[…]
Ruohui Yang is one of those students. He said he came to Canada in 2015 when he was 15 years old because his parents wanted him to study abroad.
In Canada, he said, he began learning things about his home country — such as details of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — that challenged the Chinese government’s version of events.
[…]
“I do already receive lots of threatening [messages], lots of swearing words, insults on my different social media accounts,” he said.
[…]
In May, Amnesty International released a report on the experiences of Chinese dissidents abroad. The report said many Chinese international students attending foreign universities are living in a climate of fear.
“They feel compelled to self-censor and curtail their social and academic activities and relationships or else risk repercussions from the Chinese state,” the report says.
[…]
An organization called the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) is active on university campuses across the country.
A 2019 report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) quotes the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) describing the CSSA as “an important support mechanism for international students studying abroad [that provides] a social and professional network for students.”
But the NSICOP report also reported growing public alarm over the relationship between the CSSA and the Chinese government’s embassies and consulates.
[…]
Yep. I first encountered it circa 2004 when I was in a Japanese language school in Japan, almost every single one of my fellow students was from China, and they got very antsy about anything critical being mentioned. One of them even took me aside once to explain that if she were to say something bad about the government, it could be dangerous. She did not elaborate and I never brought it up again.