Published January 23,2024
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A Chinese music pupil went on trial on Monday on U.S. fees that he harassed an activist who posted fliers on the Berklee College of Music in Boston supporting democracy in China and threatened to report her actions to Chinese legislation enforcement.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alathea Porter informed a federal jury in Boston that Xiaolei Wu, 25, scared the activist, referred to solely as Zooey in court docket, by making threats on-line to cut off her palms and report her to the Chinese authorities due to her “reactionary posters.”
“She was afraid for herself, and she was afraid for her family, who was back in China,” Porter mentioned in her opening assertion to a 12-person jury.
The trial comes as U.S. and Western authorities proceed to warn that China’s authorities has more and more exerted stress to silence its critics overseas.
Human rights teams have additionally complained of threats to tutorial freedom and monitoring of Chinese college students on worldwide college campuses.
Wu was first arrested in December 2022 and has pleaded not responsible to fees of cyberstalking and interstate transmissions of threatening communication.
Porter informed jurors that his threats started after Zooey, who additionally attended the non-public music faculty, posted a photograph on Instagram of a flier she put in a window that mentioned “We Want Freedom,” “We Want Democracy,” and “Stand with Chinese People.”
Wu in response in October 2022 posted on a 300-person chat of Chinese Berklee college students and alumni on the social media app WeChat a requirement that she tear down the fliers and mentioned he had known as in a tip to a Chinese public safety company about her.
Porter known as {that a} critical risk, because the Chinese authorities doesn’t permit the kind of expression her posters contained and labored to suppress dissent towards the Chinese authorities.
A lawyer for Wu, Michael Tumposky, countered that Wu’s feedback had been by no means meant to threaten Zooey however had been made as a part of an “immature, online dispute between two young people,” who had been acquainted with one another.
He mentioned his shopper “was not some agent of the Chinese government” however an “awkward, nerdy guy” who got here to Boston to study jazz and had spoken out about Zooey’s posters “in his own misguided way to remind her of consequences of her activism.”
“He came here to learn guitar, not to shill for the Chinese Communist Party,” he mentioned.
Source: www.anews.com.tr