Elsa

editor-in-chief @stanfordreview

[The Stanford Review @StanfordReview]

INVESTIGATION: A whistleblower has leaked Stanford's private foreign-funding records to the Review, revealing millions in funding from Chinese state-linked entities and CCP donors.

[Select Committee on China @ChinaSelect]

New @ChinaSelect Report | Research Security for America’s Future in Space: NASA’s Enforcement of the Wolf Amendment

According to our latest report released today, federally funded @NASA research, intended to advance American innovation, has been repeatedly linked to collaborations with institutions embedded in China’s defense and military ecosystem.

In one case alone, researchers produced more than 200 co-authored publications between 2020 and 2025 with Chinese defense-affiliated institutions, while still receiving U.S. federal funding. @ChinaSelect also found multiple active grants, some running through 2026 and 2027, supporting research conducted alongside entities linked to China’s military-industrial base, including those on U.S. restricted lists.

These findings reveal systemic failures in oversight, disclosure, and enforcement of the Wolf Amendment, allowing taxpayer-funded research to flow into China’s military-civil fusion strategy and raising urgent national security concerns that demand immediate action.

https://t.co/N9UCx3cI2p

[F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli @USAttyEssayli]

Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang has been charged with violating 18 USC 951, acting in the United States as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China.

Wang appeared in federal court this afternoon for her arraignment. She agreed to plead guilty and resign from public office.

Wang admitted to acting as a foreign agent from at least 2020 through 2022. At the direction of the PRC government, she coordinated with individuals to promote PRC interests by spreading pro-PRC propaganda in the United States.

Wang faces a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

@johnnyburtka @ISI Congrats, Johnny!! So thankful for you and your work at ISI

[The Stanford Review @StanfordReview]

Number of Right-Wing Students at Stanford Nearly Doubles

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

Socialists and Communists are down from 11% to 5% of the Stanford student body, Conservatives are up from 2% to 6%, and the group most confident they can change the world is now the right. Per the Stanford Marriage Pact student survey, 4,177 submissions.

The tide is turning at Stanford.

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

@Willob congrats!!

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

@StevenWMosher thank you for sharing your story, Steven!

[StevenWMosher @StevenWMosher]

https://t.co/YhBRvMgUz8

Many parallels between Elsa Johnson's harassment by China's spies and my own experience at Stanford U.

"If a university does not defend academic freedom and provide a safe space for the academics who embody it, what good is it?"

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

@ISI Thanks for your support!!

[Campaign For Uyghurs @CUyghurs]

Elsa Johnson, a student at Stanford University, has been stalked and harassed by the CCP for years after coming to Stanford to study Chinese industry and business tactics.

This is the reality of transnational repression. Americans on American soil are not safe from the CCP’s oppression. It is crucial that the United States government and the international community take steps to protect citizens against CCP harassment.

“This is a human rights issue as much as a national security issue … 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.”

Read more here:
https://t.co/FzKy98pvMp

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

https://t.co/SB6aZaF6I4

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

my congressional testimony on being harassed by the CCP at Stanford in @thetimes

read below:

[Byron Wan @Byron_Wan]

In Aug 2025, Elsa Johnson, a Stanford student, wrote a piece for The Times about how members of the CCP tried to recruit her as a spy. Since then, the junior, who is majoring in East Asian Studies, has faced a wave of harassment from Mandarin speakers who have called her and threatened her and her family. The FBI also informed Johnson that the CCP is physically monitoring her whereabouts on campus — making her fear for her own safety. On Mar 26 she testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, urging Congress to do something to protect America’s students who “face transnational repression”, given that Stanford “has chosen not to address this problem at all”. Here is an abridged and lightly edited version of her testimony.

=======

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. Just this week, I received another call from a US number. After exchanging hellos, the caller switched to Mandarin and asked whether I had finished dinner. That cannot be a coincidence. It is happening to me on American soil because I reported on the activities of a foreign government at an American university.

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 (CSSAs) 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 US-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 Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford, or ACSSS, is a recognized student organisation that receives university support and funding.

The CCP’s United Front uses these organisations as vehicles for surveillance and influence.

American universities are supposed to be places where people can think and speak freely. Right now, for too many students, they are not. 

https://t.co/82myOp40MX

[Freedom House @freedomhouse]

What happened to @ElsaJohnson is wrong and speaks to the Chinese Communist Party’s brazen attempts to silence criticism around the world, including in American universities. Freedom House’s research has highlighted the negative impacts of surveillance and harassment by foreign governments at universities across the country: https://t.co/Uxd5ar8Pjo

[House Committee on Education & Workforce @EdWorkforceCmte]

The CCP is infiltrating our universities to steal research, undermine American values, and silence free speech. At our hearing this week, student-journalist @elsajohnson told her story: she was tailed, monitored, and harassed by the CCP. Her story is horrifying, but it isn't unique—this is happening at schools across the nation.

[Elsa @elsajohnson]

@marlo_safi Thank you so much, Marlo!! I couldn’t do it without ISI’s support :)

[StevenWMosher @StevenWMosher]

One of the reasons that Chinese agents are stalking and harassing Elsa Johnson is that, in May 2024, she published in the Stanford Review how China bullied Stanford into terminating me.

"Announcing 'Stanford's Censorship'" (May 3, 2024) and the follow-up "Stanford's Censorship: A History of Academic Freedom" (May 6, 2024) describe how, in the early 1980s, Stanford expelled PhD student Steven Mosher from its anthropology doctoral program after he conducted field research in rural Guangdong province, China. Mosher documented forced abortions, sterilizations, and poverty under China's one-child policy. His reporting angered the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which pressured Stanford and other U.S. institutions.

Those who are harassing her should be immediately deported.

[CBS News @CBSNews]

A Stanford student testified that she was targeted by a Chinese spy — and the FBI confirmed to her that she and her family were being surveilled by China.

Elsa Johnson said a man who called himself Charles Chen reached out to her on Instagram during her Freshman year. The FBI later told her he had no affiliation with Stanford and was likely working on behalf of China’s ministry of state security. And she was not the only student targeted.

[Michael Ron Bowling @mrbcyber]

The Chinese government believes it can terrorize people in the US. Agents working for the CCP stalked and threatened a student at Stanford who was doing research on China's military. This is happening in other democracies as well and we must put a stop to it.