I’m a Stanford student. A Chinese agent tried to recruit me as a spy

The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024.

The sender was a man calling himself “Charles Chen”. He said he was an international student at Stanford.

“You seem familiar,” he said. “How are you?”

I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with other young people at Stanford, in Newport Beach, California, and at other locations in the United States.

In one picture, Charles was wearing a black suit and a bow tie while standing in front of a building with grand columns, surrounded by a group of smiling girls in dresses. It looked like a graduation.

My curiosity piqued, I asked Charles where he was from. After a week of silence, he replied to say he was from China. Then he named two Stanford students, both American women, and asked if I knew them. I wrote that I hadn’t heard of either.

His next comment jolted me: “Do you speak Chinese?”

He posed the question in Mandarin.

I’m studying East Asian affairs at Stanford and I do speak Mandarin, but I had no idea how he could know this. It isn’t mentioned on my Instagram page and I had never met him before in my life. Suddenly I felt on edge.

But still, I replied. I wrote that I did speak Mandarin, and asked how he knew.

The playbook: start friendly, then ask questions

After that I started screenshotting our conversations. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy.

I know it sounds paranoid, but I had heard of other Stanford students receiving communications like this out of the blue — especially those studying science, tech, engineering or mathematics.

Generally, it’s the same playbook: a person claiming to be a Chinese student “slips into your DMs”, or direct messages. They start out friendly with inquiries about your home life and ask whether or not you have mutual friends. Sometimes they point out shared interests and invite you to hang out.

Then the hard sell begins, with offers of an all-expenses-paid trip to China. They might flatter you with compliments and claim you can make money in the country as a social media star. If the conversation progresses, they may ask about your research, academic achievements over the years or the software you might use in class.

And this is exactly what happened with Charles. He shared videos of another woman he claimed was a Stanford student. “She was on a TV show in China and is famous now!” he wrote.

The implication was clear: I, too, could become prosperous and popular in China.

‘If someone pays for you, would you come?’

On June 27, Charles pressed the point. “You really should travel to China soon,” he wrote, adding that I could visit the country for six days without a visa under a government-approved tourist programme. He sent me an article explaining this.

“A bunch of people at Stanford have been to China this summer,” he wrote. “If someone pays for you, would you come?”

He sent me a flight itinerary from LA to Shanghai that cost $912 (£675) with China Eastern Airlines. “I can take care of your accommodation and transportation here,” he wrote.

Then he showed me a bank wire worth $5,485 that he received in May to prove he could afford it.

I messaged him back, saying the trip would be too expensive. He persisted. “Can’t you afford a thousand-dollar flight ticket?”

“It’s not worth it for a quick trip,” I replied.

He shared a video of another American college girl he said had visited China and built up an online following in the country. “This American college girl visit her Chinese friend every vacation no matter summer, Christmas, new years [sic],” he wrote.

I decided to message one of the Stanford students he mentioned when he first contacted me. I found her on Instagram and when I texted her what was happening to me, she said Charles had bombarded her with the same messages and requests. She had felt so harassed, she blocked him.

I felt incredibly creeped out by this but wanted to do more digging and find out the truth about my messenger.

So I kept the conversation going, asking him questions about what he was studying, where he was living. Though he told me he was a junior studying economics at Stanford, I couldn’t find any record of him in the student directory. He said he was from Shanghai — and then later said Nanjing, which is almost 200 miles away.

He shared a video of what he said was his house in LA and his car, an expensive-looking Bentley:

At the same time, Charles continued to send me his WeChat QR code, asking that we speak on that platform instead. WeChat is the WhatsApp of China, but it is heavily censored and monitored by the CCP. Each time, if I didn’t respond within a couple of hours to his requests, he would delete his message and resend it.

One day in July, after I had not responded to another of his WeChat invites, he wrote: “Talk to me, Elsa!”

And then: “Elsa, what do you think, come to China this summer?”

Our conversation continued until July 21, when he publicly commented on one of my Instagram posts, in Mandarin, asking me to delete the screenshots I had taken of our private conversation.

This completely freaked me out. I had not told Charles or anyone else that I’d taken screenshots of our chats. I don’t know how he knew. I could only assume that my Instagram account had been hacked or my phone was compromised in some way.

That’s when I decided enough was enough.

“I see, you think too highly of yourself,” he replied. Then he deleted that message and wrote: “You are worthless.”

After that, Charles deleted all of his Instagram messages to me and never contacted me again.

Several days earlier, I had alerted two trusted Chinese experts at Stanford to tell them I was worried I was being targeted. They put me in touch with an FBI contact who worked with the college on cases of CCP-related espionage.

I met them in mid-September, handing over the screenshots and the names of other people that Charles said he had been in touch with. The FBI warned me never to click on any links sent to me by obscure Chinese social media accounts and not to share information with suspicious individuals I didn’t know.

With the help of the FBI and my Stanford professors, I was able to establish that Charles had no affiliation with the college. He had probably posed for years as a student, creating fake Instagram and LinkedIn profiles that he used to target multiple people researching China-related topics.

Stanford University, California, has long been associated with science and technology GETTY IMAGES

In total, I identified as many as ten other female students who had been targeted by this individual since 2020, and that in the past he had referred to himself as Charles Chan.

The experts I spoke to concluded that Charles was likely to be associated with China’s ministry of state security, and that he was probably conducting an elaborate entrapment operation targeting young female students.

The FBI also confirmed to me that espionage of this type can happen at Stanford, one of America’s leading universities in artificial intelligence, and that several of the 1,129 Chinese students on campus were reporting to the CCP.

What did he want from me?

The fact that he targeted young, white American women is significant, I was told. The CCP apparently sees people like me as valuable assets in their propaganda war, who can give the impression that there is nothing to fear from China. [The Times spoke to one of the Stanford experts on China who Elsa Johnson consulted — Glenn Tiffert, a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution — who corroborated her analysis.]

I’m told these spies want to learn how leading universities, such as Stanford, are developing key technologies that are giving America an edge over China. They target young, sometimes naive, students working in these fields with the aim of befriending them and grooming them to share their knowledge. Some students I know have even been approached by strangers about working for major Chinese tech companies, such as Baidu and Huawei.

Most students see through this espionage. But inevitably, some don’t, and accidentally disclose sensitive information. Others may even be sympathetic to the CCP’s cause and knowingly co-operate.

“It is frightening yet ingenious what the CCP is doing” MARK MAKELA FOR THE TIMES

What did Charles want from me? I don’t study science or technology, so I would not have been a valuable source of information about sensitive and groundbreaking research. Perhaps, because I study Chinese culture, he assumed I would be sympathetic to the CCP’s cause and could eventually be persuaded to spy on other Stanford students. Even now, I get weekly phone calls from US numbers, with callers saying hello in English before switching to Chinese. I hang up immediately whenever this happens.

Initially I was extremely frightened to talk about what happened to me out of fear of being further targeted. I love Chinese culture, and I want to be able to visit the country, but speaking out could lead to retaliation by the Chinese authorities.

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But as time passed, I learnt that my experience is emblematic of Beijing’s larger efforts to infiltrate American institutions, and I realised I had to do something.

And so, this is my warning to my fellow students.

Thanks to American universities’ open-door policy, Chinese academics are allowed to collaborate with our smartest researchers and scientists, and take our advancements in AI, robotics, weaponry and nuclear technology back home. This is not an exaggeration — it’s the conclusion of a report on the CCP published last September by the House select committee on the CCP.

Military students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business have been targeted. Several of these individuals told me they had been physically approached by Chinese nationals, who seem to know they are in the military. They start by asking friendly questions before inquiring about the locations of US military bases and information on our military capabilities. Obviously the Stanford students don’t engage.

Chinese soldiers marking 80 years since Japan’s surrender in the Second World War this month KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

China is also suppressing Chinese students in the US who appear to have pro-American sympathies or speak out in class in favour of democracy.

These individuals are reported by classmates who are recruited by the CCP to monitor those who criticise the party, attend demonstrations or seek permanent relocation to the US. Last year a Chinese student and supporter at the Berklee College of Music in Boston was convicted of cyberstalking a pro-democracy Chinese student.

One of my own friends at Stanford, a Chinese-American citizen born in the US, received an anonymous email on June 26 this year, in which the sender threatened to kill him and his Chinese father for betraying the CCP by living in America. My friend did not hear anything else from the sender. He initially laughed it off but I eventually encouraged him to take his case to the FBI.

… and now Trump doubles Chinese student numbers

In the eyes of the CCP, anyone with Chinese blood is Chinese — even if they’re born in America — and they should be loyal to the People’s Republic of China.

Presidents Trump and Xi at the G20 summit in Osaka, June 2019 SUSAN WALSH/AP

This week, President Trump said he would allow up to 600,000 Chinese nationals to study in the US — up from the current number of 277,000. The vast majority pose no threat, but increasing these numbers leaves us more vulnerable to espionage. The FBI should set up tip lines so American students can report any threats or suspicious contact.

• Where — and who — are America’s foreign students? In charts

The irony of all this is that I was educated at a Chinese immersion school. I’ve been speaking Mandarin and learning about Chinese culture, which utterly fascinates me, since I was five. It means I’m familiar with China’s dark arts, and I now have the tools to call it out.

It is frightening yet ingenious what the CCP is doing, and other American students like me need to be aware of the threat we’re facing. I tell my friends all the time: if you ever get a message out of the blue from a stranger telling you to visit China, be on your guard.