A man who stalked and threatened a fellow Chinese student on a Boston college campus after she put up pro-democracy fliers has been sentenced to nine months in federal prison and he will be sent back to China when he has served his time. Prosecutors said that after the woman put up fliers in solidarity with protesters in China, 26-year-old Xiaolei Wu tried to find out her address and threatened to chop her hands off in a message on the WeChat app, CNN reports. Prosecutors said he also reported her to his mother, a government official in China and told the woman that the country's public security agency would "greet" her family, reports the Washington Post.
Wu was suspended from the Berklee College of Music after his arrest in 2022. In January, he was convicted of cyberstalking and interstate transmissions of threatening communication. With the prison sentence, he "learned there are serious consequences for harassing, threatening, stalking, and infringing on a fellow student's constitutional rights solely because she was critical of the ruling Communist Party of China," Jodi Cohen, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston field office, said in a statement. "What Mr. Wu did—in weaponizing the authoritarian nature of the People's Republic of China to threaten this woman—is incredibly disturbing."
Prosecutors said the woman's family in China received repeated visits from state security officials after Wu reported her and she feels she can no longer safely return to the country, the Post reports. She is now a permanent US resident. Wu's lawyers said he will not be allowed to return to the US after he finishes his sentence and is deported. (More Chinese Americans stories.)
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