Coming To America: The CCP Threatened A College Student For Having A Twitter Account With Two People

The Federal Government has flirted with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) according to numerous reports of their infiltrations and influences, yet most Americans don’t really understand the lengths and depths to which the proponents of Communism and their allies will go to dominate and control people into submission. Here is a story that illustrates the firm grasp the CCP has over people.

“There is no such thing as “democratic socialism”. It is a deception created to make Marxism/communism more palatable to the American people because no one in their right mind on either side would sign up for where they are taking all of us. Open your eyes,” Lara Logan wrote recently about the influence of the CCP by the Democrat administration of Joe Biden.

Campus Reform reported on the story:

“China targeted a Chinese student studying in Canada for criticizing the CCP. Experts say students in America are faced with the same threat.”

Recently, an international Chinese student in Canada was tracked and threatened by the Chinese government after tweeting his disapproval of the regime.

Experts told Campus Reform that Chinese students in the United States have faced similar repercussions for criticizing China.

According to their source, the Toronto Star, the student had written to a reported to tell his story:

“A Chinese student in Canada had two followers on Twitter. He still didn’t escape Beijing’s threats over online activity”

In “China Unbound: A New World Disorder,” Toronto Star reporter Joanna Chiu examines China’s growing influence around the world, including in western countries, and its surveillance and human rights abuses that increasingly extend beyond its borders.

THE STUDENT’S LETTER

Dear Joanna Chiu,

I am (Dan). I am from China. I just graduated from (a Quebec university). I hesitated for a whole night before deciding to write this email …

Now I am living in Canada, but I am living with fear from the Chinese government.

Chiu tells the story from Dan’s point of view:

Dan, whose name I’ve changed to protect his identity, hails from one of China’s picturesque and relatively laidback southwestern provinces. He studied English diligently and was elated when a top Canadian university accepted his application to study law.

About a month before the start of the September 2017 session, when Dan was still in China, the university issued his student credentials, and with them he received access to a virtual private network (VPN). The tool allowed him — for the first time in his life — to scale the “Great Firewall of China” and access an uncensored internet.

Curious, the 21-year-old thought he might check out some overseas social media sites, connect with future classmates, and read world news; that way, he wouldn’t seem so out of touch once he arrived. He would be joining a cohort of Chinese international students in Canada totaling around 140,000 that year.

Once Dan arrived in Canada and began adjusting to a new city and a new university, he continued to browse Twitter in his dorm room. He was too nervous to actually join in any conversations. He retweeted only three posts: the news that Nobel laureate and Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo had died, a short satirical video about President Xi Jinping, and a chart on levels of Chinese government corruption.

With only two followers, he wasn’t making a splash — but sharing those posts still gave him a thrill. His undergraduate studies did offer some opportunities to discuss international political systems, and the problem of lower-level government corruption wasn’t a completely taboo topic, but virtually all Chinese people know that publicly supporting high-profile dissidents or satirizing top leaders is strictly forbidden.

Months passed. Life got busy, and Dan didn’t have time to keep up his exploration of social media. He never got involved in any political activities on campus either. Rather, he focused on learning about the Canadian legal system in hopes of staying and working in the country.

Then his father called him out of the blue, clearly disturbed. “Son, did you say something about the Chinese government on the internet? The public security bureau called us twice.”

FREE BUT NOT SO FREE

The officer never raised his voice, but his tone became sterner as the conversation went on. When Dan asked what would happen if he refused to accept responsibility for the Twitter account, the agent told him in Mandarin, “You will face trouble.”

“Trouble” is a well-known euphemism in China for state persecution. It can range from repeated visits and phone calls all the way to travel bans, rejection for jobs and house arrest. Chinese authorities also routinely threaten relatives in China to silence dissidents abroad. In a report on the topic by the international NGO Human Rights Watch, a Vancouver technology consultant explained, “If I criticize the (CCP) publicly, my parents’ retirement benefits, their health insurance benefits could all be taken away.”

“To be honest, I’m terrified,” Dan whispered to me, so students in the library wouldn’t hear him.

Dan had confided in one of his professors, who expressed alarm about the threatening call and urged him to report it to Quebec police. But when the student showed up with all his files, police officers said they couldn’t do anything about activities that happened in China.

“You can delete the posts, but you don’t have to,” an officer said, shrugging.

That was never the question; Dan knew he had freedom of speech on Canadian soil. But while he hadn’t been sure what police could do to help his parents in China, he’d thought they would at least accept his report so that, if something ever happened to him or his family, they would have something on file.

Crestfallen, Dan removed the retweets.

Back in his dorm room, he was left to wonder how Chinese authorities were able to track him overseas, why they would care about his influence on an audience of two — and how a democratic country like Canada could do so little to protect him.

Though Beijing’s targets in Canada tend to be people of Chinese origin, this is far from a fringe issue affecting a small population. Metro Vancouver has nearly 500,000 people of Chinese descent, about 20 percent of the region. The Greater Toronto Area has more than 630,000.

“There’s a conflict here,” Deibert says. “Canada is a country of immigrants and trumpets the fact we’re accepting and multicultural. But when push comes to shove, are we going to stand up and protect those people from the threats they’re escaping from?”

The Full story is at the link above. The CCP is in Canada, and it is in America.

Kari Donovan

Kari is an ex-Community Organizer who writes about Voter Engagement, Cultural Marxism and Campaigns. She has been a grassroots volunteer with the GOP, on and off for 18 years. She is a Homeschool Mom in North Carolina and loves Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism. @Saorsa1776