President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

Purdue President Mitch Daniels sent an email to Purdue students, faculty and staff Wednesday, criticizing the harassment of a Chinese student over speaking on Chinese politics.

The email comes as a response to a ProPublica article written about Purdue student Zhihao Kong, who was allegedly harassed and threatened by other students from China about a post he made commending the heroism of students killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

The students followed Kong around campus, according to the article, calling him a CIA agent and threatening to report him to the Chinese embassy. Officers of the Ministry of State Security, a civilian spy agency from China, visited Kong’s parents and told them to warn him about speaking out, according to the article.

“We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events and had to learn of them from national sources,” Daniels said in the email. “That reflects the atmosphere of intimidation that we have discovered surrounds this specific sort of speech.”

The university welcomed its first Asian students over a century ago, the email states, and is proud of the several hundred international students that enrolled in the fall, including about 200 Chinese students. Of the over 45,000 students enrolled at campus, 5,196 are of Asian ethnicity, according to a Purdue news press release published Sept. 13.

“Joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression,” Daniels said in the email.

“Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”