The following is an excerpt from congressional testimony by Stanford student Elsa Johnson, a junior specializing in East Asian Studies, about how the Chinese Communist Party tried to recruit her—then harassed her when she reported what was happening. Her testimony has been published in full by The Times [UK] (March 31, 2026).
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In June 2024, a few days after I spoke with one of my supervisors at Hoover about Chinese recruitment tactics targeting American academics, a man calling himself Charles Chen reached out to me on Instagram. He had over a hundred mutual followers with me and had photos of Stanford on his profile. I had no reason to believe he was anything other than a fellow student.
Over the following weeks, Chen’s messages grew more concerning. He told me he was from China and asked detailed questions about my research and background in Chinese. He offered to pay for a trip to China, sent me a flight itinerary from Los Angeles to Shanghai and sent screenshots of a bank wire to prove he could afford my accommodations once I got there. He also sent me a document outlining a policy that would allow me to travel to China without a visa. He sent me videos of Americans who had gotten rich and famous in China and insisted that I, too, could find wealth and fame in the PRC.
Later on, he began incessantly pressuring me to move our conversation to WeChat, a Chinese government-monitored messaging app….
Then, in July, he publicly commented on one of my Instagram posts in Mandarin, asking me to delete the screenshots I had taken of our private conversation. I had not told anyone I had taken screenshots, and I do not know how he knew. The only explanation I could come up with was that my phone or my account had been compromised somehow.
No Stanford affiliation
I contacted two China experts at Stanford whom I trusted and they connected me with an FBI contact who handled CCP-related espionage cases at the university.
I met with the FBI in September and handed over everything I had. The FBI confirmed that Charles Chen had no real affiliation with Stanford. He had likely posed as a student for years and used multiple fabricated social media profiles to target students researching China-related topics. I was told he was likely operating on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security. I later found out that I was one of at least ten other female students targeted by Charles Chen since 2020.
My experience with Charles Chen was only the beginning of what I have gone on to experience from the CCP. After I wrote a first-person account of my experience in The Times of London, the repression only worsened.
Last summer, while conducting research on China in Washington, DC, I began receiving regular phone calls from unknown US numbers. When I answered the calls in English, the callers would switch to Mandarin. In one case, the caller referenced my mother. These bizarre calls were intimidation attempts, designed to remind me that neither my family, nor I, is safe from transnational repression by the CCP.
Then, this past fall the FBI informed me that I am being physically monitored on Stanford’s campus by agents of the Chinese Communist Party. They told me that my family is also at risk and is being monitored. As a 21-year-old who grew up loving the Chinese language and culture, I never imagined that studying it would put me in a position where a foreign intelligence service is tracking my movements on my own campus and monitoring my family. I fear for my safety and for my family’s safety.
The intimidation calls have not stopped….
Part of a pattern
My experience is disturbing, but it reflects a much larger pattern playing out on campuses across the country.
According to Freedom House, the Chinese government is the greatest perpetrator of transnational repression targeting students and scholars in the United States. Their 2024 report found that international students and faculty face surveillance and coercion by foreign governments. More than 1.3 million international students study at American colleges and universities, yet many are unable to exercise the freedoms that are supposed to define an American education.
There is also infrastructure already embedded on American campuses that facilitates this system.
Chinese Students and Scholars Associations exist at roughly 150 American colleges and universities, including Stanford. The US State Department has stated plainly that the CCP created the CSSA to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the Party’s stance.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission found in 2018 that CSSAs receive guidance from the CCP through Chinese embassies and consulates, and that they are active in carrying out work consistent with Beijing’s United Front strategy. In some cases, the local Chinese consulate must approve CSSA presidential candidates. Documents obtained by Foreign Policy showed that at Georgetown, the CSSA accepted embassy funding amounting to roughly half its total annual budget….
The CCP’s United Front uses these organizations as vehicles for surveillance and influence without the consent or awareness of most participants. Congressman Tim Walberg has co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, requesting that CSSAs be evaluated for designation as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act. This is a very important step in the right direction. Universities should not fund or officially recognize organizations that function as extensions of a foreign intelligence apparatus, and students within those organizations deserve to know the truth about the institutional ties that govern them.
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires postsecondary institutions to disclose foreign gifts or contracts totaling $250,000 or more, and the Department of Education recently approved a new foreign funding reporting portal that launched earlier this year…. For far too long, Section 117 enforcement has been neglected. A bipartisan Senate investigation found that 70 per cent of schools with a Confucius Institute that received more than $250,000 in a given year failed to report it properly….
Looking the other way
Universities have financial incentives to look the other way. Chinese students contribute an estimated $12 billion in tuition to American institutions annually. Without external pressure, universities are reluctant to take any action that would disrupt that revenue stream, even when a foreign government is coercing their students.
Stanford recently issued a statement saying it was looking into the reports and had reached out to federal law enforcement. That was almost a year ago. Nothing meaningful has changed….
When students and researchers know they are being watched but have nowhere to turn, they self-censor and stop collaborating openly. The very qualities that make American universities engines of innovation are being undermined by a threat that the universities themselves refuse to acknowledge….
Stanford should build a dedicated office to handle cases of transnational repression. Students who come forward should be met with a clear and secure process. This is an administrative decision that the university can make tomorrow.
Stanford should stop treating transnational repression as a secret. Information about transnational repression should be incorporated into the onboarding process for incoming students and faculty. Students arrive on campus with no understanding of the threat they face and no knowledge of where to turn if they are targeted….
I urge Congress to continue strengthening enforcement of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. I also urge the Senate to take up the DETERRENT Act, which passed the House in March 2025 with bipartisan support. The bill would lower the minimum reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 for most foreign gifts and down to zero for gifts from countries of concern, including China. Transparency about foreign money is the necessary foundation for everything else.
Finally, I ask the Committee to recognize that this is a human rights issue as much as a national security issue. Chinese international students who are coerced into reporting on their classmates are themselves victims. Any policy response must protect them. The goal is to make all students free to pursue their education without fear that a foreign government will cross borders to punish them for it.
Also see:
The Times (UK): “I’m a Stanford student. A Chinese agent tried to recruit me as a spy” (August 28, 2025)
“For three months a man bombarded me with messages, trying to lure me to China with promises of money and fame. Now, I’m revealing his tactics.”
U.S. Congress: “Section 117 of the Higher Education Act: Reporting of Foreign Gifts and Contracts”
“As of February 23, 2026, Qatar was the country of attribution with the largest dollar amount of reported transactions (about $8.8 billion), representing about 1,300 transactions. China was the country of attribution with the second largest dollar amount of reported transactions (about $4.9 billion), representing about 8,000 transactions.”
U.S. Congress: “DETERRENT Act”
“To amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to strengthen disclosure requirements relating to foreign gifts and contracts, to prohibit contracts between institutions of higher education and certain foreign entities and countries of concern, and for other purposes.”
