Text | Sun Tao Liu Jiajia
Editor's note
Following the January 5 report titled "The Sudden Repatriation of Chinese PhD Students in the United States: 50 Nightmare Hours", China Science Daily continued to focus on the forced repatriation of Chinese students and scholars from the United States. Heartbreak and confusion remain the key words in these events. This article is based on the story of the protagonist Fan Qing, and her experience is embarrassing. We hope that stories like this will continue to serve as a warning to those who come after studying in the United States.
Fan Qing (pseudonym) could never have imagined that his postdoctoral career at Harvard would be ruined on a draft of a dissertation, and he would be saddled with a lifetime ban on entering the United States.
The research project was a collaboration with a professor at Beihang University during her Ph.D. at Tsinghua University, but it was only in the draft stage and was not completed, let alone submitted. She is responsible for the theoretical modeling and simulation analysis, and the experiments are done by the co-professors. The important thing is that this two-year-old project is not sensitive to Fan Qing, and it is a thing of the past for her, and she has long since wanted to and did not participate in the project.
However, the U.S. Customs inspector at Logan International Airport in Boston, USA, disagreed, and after seven hours of repeated pestering, she finally told her that because the research was not mentioned in the list of published articles on her resume, it was a misrepresentation of suspected visa fraud. She will be deported under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
It wasn't until she boarded the return flight and pored through the transcript of the interrogation that she noticed the words "lifetime bar" in the last note.
A lifetime ban, what a harsh ruling! A dissertation that was still in the draft stage that was not listed on her resume had caused her an irreparable end. It was January 28, 2024, 12 days before the Chinese New Year, and Fan Qing's tears dried up at the airport.
Fan Qing at Harvard.
Customs is blocked
In 2012, 18-year-old Fan Qing was admitted to the Department of Engineering Mechanics of Tsinghua University. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 2016, he studied for a doctorate in mechanics at the Institute of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering of the university, and graduated with a doctorate in January 2022. Before going to Harvard for postdoctoral research, she spent nine and a half years at Tsinghua University.
In the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, she focused on the theory of the evolution of soft matter morphology, "all of which can be done on scratch paper and a laptop." She said her research did not cover sensitive professions that the U.S. government deems them.
Because of the expiration of the postdoctoral J1 visa, Fan Qing returned to Shanghai on December 4 last year, went to the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai on the 7th for an interview, and got the new one-year J1 visa six weeks later. The process of renewing the visa this time was not complicated, and after the interview, the electronic version of the resume, the research content of Harvard, and the resume of the supervisor were reissued. Her new visa is valid until January 2025.
On January 27, departing from Shanghai Pudong Airport, Fan Qing boarded a plane that was transferred to Boston in the United States via Doha, Qatar.
Unexpectedly, as soon as the plane landed in Boston at around 14 o'clock local time on January 28, Fan Qing's nightmare began.
Fan Qing followed the flow of people into the non-immigrant channel, and when she was in line, the examiner glanced at her passport and asked her what her name and birthday were. After confirming her school and major in the United States, the examiner made a phone call, and another examiner came over and took her away. Walk through a corridor and take the next elevator to the baggage carousel. Fan Qing found that the oval corner of the baggage carousel was separated by a curtain, and the people who walked into the quarantine area were people who were about to enter the "little black room".
At this time, a white female official named Tully told Fan Qing that she would need to inspect her luggage later. While waiting for her luggage, Tully asked Fan Qing's name, where she worked, including who would pay her salary, as well as the names, ages, and places of birth of her parents.
Tully was concerned about Fan Qing's profession next, and when Fan Qing patiently explained that he would use a series of partial differential equations to describe and solve the development and evolution of biological tissues, Tully became impatient and said that he hated mathematics. Tully also asked Fan Qing if there would be any military applications for his research, and Fan Qing was surprised because his research field was the morphology generation of biological soft tissues, which had nothing to do with the military.
When the luggage arrived, all of Fan Qing's electronic products were taken out. After asking her for the boot password, Tully took away her phone, iPad, laptop, and even sports bracelet, as well as her two portable hard drives, which stored all work files.
After Tully left, it was time for Fan Qing to wait alone.
At around 15:40, Fan Qing was called to the "little black house". After another 20 minutes of waiting, it was time for Tully to interrogate another tall, muscular man.
Fan Qing noticed that there was a camera in front of him, but it was not clear whether he was filming it. After asking some basic questions, the two censors asked Fan Qing: If you were sent back to China, would you be worried that you would be persecuted? ”
The figure shows the number of Chinese students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions from 2011 to 2023. According to the U.S. State Department, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States fell by more than 20% in 2023 from 370,000 in 2019. Source: The Washington Post
The pit that has been dug a long time ago
In hindsight, the two censors had already dug a hole for her.
The first question is whether the scientific research done by Fan Qing is related to military applications. Fan Qing replied in the negative: "All the research I do is about theoretical models and numerical simulations. I don't do any experiments, and what I do has nothing to do with military applications. ”
However, the censor came prepared, and he had already anchored the topic of Professor Beihang and Fan Qing. They first asked Fan Qing if he knew the professor at Beihang University, and Fan Qing told them that the professor was a former member of the same research group at Tsinghua University, but graduated early. The examiner then asked if there was any research cooperation, and Fan Qing said frankly that there was only one collaborative work, which was a mechanical study of elastic ring deformation, but it had not yet been completed.
At this time, the censor took out Fan Qing's iPad, opened her WeChat, and called up the conversation record between Fan Qing and the professor of Beihang University, asking her to elaborate on the topic of their cooperation and translate the content of the conversation in English.
Next is the one mentioned at the beginning of this article, Fan Qing insisted that he was only helping the other party to do some theoretical modeling and simulation analysis, but he did not know how their specific experiments were done. She was not involved in the experiment, and the research had nothing to do with military applications.
This chat log does not indicate that she is continuing the research. In fact, Fan Qing has explicitly rejected the Beihang professor's request to revise the paper, specifically telling the examiner: "I did this project before I came to the United States, and now I have stopped the project, not paused." ”
The reason why she did not continue the project of Professor Beihang was also because when she transferred from Shanghai to the United States through Canada in 2022 to start her postdoctoral career, she was interrogated by the U.S. Customs inspector when she went through customs clearance procedures in Toronto in advance.
That time, Fan Qing was locked up in a "small black room" for several hours, so much so that he almost missed the plane. At that time, the examiner printed the titles of all her papers on the front and back of an A4 sheet of paper, gave her a pencil, and asked her to write down the topic content of each published paper, and at the same time interrogated her for a long time about the cooperation with the professor of Beihang University. She told the censor that the study was merely a toy model and had no military application.
The examiner also focused on the title of the paper, asking why it was called Robotic fish, and repeatedly mentioned the word "robot fish" in the WeChat messages that the professor of Beihang University unilaterally sent to her. In addition, in her computer files, it was found that the draft article and supplementary materials for the study were placed in a folder called "Ray paper". And the code name "Ray" is very similar to a military project in the United States. Fan Qing was very annoyed, she didn't understand why her partner would use this troublesome name, and she had already reminded the other party many times to change the name of the paper. She has made it clear that she is withdrawing from the study.
However, she quickly reacted: Executive Order 10043, signed by former US President Trump in June 2020, barred students and scholars from many universities such as Beihang University from obtaining F/J visas. She may well have been implicated in this.
In the end, Fan Qing successfully cleared customs in Toronto. This time, despite previous reports of Chinese students being forcibly repatriated from Washington Dulles International Airport, she still believes that her research is not sensitive, and that there are many universities in Boston, so students and scholars entering Boston Airport should not be treated unfairly and discriminatorily.
Unexpectedly, Boston Customs imposed such a severe penalty on just one unfounded suspicion.
Fan Qing attended the National Conference on Biomechanics.
"Plants and Trees"
In hindsight, she had long been targeted by U.S. Customs.
In the eyes of the censors, sensitivity is everywhere. In order to prove that Fan Qing had something to do with military projects, the two censors racked their brains.
They asked Fan Qing many times why his major in engineering mechanics belonged to the School of Aerospace and Aeronautics of Tsinghua University, and Fan Qing repeatedly explained to them that there are many different departments under the School of Aerospace and Aeronautics, but his major is mechanics, not aerospace.
They found a photo of Fan Qing on her phone taken during a conference in Xi'an in 2018, with the 12th National Conference on Biomechanics in the background. The censor enlarged the photo, pointed to the words "Northwestern Polytechnical University" on the background board and asked, "What is your relationship with this school?"
Obviously, Northwestern Polytechnical University, which is also listed in Executive Order 10043, is a sensitive word. Fan Qing told them that Northwestern Polytechnical University was the organizer of the conference, but "I never entered the school's gate."
When the examiner asked her if she had received funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC), Fan admitted that she had received funding for the project in 2019.
The censor's next question made Fan Qing laugh, and they pointed to an app called "CSC" found in Fan Qing's phone and asked, "Why is 'CSC' still in your phone now?" Fan Qing told them that this CSC was not the other CSC, but the application of the Harvard apartment basement laundry service company.
It's not over yet. The censor found a memo on Fan Qing's mobile phone that included a schedule to visit the Whampoa Military Academy on December 18, 2023, and asked her what she had to do with the military academy.
Fan Qing had no choice but to explain that this memorial hall at the former site of the Whampoa Military Academy was just a historical relic, just a scenic spot in Guangzhou. At that time, Fan Qing had just submitted a U.S. visa application in Shanghai, and then went to Chengdu and Guangzhou for a few days. In fact, because there was something else that afternoon, she did not visit the former site of the Whampoa Military Academy.
Although it turned out that these were all "grass and trees are soldiers", it did not change the censor's judgment on the Beihang cooperation paper, and after repeated entanglement, the final decision was given to the repatriation.
After announcing the deportation decision, the examiner asked her to sign, and Fan Qing cried and tried to read the transcript before signing, but was refused. Tully threatened to spend the night in a "little black room" if she didn't sign, and Boston was cold in winter with no heating, so Fan Qing had to hold the mouse tremblingly and sign a tadpole-like crooked, barely legible name.
Next, when she saw that Fan Qing refused to press the fingerprint, Tully lost her patience and directly grabbed Fan Qing's hand and pressed it on the fingerprint device.
They also had to take pictures of Fan Qing, asking them not to cry anymore, to stand up straight and show their teeth. In the end, she was given a scraper and asked to leave a sample of oral epithelial cells. Then they were put at the boarding gate and returned to Shanghai via Qatar as they had come.
Later, after consulting a lawyer, she learned that she did not have the option to withdraw her application for entry, and if she had, she might not have been punished with a lifetime ban from entering the country so quickly.
"The screen is being monitored"
By the time she boarded her repatriation flight at around 9 p.m. on Jan. 28, Fan Qing had been at Boston's Logan International Airport for seven hours.
Her passport and repatriation documents were in a yellow bag that was kept by the crew all the way, while all electronic devices were seized at U.S. Customs for further inspection, and all she had was a list of the equipment. Fan Qing asked how long it would take to return it to her, and the reply was two weeks. Again, can I send it back to China? The answer is no, it can only be mailed to an address in the United States.
The flight from Boston to Doha and then to Shanghai took nearly 30 hours, during which Fan Qing sat in the last row of the flight, unable to move around at will, let alone change seats. She was anxious because she had no communication equipment: her colleagues at Harvard were waiting for her to return, and she had lost contact with relatives and friends back home.
In the 14 hours from Boston to Doha, Fan Qing didn't eat a mouthful of food, she couldn't eat. It wasn't until she was about to get off the plane that she asked for a snack. Even when she got off the plane, she was asked to be the last to leave, and someone was specially supervised. Fortunately, a flight attendant was kind enough to lend her mobile phone to call her family.
On the Doha-Shanghai route, Fan Qing felt a lot better, after all, there were more Chinese passengers. She borrowed her phone again to contact her family.
At nearly 3 p.m. on January 30, she finally returned to Shanghai.
It wasn't until early March that Fan's colleagues at Harvard received her seized electronic devices. However, when a colleague opened the computer to copy files at Fan Qing's request, he turned on the computer and found a line of small English words on the top of the laptop display, "Your screen is being observed".
Fan Qing and her colleagues were terrified, worried that their phones and iPads were also being monitored, so they had not yet charged them.
Fan Qing's notebook being monitored.
End
Harvard's lawyer told Fan Qing that in January 2024 alone, five Chinese at Harvard were deported.
Burdened with a lifetime entry ban, Fan Qing no longer hopes to return to the United States.
Her two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard also benefited her a lot. Harvard's tutors are better at looking at problems from a mathematical point of view, which gives Fan Qing a lot of different academic perspectives.
The tutor was very sorry, and he told Fan Qing that this was caused by wrong political factors, "I hope that this incident will not hinder the development of your academic career in the future."
Originally, Fan Qing's plan was to find a teaching position in the United States after completing his postdoctoral work in 2025. Next, she plans to go to Europe to look for opportunities. Although going to Europe to learn a new language and not having as many job opportunities as in the United States, this is an acceptable outcome for Fan Qing at the moment.
Fortunately, she has successfully obtained an offer from a well-known research institute in Europe and is ready to start her second postdoctoral work.
The only concern is that Fan Qing has not yet gotten all the electronic devices she had seized by Boston Customs. These personal belongings are mailed back to China from the United States and have to pay a lot of customs duties to Chinese customs, which is about 20% of the total value. This made her incomprehensible.
(Unless otherwise captioned, the photos in this article are provided by the interviewee)