You’re listening to part one of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Elsa Johnson, student at Stanford University and managing editor for the Stanford Review, conducted by Dr. William Saunders, director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the rest of this interview, click the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: Hi, welcome to another edition of the Barefoot Lawyer podcast. I’m William Saunders, I am the Director of the Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America, where our distinguished fellow is Chen Guangcheng, the very famous Barefoot Lawyer for whom the podcast is named. Now, he’s not with us today; I will be conducting the interview with Elsa Johnson.
She is a student at Stanford University who has had experience with communist Chinese activities in the United States. So, she has a story to tell us which I hope, for those of you listening who are students, you will pay attention, and for those of you who are not students, you will share this with the students in your life so that they can learn from this and be ready.
So Elsa, let me turn it over to you. Maybe you could tell us, first of all, about your… what you do; I know you’re a student, but maybe tell us what year you are, what you’re studying; I believe you’re an editor of a newspaper. Just to give people a sense of who you are, and where you’re from.
Elsa Johnson: Yeah, thank you. I’m excited to be on. Like you said, my name is Elsa Johnson. I will be a junior at Stanford this year. I study East Asian Studies with a focus on China. I am a managing editor at The Stanford Review, which is sort of our independent contrarian newspaper. I’m also the president of the Stanford Republican Club.
So this experience with the Chinese spy, so to speak, happened right after my freshman year.
I’d just gotten out for the summer, in June, and I was doing research for the Hoover Institution, which is our conservative think-tank on campus. I was doing China research.
The experience was so strange to me because, a few days prior to Charles Chen reaching out to me, I’d had a conversation with one of my bosses at the Hoover Institute about Chinese recruitment tactics and how they target American academics to collaborate, and try to get people to go to China.
In reality, even though these efforts seem friendly, they actually are far more nefarious, and oftentimes the Chinese government will try to discover information about someone and eventually use it against them. They will use various financial incentives to try to get people to go to China; these carrots and sticks that the CCP uses on American citizens.
A few days after I had this conversation, a man named Charles Chen reached out to me on Instagram, through direct messages. At first, I thought nothing of it. I had a lot of mutual followers with him on Instagram. I think there were over 100 mutual friends, so I obviously assumed that he was also a Stanford student. I’d seen a few photos of Stanford on his profile; I had no reason to think that this was something besides a student reaching out to me.
He asked me right away, “Have we met on campus?” He told me he was from China, and I was trying to engage with him. Then he ended up asking me in Mandarin if I speak Chinese, and that was the first red flag for me.
I grew up going to a Chinese immersion school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am fluent in Mandarin, but this was something that I’d never told him about, and I didn’t have any idea how he knew this about me. My alarm bells were going off at this point, but I decided to keep the conversation going.
It got to the point where he was telling me that I should go to China, offering to pay for all of my accommodations. He wanted me to buy the ticket, interestingly, which I’ve heard is the case in a lot of these situations, oddly enough. Maybe it makes it less traceable or something.
But, he sent me screenshots of his bank account to prove that he could pay for it. He was sending me videos of Americans who could speak Mandarin and who had become famous or wealthy in China for their Mandarin abilities, and was not so subtly hinting to me that I, too, could have some sort of prosperity in China.
Every time I would say, “No, I’m not interested,” or, “I don’t have the money to go to China right now.” He was very persistent. Then he also sent me a non-visa requirement for traveling, and this was a policy that China had recently instated where I could go to China for one to six days without a visa.
That was also a big red flag for me, because traveling to China in particular without a visa, I think, can be really dangerous. There have been a lot of stories where Americans go to China and are denied exit, so I can imagine going without a visa is also something that is probably on the more dangerous end.
W: Yeah. Let me just, Sorry interrupt you, but just for our listeners, you know, we’ve been…Chen Guangcheng himself, of course, was put in black jail, and his attorney, who we considered and others considered to be the leading human rights lawyer in China, Gao Zhisheng, has disappeared into Chinese black jails for, now it’s been, seven years, and we continue to talk about and monitor his case and try to get the Chinese government to do something. And I just mention that because we’re gonna have subsequent shows about him talking about it.
And, I agree with you 100% that… Yeah, you could disappear into the system if you don’t have the proper documents, and even with them, you might disappear into the system. So I think that was very wise of you.
This has been part one of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Elsa Johnson. To listen to the rest of this interview, click the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.