Chinese Student, Disguised, Tells Congress That Columbia Took ‘No Action’ after Assault on Friend

A Chinese student at Columbia University who organized a vigil for victims of the Chinese government’s draconian zero-Covid policy on campus in 2022 said that the school’s administration did nothing when one of her friends was assaulted there.

Citing security concerns, the student went by the alias “Karin” and disguised herself by wearing a hat, sunglasses, and a mask during a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China — a panel focused on human rights in China that counts members of Congress and State Department officials as members — this morning.

She said she expects that the Chinese government will eventually learn who she is and that concealing her identity “will only delay the inevitable police visit to my parents.”

Speaking at the hearing, which marked the 35th anniversary of the June 4 Massacre, Karin said that the Covid lockdown in Shanghai in 2022 awakened her to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party had not changed from its “totalitarian self” in the 35 years since the mass killings in Tiananmen Square.

In November 2022, she said she worked with her friends to organize demonstrations at Columbia in memory of the victims of fire that ripped through a locked-down building in Ürümqi, a city in the Xinjiang region, where Beijing is carrying out a systematic campaign of repression against Uyghurs.

“We wanted it to be a peaceful event,” Karin said. “But my friend Ava, shortly after delivering a speech, was violently assaulted — struck on her face — by an unidentified individual who claimed to be a Columbia student.”

At the time, the NYPD said that the assailant punched the victim in the head multiple times, knocking her out.

The NYPD told National Review in January 2023 that the investigation was ongoing. NR asked the NYPD for an update today.

Karin said that Ava asked the Columbia University administration for assistance. “But no action was taken aside from a suggestion to seek ‘mental health support,’” she said. “Not even a campus safety alert.”

She added that after the event, she was afraid that her pro-Beijing classmates would assault her “and that Columbia’s administration would do nothing.”

National Review has requested comment from a Columbia spokesman.

Karin expanded on her concerns about her personal safety, saying that she’s afraid because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her: “I don’t know if I’m gonna get punched in the face for three times like Ava got . . . or be like the girl from the Berklee School of Music, who received threatening message that her hands is going to get chopped off.”

Earlier this year, a federal court convicted a Chinese Berklee student of charges related to his harassment and cyberstalking of a classmate who had helped to put up posters related to the White Paper movement. Students there faulted the Berklee administration for failing to do enough to support the victim, NR reported last year.

Karin also cited the presence of a Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) branch at Columbia. These organizations are dedicated to fostering community among Chinese students on U.S. campuses, though they are documented to have extensive ties to, and in some cases receive funding from, China’s embassy and its consulates.

“In Columbia, a school with massively influential CSSAs and almost 7,000 Chinese students, I think there will always be this feeling of uncertainty as to when and from whom, and what format of retaliation or transnational repression is going to happen,” she said.