Long advantage, Harvards China bonds become political liability

By Michael Martina

Washington (Reuters) -Sharvard University in China, long a profit to school, are liability, since the allegations of the Trump administration that his campus is plagued by Beijing -supported influencing operations.

On Thursday, the government moved Harvard’s ability to record foreign students and said that it promoted anti -Semitism and coordinated with the Chinese party’s Communist Party. Among them are Chinese citizens who make up about a fifth of Harvard’s foreign students’ statement in 2024, the university said.

On Friday, a US judge temporarily blocked the administration’s command after the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had sued.

The concerns about the Chinese government in Harvard are not new. Some US legislators, many of them Republicans, have been worried that China manipulates Harvard in order to gain access to US technology, to avoid the US security laws and to suppress criticism in the United States.

“Harvard has had the Chinese party’s Communist Party exploited,” an official of the White House told Reuters on Friday and added that the school had “made an eye on the KCP director of Vigilante on the campus”.

Harvard did not immediately answer inquiries about comments.

The school said that the revocation was a punishment for Harvard’s “perceived perspective”, which it described as a violation of the right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed by the first change in the US constitution.

Harvard’s connections to China, which include research partnerships and academic centers oriented in China, have long been. The connections have led to large financial gifts, influences on international affairs and global prestige for school.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers, who was temporarily critical of the university, described the step of the Trump government to block foreign students the most serious attack by the university so far.

“It is difficult to imagine, a greater strategic gift for China than for the United States to sacrifice his role as a beacon for the world,” he said in an interview with politico.

Health training

In a statement, the Chinese message in Washington said: “The exchange of education and the cooperation between China and the United States are mutually advantageous and should not be stigmatized.”

The presence of Chinese students in Harvard and the connections of the school to the country are not proof of misconduct. However, the complexity and the overlapping nature of the connections were imperceptible enough to attract attention and criticism.

The questions in China quoted by the Trump government reflect the work of the selected selection committee of the Republican House of Representatives for China.

For example, after 2020, Harvard provided training for public health training for public health training after 2020. This year, the United States imposed sanctions against the Chinese paramilitary organization for its role in alleged human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

The Department of Homeland Security said these engagements with XPCC were only continued “only in 2024”. “

China vehemently denies any allegations of misconduct in Xinjiang, but both the Trump and Biden administration have defined the politics of Beijing in the region as “genocide”.

In a further episode in which questions were asked, the strategy of the US Business Intelligence company stated that Ronnie Chan, which enabled a donation of $ 350 million in 2014, which led to the School of Public Health after his father, the real estate developer Th Chan, as a member of China-United States Exchange Foundation.

The organization based in Hong Kong, which says that its goal is to promote the dialogue between the two countries, was classified as foreign headmaster under the US law, with American lobbyists who are working to assign this work to the US government.

Former professor condemned

The former Harvard professor Charles Lieber was examined in 2018 by a Trump program called China Initiative, which focused on combating Chinese espionage and intellectual ownership and researchers and universities examined whether they revealed financial relationships with Beijing.

He was convicted in 2021 to lie about his connections to China in connection with federal research. In April he became a full -time professor at a Chinese university.

The initiative was hired as part of the Biden administration after critics said that they had led to racial profiles and a culture of fear that cooled the scientific cooperation.

The US legislature of both parties has expressed concern about the efforts of Beijing-linked student associations to monitor political activities. In April 2024, a student activist by Harvard from an event by a Chinese exchange student – not by faculties or security personnel – was physically ejected in order to interrupt a speech by the China Ambassador Xie Feng.

The pressure in Trump’s second term in Trump’s second term, whereby the education department in April asked the university to submit records on its foreign funds after checking the necessary reporting on large gifts and contracts in foreign sources that resulted in incomplete and inaccurate disclosures.

The movements of the Trump government against Harvard have alerted some China experts.

Yaqiu Wang, a human rights researcher based in the USA who came to the United States as a student from China, said that the Trump government’s step to ban foreign students in Harvard was “completely counterproductive”.

“The concerns of the Chinese government’s transnational attempts at repression to silence critics are very legitimate and espionage problems are legitimate.” Said Wang. “But to try to remedy this by not only Chinese students, but also foreign students are understandable.”

(Reporting by Michael Martina; additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and David Brunnstrom; editorial team of Don Durfee, Cynthia Osterman and Diane Craft)