of up to five years in prison and fines of $250,000.