A showdown over Harvard’s China ties
President Donald Trump's administration is targeting Harvard University’s China ties in what may be the opening shot in a wider administration effort to compel U.S. schools to sever their relations with Chinese entities. | Evan Vucci/AP
With help from John Sakellariadis, Maggie Miller, Nahal Toosi and Daniel Lippman
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The Trump administration is targeting Harvard University’s China ties in what may be the opening shot in a wider administration effort to compel U.S. schools to sever their relations with Chinese entities — or else.
The Department of Homeland Security provided a number of reasons for terminating Harvard’s right to enroll foreign students Thursday, including allegations of pervasive antisemitism and race discrimination. But China featured prominently in the rationale. The agency alleged that the school had relationships with a Xinjiang-based paramilitary force and Chinese universities and individuals “linked to China’s defense-industrial base.” The statement referred to sources that included Harvard websites and academic journal articles that demonstrated the university’s ties with those Chinese entities. Harvard convinced a federal judge Friday to temporarily block the DHS order.
Harvard and many in the academic community see that as just an excuse to ramp up pressure on the school for defying the Trump administration’s efforts to compel it to enact sweeping changes to admissions and hiring that the administration deems “hostile to the American values and institutions.”
“This is clearly another attempt to find a reason to punish Harvard,” said ROSIE LEVINE, executive director of the US-China Education Trust, a nonprofit education advocacy group. “There’s a risk of lumping everything that has anything to do with the military in China under this very broad lens that puts very normal, nonsensitive research into the crosshairs.”
Beijing feels the same way.
DHS’ move on Harvard is “politicizing education cooperation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson MAO NING said today.
Harvard didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The State Department didn’t waste any time leaping on the directive. An internal State Department cable issued today instructed all consular sections “effective immediately” to refuse visas for foreign students associated with Harvard. “Consular sections should refer all inquiries from impacted students or visa holders to DHS for further information,” the cable read.
DHS got help in justifying the move from Rep. JOHN MOOLENAAR (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China. Moolenaar, along with Reps. TIM WALBERG (R-Mich.) and ELISE STEFANIK (R-N.Y.), raised “serious national security and ethical concerns” about Harvard’s China ties in a letter to the school Monday. DHS referenced that letter in its statement justifying the move Thursday.
Moolenaar declined to comment to NatSec Daily, and neither Walberg nor Stefanik responded to our requests for comment.
Moolenaar has made the targeting of U.S. universities with allegedly problematic ties to Chinese schools a key focus of the China committee. In January, he persuaded the University of Michigan to cut ties with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Moolenaar and Walberg also want Duke University to shut down its China-based Duke Kunshan University campus, alleging it’s “a direct pipeline between U.S. innovation and China’s military-industrial complex,” the lawmakers said in a letter to Duke last week. That echoes long standing bipartisan concerns — backed by the FBI — about the threat of Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property.
And there’s likely more to come.
Moolenaar sent questionnaires to six U.S. universities in March about their Chinese student population and their participation in advanced STEM programs. Moolenaar has declined to respond to requests about how he’ll use that data. Within U.S. academic circles, there is concern that U.S. universities are now at risk of accusations of national security breaches due to the composition of their foreign student bodies or tangential ties to the Chinese military.
“For some schools that even just have Chinese language programs, it may be very easy to just cut any kind of ties with China that might bring you into the firing line of the Trump administration,” said a professor in a U.S. university with multiple cooperation programs with Chinese schools. POLITICO granted them anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.