A Chinese woman studying in the US says she has become the victim of threats and intimidation for her role during a recent campus protest against China’s crackdown in Tibet.
“Trying to mediate between Chinese and pro-Tibetan campus protesters, I was caught in the middle and vilified and threatened by the Chinese,” Grace Wang (王千源), a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday.
Wang, from the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao, had tried to mediate in a small demonstration between pro-Tibet and pro-China students at Duke University, where she is an undergraduate.
When she then wrote a letter to the university’s Chinese students’ association explaining her actions, it opened the floodgates to angry denunciations of her for apparently siding with the Tibetan cause.
Wang wrote that while trying to mediate between some pro-Tibet protesters and a larger gathering of pro-China students on April 9, tempers became so inflamed that she was nearly attacked by fellow Chinese students.
“The Chinese protesters thought that, being Chinese, I should be on their side,” she said. “It started to feel as though an angry mob was about to attack me,” wrote Wang, who said she was forced to leave the protest “with a police escort.”
She later became the victim of online “intimidation” by fellow students at Duke who deemed her a “traitor” to her country, as well as threatening phone calls.
“It has been a frightening and unsettling experience,” she wrote.
Nevertheless, Wang, who continues to receive police protection on the Duke campus, said she remains “determined to speak out, even in the face of threats and abuse.”
“If I stay silent,” she wrote, “then the same thing will happen to someone else someday.”
Wang said that detailed instructions to her parents’ house had appeared on-line, feces had been emptied on the doorstep and her high school had revoked her diploma.
“It was ironic: What I had tried so hard to prevent was precisely what had come to pass. And I was the target,” Wang wrote.
Her only intention was the get the two sides at the protest to talk to each other, she said.
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