In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard University boldly asserts that it will not “submit to the government’s control over its academic programs.” However, a new report reveals a troubling reality: Harvard is making significant academic concessions to align with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Strategy Risks, a consulting firm focusing on geopolitical risk analysis, published an analysis titled, “Beijing Exercises Strong Influence Over Multiple Areas of Harvard University.” This report uncovers the alarming depth of the CCP’s financial leverage and influence over Harvard for many years.
“Since 2012, Harvard has received over $1.1 billion in foreign funding, with significant contributions from China. These gifts often come with ‘strings attached,’” Melissa Chen, vice president of Strategy Risks, wrote in an X.com post. The funding potentially compromises academic freedom and may “lead to partnerships that present huge attack areas for espionage, intellectual property theft, and corruption.”
The report identifies many examples of how Harvard’s academic freedom and research have been compromised because of funding from China. For instance, a 2020 Harvard study titled “Understanding CCP Resilience,” claimed that the “Chinese public” was satisfied with Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign and “that things were moving in the right direction.”
The Chan School’s CCP Ties
The report brought to light a particularly concerning instance involving the Harvard T. Chan School for Public Health (Chan School), which is named after Hong Kong real estate tycoon Ronnie Chan. The Chan family and their foundation made a substantial donation of $350 million in 2014.
Harvard should have carefully weighed the implications of accepting this donation, as Ronnie Chan has deep connections with the CCP. He’s a staunch supporter of Hong Kong’s former Chief Executive Carrie Lam, whose attempt to pass a controversial extradition bill ignited massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019. The U.S. government later sanctioned Lam for cracking down on Hong Kong protestors.
Furthermore, Chan holds the position of governor at the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), an organization that operates as a registered foreign agent of Communist China under the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act. CUSEF is funded by the United Front, a covert propaganda entity of the CCP. Chan is also a top donor to the Peterson Institute for International Economics based in Washington, D.C. Through strategic donations to prestigious institutions and numerous public lectures in the U.S., Chan is playing a crucial role in shaping pro-CCP narratives and influencing public sentiment in favor of the regime.
In 2018, the Chan School established the China Health Partnership (HCHP) in collaboration with several Chinese institutions to train Chinese government officials. The Strategy Risks report revealed that officials from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) attended training sessions in 2019 and 2023. This finding is significant because the XPCC is a notorious paramilitary organization directly controlled by the CCP in Xinjiang.
The XPCC has two main divisions: a military branch responsible for defending borders and law enforcement, and a production division that functions as a state-owned enterprise, producing a range of goods from cotton to energy. The military arm of the XPCC plays a crucial role in enforcing the CCP’s oppressive policies against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities. This includes extensive surveillance, internment, forced sterilization, and acts of cultural genocide. Furthermore, the production arm of the XPCC is known to employ enslaved laborers.
In 2020, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the XPCC and its officials due to human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. That same year, the U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Act, which was subsequently signed into law by President Donald Trump. Two years later, the U.S. enacted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which prohibits the importation of goods produced, wholly or in part, with forced labor, primarily from Xinjiang. The Strategy Risks report concludes that by inviting XPCC officials to the Chan School’s healthcare training as recently as 2023, Harvard might have violated U.S. government sanctions and laws, or “at the very least, it raises important questions about Harvard’s judgement, and Harvard’s compliance programs.”
Chen pointed out Harvard’s hypocrisy on X.com: “this is an elite institution that has spent decades posturing itself as a paragon of progressive values and a stalwart of social justice refusing to reckon with the moral implications of willingly training members of the XPCC, an organization that is antithetical to everything that social justice purportedly stands for.”
Student Protests
Furthermore, Harvard’s hypocrisy is glaringly apparent in the inconsistent way its administrators have handled student protests. Following the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the university’s response to the harassment faced by Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protesters has been alarmingly slow and inadequate. Meanwhile, the school’s former president, Claudine Gay, attempted to justify the university’s insufficient response by citing a commitment to free speech.
In stark contrast, when a few students briefly interrupted a talk by Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng at the Harvard Kennedy School in April 2024, the university took swift action by placing three students on disciplinary probation for three days. Harvard even issued an apology to the Chinese student who physically removed a protester, another Chinese student named Cosette Wu, from the conference. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, criticized the incident as “yet another example of Harvard’s appallingly unequal treatment of protesters based on the speech they support.” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said that “Harvard has proven to be completely corrupted by adversarial foreign influence.”
Harvard’s decision to sue the Trump administration is misguided and counterproductive. The university may have intended to position itself as a defender of academic freedom; however, this lawsuit has opened the door to intense scrutiny of its funding sources, particularly from abroad. As this lawsuit continues, more negative information about Harvard is likely to come to light. Many Americans are becoming increasingly outraged over China’s significant financial influence on our nation’s elite institutions, which may lead to greater support for the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal funding to Harvard. In the eyes of the public, Harvard has already lost credibility.
