A Letter to MIT President Dr. Leo Rafael Reif
A quiet corner of the MIT campus near Hayden Library, showing a branch of one of the largest gingko trees in Boston (right). Each time he sees the tree, Dr. Gang Xu is reminded of the Temple of Confucius in his hometown Quzhou City, China, which is hallmarked by the giant ginkgo trees in its yard.
Dear Dr. Reif,
I am writing regarding your student Shiyan Yin in the class of 2020, who was in the center of a silencing operation that aimed to destroy my life, both my reputation and my physical existence, to cover up her family affiliation with Chinese intelligence services and her questionable college application practice. This operation likely represents the first well-documented case in the U.S. that Chinese intelligence, or at least Chinese influence, has successfully infiltrated and controlled an American state’s judicial system and is capable of converting Massachusetts courts into a weapon of personal destruction to advance its agenda. I hope my experience would alert you the necessity to develop certain protocol to protect your faculty and staff in their interactions with some Chinese students of certain background.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I received my PhD degree from University of Iowa in 1997 and then completed my fellowship at Harvard. After a short stint at Yale, I came back to Boston. I started my business in 2009, offering educational support services to Chinese students and families. As a scholar by training, I was used to a life frequently sparkled by curiosity and research. In my pursuit as a professional consultant, I allocated quite some resources researching on two subjects. One is the acquisition of English as a second language by Chinese juniors. In this respect, I proposed an ESL acquisition model and identified a major pitfall in English teaching, having since stopped the promotion of undiscriminating application of phonics to Chinese juniors who had no sufficient prior exposure to English. This finding was reported by the two major newspapers in Chinese-American community in 2015. My other research concerns the humanity and civilization. Last year I deposited three research articles in ResearchGate, tackling the very fundamental notions of Chinese civilization that are of significant implications for a healthy China-U.S. relationship (click here to see the deposited articles). While I will leave the judgment of my works to others and time, I am both honored and humbled that my pieces have received unexpected interests around the world, even though I did not go to any meeting or conference to promote my ideas, even though I am an “outsider” to the field.
My acquaintance with Shiyan Yin and her mother started in November 2012, when her mother, a Chinese from Shanghai, approached me for service to help transfer her to a different school. Earlier in the fall, her mother and her second aunt (“her aunt”), accompanied by her aunt’s Chinese American friend, had brought her to Boston to attend a private boarding high school. In her first day reporting to the school, their Chinese American friend suggested that she transfer to a different school and offered initial help for her mother to stay in Boston for that purpose. During the process of transfer application, her mother and I developed mutual feelings.
In May 2013 I visited her grandmother at Shanghai. I also flied to a China-Vietnam border town and paid a special visit to her aunt, as her aunt had been sponsoring her education since her mother became widowed, and her aunt had been playing a father’s role in her upbringing. It was in this trip that I learned that her aunt, a private business owner, was also an intelligence operative posted on the border. Their Chinese American friend, as her aunt specified, was an agent in the Chinese intelligence service Ministry of State Security.
But I was not too concerned then: the U.S.-China relationship appeared so rosy in 2013, literally analogized to a “marriage.” I was certain, even today, that her mother was an average people just like me. I married her mother in December 2014.
Soon after the marriage, Shiyan Yin declared her aspiration: to pursue a career in the U.S. military. She had been inspired by her grandmother, who joined the Chinese communist party army when an early teen and fought in Chinese civil war. In preparation for her college application in 2015, Shiyan Yin looked for schools with a ROTC program.
As an educational consultant, I had been tutoring her on her college application materials, admission essays in particular. I took my role as her mentor and resisted being her essay mill; I hoped she would learn some writing skills through the process of revision and editing. Before she returned to her boarding school for the senior year, we had finished the draft and a major revision for her common application essay. I continued to send her my input and expected to work with her to refine the essay when she had some time, from her extreme busy senior schedule.
On October 16, 2015, I learned that her aunt had kept me in the dark and hired an educational consultant in California, working for her. Clearly they pushed me to generate early versions of application materials for the CA consultant to finalize.
While such a form of maneuver was quite common in business in China and was typical of the stratagem that had helped China gain intellectual property from numerous Western companies, it had crossed the bottom line when it was used on a family member. The CA educational consultant was arranged when her aunt came to visit the Silicon Valley in the summer. Given her aunt’s background, I was scared: I did not know what else her aunt had done that I was not aware of but I could be subjected to the consequence.
I made the right decision. I emailed her mother that I wanted a divorce in the evening of October 16, 2015.
But my effort to “decouple” turned out to be a catastrophic struggle.
Two Massachusetts courts were mobilized. One stealthily set me up, trying to make a criminal out of me. The other blatantly manipulated the case, prohibited me from contacting law enforcement and MIT, and acted to conceal the cause of the divorce and smear my name (click here to see a narrative in perspective).
Shiyan Yin spearheaded the early ambush against me. Unaware of a prior setup to frame me for domestic violence in December 2015, I emailed her on June 4, 2016, asking her to help prevent escalation of the divorce fight. According to her statement under oath in a courtroom, she was then already back in China. But she landed in Boston within 48 hours and signed a document at Malden District Court (MDC) on June 6, 2016, falsely accusing me of various domestic abuses and death threat. In the following sessions, MDC deprived me of my right to due process, secretly issuing and extending a restraining order against me. If I had called her mother in the summer, I would have ended up in the jail.
In my visit in 2013, her aunt boasted that Chinese intelligence operations had gained the capabilities of controlling U.S. courts. I had shrugged off that claim as purely an exaggeration. But my experience compels me to accept that China indeed has the ability to compromise U.S. court system and MA courts are deeply infiltrated by Chinese influence, though the mechanism(s) of such infiltration remains to be illustrated.
And I am also convinced that Shiyan Yin was selected and sent to the U.S. by a Chinese intelligence service as a prospective mole; in support of this mission she was furnished with vast resources, including China’s asset in MA judicial system, though it is not clear if she herself, at her age, was aware of this design and to what extent if she was.
As my legal battles in two MA courts continued, it became clearer and clearer that I was targeted in a silencing and smearing operation that was extremely malicious and well-coordinated. I fled Boston to Taiwan in January 2017—to seek asylum and to expose the crimes—but only came back three weeks later, as Taiwan was unable to grant asylum. I have since been living a semi-hiding life in Boston, in the fear. Last year I officially closed my business after its 10th anniversary.
Over the past decade we have seen quite some tragedies in our universities involving interactions with Chinese students or institutions. An early incident was at Dickinson State University in North Dakota in 2012, where a partnership with about 20 Chinese colleges—including a couple of very reputable Chinese schools— turned into a diploma mill and led to the suicide of one of its deans. Very recently, Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard was criminally charged. These incidents demonstrate how vulnerable our human nature could be when dealing with some people from China.
To those who are careful enough but who have the knowledge of the secrets of some Chinese students and their families, my experience offers a different scenario and outcome. I hope my ordeal could caution our universities to formulate some measures to protect their faculty and staff in a similar situation.
However I am not advocating any prejudice against Chinese students and their families. As an immigrant from China myself, I love this country, I have joined this country, and now I am fighting for this country. I am sure that most Chinese students and scholars would be just like me when circumstances arise.
We are living in a critical moment in the history of humanity. The challenge we are faced with is not the CLASH of civilizations; rather, the FUSION of the darkest sides of China and the U.S. As a matter of fact, none of the perpetrators who had violated me in the two MA courts appears to be of any Asian ethnicity.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
Sincerely yours,
Gang Xu, PhD
May 28, 2020
I am writing regarding your student Shiyan Yin in the class of 2020, who was in the center of a silencing operation that aimed to destroy my life, both my reputation and my physical existence, to cover up her family affiliation with Chinese intelligence services and her questionable college application practice. This operation likely represents the first well-documented case in the U.S. that Chinese intelligence, or at least Chinese influence, has successfully infiltrated and controlled an American state’s judicial system and is capable of converting Massachusetts courts into a weapon of personal destruction to advance its agenda. I hope my experience would alert you the necessity to develop certain protocol to protect your faculty and staff in their interactions with some Chinese students of certain background.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I received my PhD degree from University of Iowa in 1997 and then completed my fellowship at Harvard. After a short stint at Yale, I came back to Boston. I started my business in 2009, offering educational support services to Chinese students and families. As a scholar by training, I was used to a life frequently sparkled by curiosity and research. In my pursuit as a professional consultant, I allocated quite some resources researching on two subjects. One is the acquisition of English as a second language by Chinese juniors. In this respect, I proposed an ESL acquisition model and identified a major pitfall in English teaching, having since stopped the promotion of undiscriminating application of phonics to Chinese juniors who had no sufficient prior exposure to English. This finding was reported by the two major newspapers in Chinese-American community in 2015. My other research concerns the humanity and civilization. Last year I deposited three research articles in ResearchGate, tackling the very fundamental notions of Chinese civilization that are of significant implications for a healthy China-U.S. relationship (click here to see the deposited articles). While I will leave the judgment of my works to others and time, I am both honored and humbled that my pieces have received unexpected interests around the world, even though I did not go to any meeting or conference to promote my ideas, even though I am an “outsider” to the field.
My acquaintance with Shiyan Yin and her mother started in November 2012, when her mother, a Chinese from Shanghai, approached me for service to help transfer her to a different school. Earlier in the fall, her mother and her second aunt (“her aunt”), accompanied by her aunt’s Chinese American friend, had brought her to Boston to attend a private boarding high school. In her first day reporting to the school, their Chinese American friend suggested that she transfer to a different school and offered initial help for her mother to stay in Boston for that purpose. During the process of transfer application, her mother and I developed mutual feelings.
In May 2013 I visited her grandmother at Shanghai. I also flied to a China-Vietnam border town and paid a special visit to her aunt, as her aunt had been sponsoring her education since her mother became widowed, and her aunt had been playing a father’s role in her upbringing. It was in this trip that I learned that her aunt, a private business owner, was also an intelligence operative posted on the border. Their Chinese American friend, as her aunt specified, was an agent in the Chinese intelligence service Ministry of State Security.
But I was not too concerned then: the U.S.-China relationship appeared so rosy in 2013, literally analogized to a “marriage.” I was certain, even today, that her mother was an average people just like me. I married her mother in December 2014.
Soon after the marriage, Shiyan Yin declared her aspiration: to pursue a career in the U.S. military. She had been inspired by her grandmother, who joined the Chinese communist party army when an early teen and fought in Chinese civil war. In preparation for her college application in 2015, Shiyan Yin looked for schools with a ROTC program.
As an educational consultant, I had been tutoring her on her college application materials, admission essays in particular. I took my role as her mentor and resisted being her essay mill; I hoped she would learn some writing skills through the process of revision and editing. Before she returned to her boarding school for the senior year, we had finished the draft and a major revision for her common application essay. I continued to send her my input and expected to work with her to refine the essay when she had some time, from her extreme busy senior schedule.
On October 16, 2015, I learned that her aunt had kept me in the dark and hired an educational consultant in California, working for her. Clearly they pushed me to generate early versions of application materials for the CA consultant to finalize.
While such a form of maneuver was quite common in business in China and was typical of the stratagem that had helped China gain intellectual property from numerous Western companies, it had crossed the bottom line when it was used on a family member. The CA educational consultant was arranged when her aunt came to visit the Silicon Valley in the summer. Given her aunt’s background, I was scared: I did not know what else her aunt had done that I was not aware of but I could be subjected to the consequence.
I made the right decision. I emailed her mother that I wanted a divorce in the evening of October 16, 2015.
But my effort to “decouple” turned out to be a catastrophic struggle.
Two Massachusetts courts were mobilized. One stealthily set me up, trying to make a criminal out of me. The other blatantly manipulated the case, prohibited me from contacting law enforcement and MIT, and acted to conceal the cause of the divorce and smear my name (click here to see a narrative in perspective).
Shiyan Yin spearheaded the early ambush against me. Unaware of a prior setup to frame me for domestic violence in December 2015, I emailed her on June 4, 2016, asking her to help prevent escalation of the divorce fight. According to her statement under oath in a courtroom, she was then already back in China. But she landed in Boston within 48 hours and signed a document at Malden District Court (MDC) on June 6, 2016, falsely accusing me of various domestic abuses and death threat. In the following sessions, MDC deprived me of my right to due process, secretly issuing and extending a restraining order against me. If I had called her mother in the summer, I would have ended up in the jail.
In my visit in 2013, her aunt boasted that Chinese intelligence operations had gained the capabilities of controlling U.S. courts. I had shrugged off that claim as purely an exaggeration. But my experience compels me to accept that China indeed has the ability to compromise U.S. court system and MA courts are deeply infiltrated by Chinese influence, though the mechanism(s) of such infiltration remains to be illustrated.
And I am also convinced that Shiyan Yin was selected and sent to the U.S. by a Chinese intelligence service as a prospective mole; in support of this mission she was furnished with vast resources, including China’s asset in MA judicial system, though it is not clear if she herself, at her age, was aware of this design and to what extent if she was.
As my legal battles in two MA courts continued, it became clearer and clearer that I was targeted in a silencing and smearing operation that was extremely malicious and well-coordinated. I fled Boston to Taiwan in January 2017—to seek asylum and to expose the crimes—but only came back three weeks later, as Taiwan was unable to grant asylum. I have since been living a semi-hiding life in Boston, in the fear. Last year I officially closed my business after its 10th anniversary.
Over the past decade we have seen quite some tragedies in our universities involving interactions with Chinese students or institutions. An early incident was at Dickinson State University in North Dakota in 2012, where a partnership with about 20 Chinese colleges—including a couple of very reputable Chinese schools— turned into a diploma mill and led to the suicide of one of its deans. Very recently, Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard was criminally charged. These incidents demonstrate how vulnerable our human nature could be when dealing with some people from China.
To those who are careful enough but who have the knowledge of the secrets of some Chinese students and their families, my experience offers a different scenario and outcome. I hope my ordeal could caution our universities to formulate some measures to protect their faculty and staff in a similar situation.
However I am not advocating any prejudice against Chinese students and their families. As an immigrant from China myself, I love this country, I have joined this country, and now I am fighting for this country. I am sure that most Chinese students and scholars would be just like me when circumstances arise.
We are living in a critical moment in the history of humanity. The challenge we are faced with is not the CLASH of civilizations; rather, the FUSION of the darkest sides of China and the U.S. As a matter of fact, none of the perpetrators who had violated me in the two MA courts appears to be of any Asian ethnicity.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
Sincerely yours,
Gang Xu, PhD
May 28, 2020
