You’re listening to part four 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, check the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: Well, Elsa, thank you very much for, adding your personal experience of this to the other things we’ve discussed on the podcast. Is there anything you wanna say in conclusion?
Elsa Johnson: Yeah. I think one thing that I also… that is extremely important for me to emphasize is that Chinese nationals, Chinese citizens who are here in the United States and in China, are victims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Even though the CCP doesn’t distinguish between party and people, I think it’s really important that we, in the United States can separate the Chinese people from the Chinese Communist Party. And, the unfortunate reality is that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t care where their people are. They always will try to exert power over them and use them, to carry out their will, wherever that may be.
But, there are things that we can do to, protect these students.
Oftentimes, throughout the investigation that my friend and I did with The Stanford Review, we found that a lot of Chinese nationals are required to report on research they’re doing, what they’re studying; they have to do these reports with “handlers,” which is what the students that we talked to called them. And this is not something that they choose to do, they have to do it oftentimes. Maybe it’s an extension of a scholarship that they have, or it’s just something that the party requires them to do. But we’ve seen cases where Chinese nationals have said something anti-CCP in class, and then their parents are brought into a police station in China the next day.
So I think it’s important that we keep having these conversations because we also need to be advocates for Chinese nationals who aren’t able to report that these things are happening to them with the risk of their families getting in trouble in China.
W: Yeah. As you mentioned before, we call it “transnational repression,” and there is a great… there’s a lot of actions taken against Chinese in the United States by the Communist Party, including Guangcheng and others we’ve talked about on prior podcasts. Why don’t you say a word or two about the study you did for the Stanford Review?
E: Yeah. So in May, my friend Garrett and I published our investigation on CCP influence at Stanford, and this investigation took an entire year. My interest started after the Charles Chen situation, and then my friend, Garrett, on a trip to China through Stanford, and had conversations with Stanford-educated CCP members who were very openly pro-Uyghur genocide, talking about how the CCP can get students into Stanford.
So he and I came together with this great concern, and we started having a lot of conversations with professors at Stanford, students, Chinese national students at Stanford, Hoover Fellows, and we came to this conclusion.
And some of it wasn’t news to a lot of people, but I think people were very shocked to find that CCP influence – malign influence – at Stanford is rampant, and that, of the 1,100-plus Chinese national students at Stanford, a lot of them are required to report back to China about their research or their experiences at Stanford, and that we need to be aware this is happening, and we need to be careful with…
We need to be aware that this is happening, and so I think since Garrett and I published the investigation, we’ve also gotten a lot of information from other people, whether that be Chinese Americans, former or current military students at Stanford who have similar and even more shocking experiences. So…
W: Have you published that, any of those?
E: We are soon.
W: Can you tell the people listening how they could find the report that you all did? What webpage they should go to?
E: Yeah. So we published the report on stanfordreview.org. You can look up “Investigation: Chinese Spies at Stanford.” It was also published on The Free Press. So I think if you look up “Chinese spies Stanford,” you’ll be able to find it.
W: And your name.
E: Yep. Elsa Johnson, Garrett Molloy.
So I would encourage… not to be a plug for myself, but I would encourage everyone to read it, and be aware of this happening on your own campuses. It’s obviously … It goes beyond Stanford, it goes beyond Silicon Valley. So, I think it’s important that students are on the lookout.
W: Yeah. yeah, this… the activities of communist party agents or students who are harassed into doing things by the CCP because their families are still in China, that’s something that we’ve reported on, and always seems to bubble up one way or another. Sometimes it’s through these Confucius Institutes, which many of which have gone away, but some of which haven’t, and some of which have just been renamed. So, people need to be aware of the threat within academia to academic freedom, and democratic freedom, and public discourse by these activities. So I think it’s great. I’ll plug you. I think it’s great you did that study, and I hear that you’re going to do another one.
And people need to read them. We need to be aware of these threats to freedom.
E: Yeah. thank you. I appreciate the support. I completely agree with you. I think we really need to safeguard American values. And yeah, Garrett, my co-author, and I, we have a couple pieces in the works right now, also investigations. So, we’ve found some very shocking stories and accounts from Stanford students that we are excited to get out in the world, that we wanna expose.
W: Well, you stay in touch with us and we’ll bring you back on to talk about these other things that… your other investigative reports.
E: Oh, awesome. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, we’re really excited. We’ve gotten a lot more support than I think we originally thought we would. We assumed that we would be called racist by everyone, which is obviously very frustrating to hear and also very untrue.
W: Well, yeah, because the primary victims of the CCP are Chinese people.
E: Exactly. And that’s exactly what Beijing wants everyone to believe, is that if you want… This issue is untouchable because it’s “racist.”
That would be exactly what the CCP wants Americans to believe, because that would mean that we would do nothing about this.
W: Yeah. The primary victims are Chinese people, so when you bring attention to this, it’s the opposite of racist. You’re helping somebody who’s a different race. It’s an idiotic kind of thing, but it can fool people. I think it’s important for people to realize the primary victims are Chinese people, and they’re both in China, but also, as we talked about, this transnational repression of democratic voices by Chinese people in other countries.
E: Exactly.
W: Okay, Elsa. Listen, thank you very much for joining us. and I say to the listener, as I said, when … Subsequently, we’ll have Elsa back to talk about other developments and, again, if you are a non-student but you have students in your family, pass this information on to them.
And if you’re students, now you are alerted. Be on guard at your university. And this podcast will go up on our website. Again, it’s Humanrights.catholic.edu.
And, you can learn more about the various things we have done and are doing with Chen Guangcheng, the Barefoot Lawyer. So until next time, thank you for joining us for this episode of the Barefoot Lawyer Reports.
This has been Part Four of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Elsa Johnson. To listen to the rest of this interview, check the link in the description, or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.