Harvard's China ties become new front in battle with Trump

Mint

4 days ago

In his war with Harvard, President Trump has sought to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from the school and strip its tax exemptions, measures the White House initially tied to perceived antisemitism at the school amid Israel's war in Gaza.
In recent weeks, long-simmering Republican anger over Harvard's links to China has increasingly gained traction. In escalating calls to punish the school, a training event two years ago in the Chinese city of Kunming has emerged as Exhibit A.
The training, on the bland topic of healthcare financing, was co-hosted by a Harvard professor and involved a few dozen provincial-level bureaucrats. Among them was at least one representative from Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a large Chinese Communist Party paramilitary organization in the country's far west that also handles civilian government services, including managing hospitals.
U.S. authorities in 2020 imposed sanctions against the Xinjiang corps, accusing it of ethnic and religious abuses against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities and forbidding U.S. persons from providing it 'funds, goods, or services."
On Wednesday, as Trump moved to bar Harvard from enrolling foreign students, his order cited the event, charging that in exchange for Chinese funding the school 'has, among other things, 'repeatedly hosted and trained members of a Chinese Communist Party paramilitary organization.' "
Harvard, which didn't respond to questions, hasn't publicly addressed the allegations involving the Xinjiang corps. The school is fighting Trump in court, calling some of the administration's measures illegal.
To its detractors, Harvard epitomizes American elite universities' dependence on Beijing as a profit center—and how that helps the country's rulers, the Chinese Communist Party, challenge the U.S.
The conservative Heritage Foundation took aim at higher education in its Project 2025 recommendations, saying, 'Universities taking money from the CCP should lose their accreditation, charters, and eligibility for federal funds."
Chinese citizens represent some 23% of Harvard's international students, and Education Department data show that in recent decades individuals and companies from China and Hong Kong together have been the university's No. 2 source of large foreign gifts and contracts, behind only England.
In 2023 and 2024 combined, the data show, Harvard reported $55.6 million in gifts of $250,000 or more from China, including Hong Kong, plus $13.7 million in contracts, some 13% and 8.2% respectively among all large-scale funding from non-U.S. partners.
The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps booth during a 2021 trade fair in Beijing.
In previous responses to questions about its China exposure, such as acceptance of financial gifts, the school has cited its broad global alumni network across over 200 nations.
With some 90 million members, the Chinese Communist Party has a deep reach into Chinese society. But while some tuition payments and funding might ultimately be traced to decisions by Chinese Communist Party officials, neither China's government nor the party would be likely to directly underwrite activities involving universities abroad, and there is no indication of such payments to Harvard.
The Xinjiang corps, colloquially known as Bingtuan, is central to the Chinese Communist Party's ironclad rule over Xinjiang. Widespread evidence shows its paramilitary operations have played a leading role in Beijing's suppression of Uyghurs, including the detention of more than a million people. In imposing sanctions on the corps and its leaders in 2020, the Treasury Department cited 'their connection to serious human-rights abuse."
The organization also has a massive administrative role in providing social services to ordinary citizens, such as managing hospitals and healthcare systems, the topic of the 2023 Harvard training, co-hosted by Winnie Yip, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Analysts say the Xinjiang corps's participation in the training—organized by a Chinese health-insurance regulator, the National Healthcare Security Administration—was hardly the kind of nefarious activity American sanctions are designed to halt.
Still, U.S. sanctions laws don't differentiate between types of interaction, said Julian Ku, a law professor at New York's Hofstra University. ​ 'Providing services to a blocked entity is prohibited, so Harvard does indeed face some possible liability here," he said.
Trump indicated that his concern about the Xinjiang corps was based on findings of a House Select Committee on China. Its chairman, Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), late last month wrote to Harvard President Alan Garber, demanding explanations about university activities that 'create risks to U.S. national security and further the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) genocide in Xinjiang."
Harvard President Alan Garber
A China committee statement about Moolenaar's letter charged that Harvard researchers did transplant studies with 'PRC-based collaborators, amid mounting evidence of the CCP's forced organ harvesting practices." Allegations that Beijing is engaged in institutionalized theft from prisoners and others of body parts for organ transplants have recently gained traction among Republican China critics. While few human-rights groups make that claim today, the anti-Beijing spiritual group Falun Gong has forcefully promoted the issue.
The Moolenaar letter described a number of Harvard studies as problematic, including one on cardiac transplants involving mice, detailed in a March 2024 scientific paper that indicated one of the 20 researchers had an affiliation with a hospital in northern China.
A spokeswoman for Harvard Medical School's Brigham and Women's Hospital told The Wall Street Journal that the study was done at that institution and had no association with China. By the time the paper was published, she said, one researcher had joined the Chinese hospital.
Harvard hasn't responded to Moolenaar's May 19 letter, which was also signed by Reps. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) and Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), but by no Democrats on the China committee.
Winnie Yip, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
In a response to questions, Moolenaar called the Xinjiang corps 'a sanctioned, paramilitary organization complicit in genocide" and said, 'I stand by the letter, and I will continue demanding answers from those enabling or ignoring the CCP's abuses."
Criticism over the Xinjiang organization's participation in the 2023 healthcare event originated in a late April report by Strategy Risks, a research firm run by Isaac Stone Fish, a New York-based journalist, which concluded that Harvard's behavior raised doubts about its effectiveness in 'limiting [Chinese Communist Party] and authoritarian influences." The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York public-policy organization, funded the report but hasn't independently published the findings.
Last month the report found an audience with Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who cited Strategy Risks in an open letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that urged an investigation into Harvard's potentially 'prohibited behavior" with the Xinjiang organization.
Rep. John Moolenaar
Four days later, Moolenaar and his fellow House members sent their letter to Harvard's Garber, noting the Xinjiang organization's role in mass detentions and describing healthcare efforts in Xinjiang as a 'fig leaf" to whitewash crimes.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem then called out the training as she moved to strip Harvard of its right to educate foreign students.
Harvard's public materials on the meetings don't say how the corps came to participate in the training, an iteration of a series on healthcare finance basics known as the Flagship Program developed by the World Bank and Harvard in the 1990s. It has been offered to bureaucrats in dozens of low- and middle-income nations; the 2023 version in China had a special focus on eldercare insurance.
A Chinese-language website published by Harvard said the Xinjiang group joined the annual training in 2019, but an internet archive tool showed that reference to its participation was later deleted.
Yip, far left, at healthcare-finance training event in China in 2023.
The congressional letter also took issue with a photo Harvard published from the 2023 event that blurred out name plates in front of four speakers, which the politicians charged 'raises questions about why Harvard wanted to keep their identities hidden."
It couldn't be determined who had obscured the nametags; the photo had previously been widely published that way in China. Key participants are nonetheless easily identified, including the Harvard professor, Yip.
Write to James T. Areddy at [e-mail]