The Chinese regime uses American campuses to exert control over students exercising free speech at college.
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.”
By Terri Wu
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