Global News

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/50160086

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/50159832

[Op-ed by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and the author, most recently, of, 'The Devil and Communist China'.]

I don’t know Elsa Johnson, the Stanford student who recently testified before Congress that she is being targeted by Chinese intelligence agents because her research and writing was critical of Beijing.

But it turns out that we have a lot in common.

I, too, have been targeted by Chinese intelligence agents and for the same reason: I was a Stanford scholar who published articles critical of the Communist regime.

In Johnson’s case the apparent agent first posed as a fellow student, asking her about her research and flattering her by saying she could become a social media star in China and make a lot of money. When he offered to arrange for a visa and pay her travel costs, her alarm bells went off.

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On one occasion a Chinese man posing as a political dissident first befriended me in person, attending talks I was giving at various California universities, and then not long after began offering all-expense-paid trips to China, complete with generous lecture fees and access to senior officials.

“You must visit the New China,” he urged me again and again in follow-up calls and texts. “You will be treated very well.”

I knew that the unspoken trade-off of accepting such largesse was having to tone down my criticism of China’s abysmal human rights record. I declined the offer. I have seen too many of my fellow China watchers go wobbly on China, if not become grovelling panda-huggers, after a few profitable trips there.

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The Chinese authorities were so apparently furious at my exposure of their brutal one-child policy — in which I documented forced abortions up to the point of birth — that it threatened to cancel the entire scholarly exchange programme between the US and China unless I was silenced. Stanford University itself, I learnt from my late colleague, Professor Arthur Wolf, was warned that it must “punish me severely for my crimes against the Chinese people” or else no Stanford scholars would ever again be allowed to do research in China.

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Punished for buying villagers a $4,000 truck

As I would ultimately testify in Congress, Stanford not only did not defend my right to publish my research on China’s crimes against its people, but it punished me for doing so. University officials, anxious to preserve their ties with China and bowing to its threats, began an investigation of my research in China that lasted five long years.

They actively collaborated with China to concoct a case against me, going so far as to ask the Beijing authorities to detail my supposed “crimes against the Chinese people”. The denunciation that Stanford received in return read like it came straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

It accused me of entering a restricted province (I had a valid travel document), of gifting Junan commune, where I lived, a small flatbed truck costing $4,000 (I wanted to help the villagers get their produce to market and alleviate their poverty), and — my personal favourite — of writing articles to “attack the Chinese people”.

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