Chinese students here tell of threats

Mark Muro, Globe Staff

11 July 1989

The Boston Globe

1989 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Five weeks after the Chinese government suppressed the pro-democracy movement, Chinese students in the Boston area say a wave of harassment and mysterious telephone calls has sent a new chill through their ranks.

Several students assert that they have been visited by diplomats from the Chinsese consulate in New York warning them to keep silent or asking the names of students who have participated in antigovernment activities.

A window was broken two weeks ago at the China Information Center at Newton's Walker Ecumenical Exchange, which has monitored events in China for the past several months. And for weeks, Chinese students have complained that they have received dozens of threatening calls and warnings not to speak, making them fearful for their futures and for their families at home.

Virtually all the students believe the Chinese government is behind the threats.

"They are watching us, they have eyes and ears here," said Jing Huang, a Harvard graduate student. He said he has given the FBI office in Boston and Somerville police tapes of five violent warnings he received on his answering machine from an anonymous caller with an Asian voice.

Pei Mingxing, another Harvard student who said he was visited recently by an official from the Chinese Consulate in New York, expressed anger at what he termed efforts by his government to silence student protest here.

"Sure, it could be crank calls, but I do not think so," he said yesterday. "The Chinese are very subtle: They don't say, 'If you appear on TV again your family will be shot.' Instead, they came into my apartment and politely said, 'You know, this could be surmised as treason.' So I am very worried."

Officials at the Chinese Consulate in New York yesterday denied they were harassing students.

Zhang Xiaoping, an education officer at the consulate, said yesterday, "so far we haven't done anything to our students. We have never sent anyone to Boston to do anything."

On Friday, Liang Jiang, vice consul, said, "there is no official order to say such things. It cannot be imagined."

The Boston episodes come in the wake of similar reports from around the country and after news reports that Chinese officials have videotaped student demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington and shown up at a student dorm at the University of New York at Stony Brook inquiring after the names of activists.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher had no comment on the student allegations at a news conference yesterday. But the Boston students have now joined others in Washington, New York and California who have reported harassment.

In Newton, Yian Liu of the China Information Center said the Center has received 20 or more calls in the past few weeks "saying things like 'Don't do too much, or you'll be killed.' "

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a politically active graduate student in physics said he has avoided meeting with friends, fearing he would get them in trouble, after a consular official telephoned him last week requesting the names of fellow student activists.

Pei said he was first visted by a Chinese official in May, before the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. He said the official stayed 2 1/2 hours "politely" chastising him for the "nonsense" of predicting on TV that the government would "machine-gun the students" if they demonstrated.

He said in recent weeks he has received five or six threatening phone calls and has since changed his address, taken an unlisted phone number and ordered a postbox.

A spokesman for the FBI office in Boston had no comment on whether it was investigating Pei's complaints of harassment.

Another graduate student at Brandeis, who also asked not to be named, said a New York consulate official called on several students in Cambridge and Newton during the past two weeks seeking names of organizers of rallies here and in Washington.

"They wanted to know who participated," he said, "but all we said is there are many, many of us. Never would we tell them a single name."

In Somerville, Jing, a 32-year-old political scientist, said his troubles began on June 8 after he returned to the United States from China and appeared on the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" describing the crackdown.

After midnight the next night, hours after another appearance on Channel 56, a message was left on his answering machine in thickly accented English saying "Hi. Congratulations. I hope you can earn more money and be a very important guy."

Three days later, after taping another television interview, he said he received a second message in Chinese:

"Jing! Be careful. Be very careful," the caller said.

The next night, he said, he received a similar message: "Must be very careful. Why did you do such bad things? If you continue, be careful about yourself and your family."

Later he found two more messages, including one in which the caller said: "You jerk! You jerk! We'll beat you up. Shame on you."

Jing, who played the messsages last week for a Globe reporter, said he is convinced the Chinese government is responsible for the calls.

Zhang of the Chinese consulate denied the charge. "So far we haven't taken any names or spoke to anyone like that," he said.

However, the students said they found little reassurance in the government denials.

Students, intelligence experts and American China-watchers alike note that fears of surveillance, name-taking, social control are well-founded regarding Chinese presence in the United States.

Just months ago, FBI and other military counterintelligence officials in Los Angeles issued a report disclosing that Chinese espionage agents had surpassed the Soviets as the most active foreign spies in California. And sources close to Chinese educational officials in New York confirm that the Chinese consulates keep a file on all 40,000 students at work in the United States, complete with computerized data on addresses and names and political activity.

Fueling fears among students and American experts alike is the widely held assumption that the Chinese government has attempted to maintain discipline among its American students by planting informers among them.

"There are always students among the others who keep tabs and report on their peers, in many cases quite secretly," said China scholar David Zweig of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University.