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CHINA MEDIA BULLETIN

Issue No.187: January 2025

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/ Read Online

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A monthly update of media freedom news and analysis related to China

For daily updates in the Chinese language, follow FH_China

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on X.



Analysis: Can the U.S. Find a Balance between Scientific Openness and Security?

In the News:

Censorship and surveillance

Harassment and detentions

Hong Kong

Beyond China

Read Online

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Can the U.S. Find a Balance between Scientific Openness and Security?

The real threat of Chinese espionage should not lead to wrongful persecution of Chinese scientists and students.​​​​​

By Yaqiu Wang

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In online spaces where Chinese students and researchers congregate, complaints about the state of scientific research in China abound. Online censorship makes accessing international research resources difficult; universities lack mechanisms to address sexual harassment by senior scientists; there is widespread corruption in grant-making processes; and scientists are being forced to attend

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classes on “Xi Jinping Thought.”

These are among the reasons why, every year, many of China’s best and brightest flock to the United States to study and build careers in America’s relatively open, free, and transparent environment for science and technology research. (There is no database of all domestic and international students in the United States, but it’s likely that more than 200,000 undergraduate and graduate students

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from China come to the U.S. each year to study STEM subjects.) Many will eventually become American citizens and raise families in the United States. “Our Nation [sic] leads global scientific progress by example, promoting core principles of freedom of inquiry, scientific integrity, collaboration, and openness,” said

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Kelvin Droegemeier, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under the first Trump Administration.

However, in recent years, the U.S. government has taken steps to restrict that openness—some for good reason. According to U.S. intelligence agencies

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and independent research, U.S. federal research funding has helped advance Chinese technologies with military applications, and the Chinese government and military also benefit from extensive industrial espionage by the Chinese government. Such espionage is not only undertaken by professional intelligence agents. U.S. intelligence officials also worry that due to the tight control China’s government exerts over Chinese citizens, Chinese people or those with family members back in China are vulnerable to coercion and might not be able to refuse if Beijing asks them to gather intelligence.

In the past year, I have participated in various private and public discussions about this issue, including the National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), where senior leaders in the scientific and national security entities convene to explore solutions. While the national security and scientific communities have made significant progress in forging mutual understanding, I have been concerned by the lack of focus on the rights and freedoms of the people who are most affected by the changing policies, namely Chinese scientists and researchers studying and working in the U.S. The narrow focus on “national security” risks undermining American freedom—as well as security—in the long run.

There have already been missteps. The China Initiative is an example. Launched in 2018 by the Department of Justice under the Trump Administration to prosecute economic espionage of national security significance, the program lacked the guardrails necessary to ensure its efficacy, and quickly drifted to targeting scientists of Chinese origin

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for relatively minor violations of grant disclosure rules. While the initiative achieved some notable convictions (such as that of Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber

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), some key criminal prosecutions the initiative generated were dismissed before trial or ended in acquittal due to a lack of evidence (such as the cases of Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gang Chen and University of Kansas chemist Feng Tao).

The financial and reputational costs

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for those targeted for prosecution have been ruinous and the emotional toll long-lasting. Tao of University of Kansas had to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars

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from family in China and members of his church in Kansas to pay legal fees. “I am still often woken up by my wife’s cries in her dreams as she remembers the police shouting beside her bed that morning I was arrested,” Chen of MIT said

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three years after his ordeal.

U.S. law enforcement’s conduct in one program affects the effectiveness of its other endeavors. The FBI has been working to address the Chinese government’s efforts to silence its critics abroad, including engaging in outreach to diaspora groups that may be targeted. Freedom House

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, however, found that FBI involvement in the China Initiative, which included agents speaking on campuses about the proper way to report foreign ties, made Chinese students more wary of contacting law enforcement to report transnational repression from the Chinese authorities.

In early 2022, the Biden Administration ended the China Initiative, saying it had created a “harmful perception” of bias against people with “racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China.” According to a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the termination of the China Initiative “lessened” but did not “fully expunge” the chill felt by ethnic Chinese and other Asian-American students and faculty.

While the Biden Administration deserves credit for ending the China Initiative, the U.S. government’s newer programs have generated fresh criticism. Researchers have found that instead of targeting prominent academics already in the U.S., the government is now increasingly questioning and turning back Ph.D. and postdoctoral students from China at airports

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. This type of border policing may be based on Presidential Proclamation 10043

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, a May 2020 policy intended to counter China’s military-civil fusion strategy

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by restricting access to the United States for researchers connected to unnamed PRC institutions engaged in the strategy. Customs and Border Protection agents are taking actions against Chinese travelers without public oversight or accountability. And unlike those facing prosecution in U.S. courts, the people denied entry have few legal avenues

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to contest these decisions.

The increasing atmosphere of mistrust in the U.S. is widely discussed among Chinese people considering studying and working in the U.S. On 1 Point 3 Acres, a Chinese-language website catering to overseas Chinese, I found dozens of posts by Chinese students telling stories of being barred from boarding flights to the U.S., having their visas revoked by Customs agents, being paid visits by the FBI on campus, or learning that job offers had been rescinded. While I did not independently verify these accounts, the feelings of helplessness, fear, anger, and pain were palpable. One student who said their visa was revoked after returning to China for vacation wrote

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, “I have done absolutely nothing, but have become a victim of geopolitical gaming…[I] just can’t accept this ending.” “We cannot get back what we have experienced and lost, the hurt will be buried quietly with the passing of time,” a Ph.D. graduate who said her job offer at a national lab had been rescinded for unknown reasons lamented

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. “I feel deeply that we are just grains of sand tossed around by this moment in time. Our destiny is out of our control.”

At the same time, while some universities have rightly spoken up for their faculty and students, and pushed back at the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict academic freedom on their campuses, they have done little when the Chinese government has reached across borders to suppress the freedoms of Chinese students and scholars.

Freedom House research

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shows China’s government poses a major threat to international students and scholars studying and working in the U.S. Chinese authorities and their affiliates have harassed and intimidated Chinese students and scholars for speaking critically of Beijing. Some students interviewed by Freedom House reported that their classroom discussions were surveilled and relayed to staff at the Chinese embassy. Others said Chinese authorities interrogated them about their activities in the U.S. when they returned to China, or that their families were harassed when the students were still in the U.S. Yet most universities fell short in addressing Beijing’s transnational repression, formulating responses reactively and on an ad hoc basis, sometimes even counterproductively.

As tension between the U.S. and China continues to rise, some Chinese researchers and scientists studying and working in the U.S. told me that they have increasingly found themselves in an impossible position. On the one hand, they fear being approached by Chinese intelligence officers who can coerce them into disclosing their activities in the U.S. and handing over proprietary information. If they dissent, agents of the Chinese government can silence them by targeting their families back in China, or even by threatening them in the U.S. On the other hand, they also say they are fearful of being approached by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officers who may suspect them of cooperating with Chinese intelligence. One established scientist working in a U.S. laboratory told me, “I just don’t go back to China anymore. I don’t want trouble from either side.”

Balancing scientific collaboration and national security is necessary, but it needs to be accomplished in a way that respects the rights of legitimate students and scientists. The not-so-distant history of excesses in anticommunist and antiterrorist crackdowns in the U.S. shows that, if not managed carefully, efforts to root out “Chinese spies” could spiral into long-lasting damage to American society as a whole.

Building trust with the Chinese scientist and researcher community—and the Chinese diaspora community at large—is critical to the success of any efforts to combat Beijing’s espionage activities. Though counterintelligence officers have made efforts to identify espionage threats, the Chinese scientists I have spoken to do not feel that officials have made an effort to build trust with scientists and understand their lives in the U.S. If Chinese scientists and researchers see U.S. authorities as knowledgeable, just, and accountable, they will be much more willing to report transnational repression and attempts at espionage.

Placing trust in people and keeping a system open and free has inherent risks. Inevitably, Beijing will succeed in exploiting America’s tradition of academic openness in some ways. But the United States must not lose sight of the bigger picture. It should remain confident that the overwhelming majority of people from China studying and working in the United States are here because the country gives them a better life, and that they want to take part in and contribute to America’s freedom and prosperity, not undermine it. Those people’s experience of freedom in the U.S., in turn, can contribute to their support for democracy for Chinese people by showing that there is an alternative to the repressive system of the Chinese Communist Party. In the struggle between democratic and authoritarian systems, democracies must rely on the strength of their openness.

In 2023, a Chinese student said in an online post that she had been awarded a full scholarship to a Ph.D. program in chemistry at a U.S. university but was then refused a visa at the American consulate in Guangzhou because she had attended a Chinese university on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. “[I] walked out of the consulate crying. That feeling, my friends,” she wrote. The American consulate might have acted in accordance with the law, but it shattered a Chinese person’s “American dream” before she even came to the U.S.

​​​Yaqiu Wang is the research director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House. This article was also published by the China File

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on January 22, 2025.





Censorship and surveillance

TikTok refugees face censorship on RedNote: Following the Supreme Court’s January 17 ruling upholding

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the sell-or-ban law, which requires TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to divest its interest in TikTok or be banned in the United States, a sizeable number of TikTok users flocked to another Chinese-owned platform, RedNote (also known as Xiaohongshu). The sudden influx has prompted RedNote to launch a recruitment drive, hiring censors to monitor English-language posts on the platform, according

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to a Radio Free Asia (RFA) report. Some of the new users, self-described as “TikTok refugees

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,” have already faced censorship, with their posts about sexual orientation and Japanese anime reportedly scrubbed

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from the platform. Additionally, when netizens from China and the United States began comparing notes on living costs on the platform, content suggesting that living costs may not be better in China was quickly removed, and at least one account posting such content was banned, according to civil journalist Teacher Li on X

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.

Emerging AI model shadowed by censorship: On January 20, little-known Chinese company DeepSeek released

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its first artificial intelligence (AI) model. DeepSeek claimed

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that the model rivals its US competitors in performance while operating at only a fraction of the cost, leading to a market value slump

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for major US tech companies including Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. As the AI model’s rapid rise drew global attention, journalists

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and netizens

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testing the chatbot found themselves battling with censorship—when the model was asked about sensitive subjects, such as Chinese leaders and COVID-19-related polices, the bot cut off responses mid-sentence, erased previously generated content, and suggested that users talk about something else.

Concerns over generic drug failures: Surgeons and hospital chiefs in Shanghai and Beijing have raised concerns

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over the efficacy of domestic generic drugs—low-cost medications procured nationally and widely used in public hospitals—and called on

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the government to expand patient access to brand-name drugs under the national insurance scheme. Physicians have shared their observations

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about the generic drugs’ failures online, sparking agreement

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among many frontline doctors, as highlighted by a January 18 article published by Dingxiangyuan, an online community of health professionals. The article was quickly censored. However, doctors’ concerns alarmed the public and invited increased scrutiny of domestic generic drugs. Several civil journalists continued to investigate, and uncovered

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striking similarities in the consistency evaluation data for the generic drugs submitted by different pharmaceutical companies. Although the reports were censored, public outcry persisted. The National Medical Products Administration, which oversees drug regulations, attributed the alleged data plagiarism to “editorial errors,” and reportedly made consistency evaluation data for domestic generic drugs unavailable

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for the public to download.





Harassment and detentions

Filmmaker sentenced: On January 6, a court in Shanghai sentenced

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independent filmmaker Chen Pinlin to 3 years and 6 months in prison. Chen was detained in November 2023, after he released a documentary on the nationwide White Paper Movement via YouTube, X, and other platforms. Upon his detention, his YouTube and X accounts were deleted. Chen was formally arrested in January 2024 and charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” The arbitrary detention and conviction gravely concerned the international community, prompting the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders and other UN experts to address

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the issue in their September 2024 communication to the Chinese government. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International

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and the Committee to Protect Journalists

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, have advocated for Chen’s release.

Human rights defenders in court: On January 6, a Jiangsu court rejected human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng’s appeal, upholding

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his three-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” Yu and his wife, human rights activist Xu Yan, were detained in April 2023 while en route to meet the EU delegation in Beijing. Both Yu and his wife were convicted on the same charge in October 2024. Xu was sentenced to 21 months and was released

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on January 13. In another case, in December 2024, after a seven-minute trial, a court in Shanghai upheld a seven-year prison sentence for blogger Ruan Xiaohuan, Ruan’s wife disclosed

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on X. Using the pseudonym Program Think, Ruan has penned hundreds of articles since 2009 on topics ranging from circumventing Chinese internet restrictions to book recommendations. He was convicted

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of “inciting subversion of state power” in February 2023.

Uyghurs sentenced for Quran study: A Xinjiang-based Uyghur woman was sentenced to 17 years’ imprisonment for teaching 10 Quranic verses to her children and a neighbor, according

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to a January 10 RFA report. Her two sons and the neighbor respectively received seven-, ten-, and nine-year prison sentences for participating in “illegal religious education” and “illegal underground religious activities.”





Hong Kong

Activist’s associates questioned: On January 13, the national security police detained

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Robert Chung, the head of the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (HKPORI), on the suspicion

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that he had “rendered assistance to a wanted person,” which is believed to refer to HKPORI’s former deputy head, Chung Kim-wah, one of the six exiled activists added

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to the police force’s wanted list in December 2023. According to the government’s press release, the police also searched

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Robert Chung’s residence and workplace. Following Robert Chung’s brief detention, seven other individuals connected to Chung Kim-wah, including his wife and son

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, three of his siblings

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, and two of his former HKPORI colleagues

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, were brought in for questioning. Robert Chung was also questioned

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a second time on January 27.

Beyond China

Uyghur men face deportation: A group of 43 Uyghur men detained in Thailand face the threat of forced repatriation, the Associated Press reported

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on January 11. These men were initially detained by Thai authorities in 2014 as part of a group of over 300 Uyghur people who had left China to escape persecution. In 2015, 173 of the detainees, mostly women and children, were sent to Turkey, while 109 others were forcefully deported

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to China. The 43 men have since remained in detention. In early January, they were reportedly pressured into signing voluntary deportation papers and posing

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for photographs. Some of the men have since launched a hunger strike to protest their imminent deportation. Members of the international community, including the United Nations and Freedom House, have urged Thai authorities to halt

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the deportation and facilitate

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the men’s resettlement to a third country.

Canada-based student harassed: A leaked document obtained by Voice of America

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(VOA) suggests that the Chinese government may be escalating surveillance on Chinese nationals overseas. Li Ning, a student living in Canada, reported that a Hubei policeman surnamed Wu shared the document, issued by Xinjiang authorities, with him in January. Wu reportedly contacted Li through his father in China, and demanded that Li state his Canadian address. The police officer reportedly only shared the document at Li’s insistence. The document lists the personal details of hundreds of individuals, and instructs provincial and municipal public security bureaus to verify each person. Li said he felt “terrified” and “targeted by the entire state apparatus” after seeing his name on the list, and feels that he may have been targeted for giving an interview to VOA in 2022 explaining why he had left China.





Take Action

Access uncensored content: Find an overview comparing popular circumvention tools and information on how to access them via GreatFire.org, here

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or here

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. Learn more about how to reach uncensored content and enhance digital security here

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.

Support a prisoner: Learn how to take action to help journalists and free expression activists, including those featured in past issues of the China Media Bulletin here

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.

Visit the China Media Bulletin Resources section: Learn more about how policymakers, media outlets, educators, and donors can help advance free expression in China and beyond via a new resource section

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on the Freedom House website.





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