ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY
For decades, the smartest people in the room have told you Harvard is the crown jewel of Western civilization — the place that trains our presidents, briefs our judges, and lectures the rest of us on our moral failings. This week the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a report that tells a very different story: the crown jewel, it alleges, has been moonlighting for Beijing.
According to the report — first reported on August 13 — Harvard-affiliated researchers co-authored more than 140 publications with researchers at China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a cluster of universities the Pentagon has identified as central to China’s defense research and military modernization. Read that again. Not 140 exchange students. Not 140 friendly emails. One hundred and forty-plus research papers, produced hand-in-glove with the very schools Beijing built to sharpen the sword it fully intends to point at us.
And Harvard, the committee says, was paid handsomely for its cosmopolitan open-mindedness. Citing the Education Department’s own foreign-gift dashboard, the report states Harvard has taken in more than $600 million from China under the Section 117 disclosure system — more than any other university in America. First in endowment envy, and now first in Chinese cash. Congratulations, Cambridge.
The specifics are where the stomach turns. The committee highlights a 2023 paper on “bio-inspired soft robots for deep-sea exploration,” co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher from Beihang University — one of the Seven Sons, and a school that has sat on the Commerce Department’s Entity List since 2001. The committee says the work has potential military applications, including underwater detection. Harvard’s compliance office, naturally, waved it through as “nonmilitary research.” Because nothing says innocent academic curiosity like teaching robots to find things underwater for a regime that spends its waking hours mapping how to sink our Navy.
It gets worse. The report says Harvard researchers also co-authored a 2023 paper on magnetic materials with a researcher at China’s National University of Defense Technology — another institution on a U.S. restricted list — and that the study acknowledged partial support from the U.S. Army Research Office. Sit with that one. American taxpayers, through the Army, may have helped underwrite research shared with a Chinese military university. That is not a loophole. That is a leak, and Harvard was allegedly holding the bucket.
Engineering, the committee found, was the single largest slice of this Harvard–Seven Sons collaboration. Of course it was. Beijing doesn’t want our poetry seminars. It wants our machines.
Then there is the part that should end careers. The report describes a Harvard executive-education program run with China’s National Healthcare Security Administration to train Chinese health officials. According to registration records, officials affiliated with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps — the XPCC, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2020 over human-rights abuses against the Uyghurs — were listed in connection with some sessions. The committee is careful: it says it is unclear whether XPCC officials attended every program. But it alleges Harvard had advance participant information for a 2020 online session that included XPCC-affiliated officials and took no further action. The professor who helped organize it, Winnie Yip, told investigators she did not know the XPCC was a sanctioned entity and had never received sanctions-compliance training. That is the excuse. A Harvard professor, running a program with the Chinese government, allegedly did not know she was sharing a virtual room with representatives of an outfit our own Treasury blacklisted for crimes against a persecuted minority — and no one at Harvard bothered to teach her the rules.
The committee also raises questions about a nonprofit affiliate, Harvard Global Research and Support Services, alleging it could be used to sidestep federal foreign-gift reporting requirements — a charge Harvard will surely dispute.
And to be fair, because we will be fair, these are allegations in a congressional report, and Harvard denies wrongdoing. The university says it “shares the Committees’ concern about geopolitical risks, including threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” insists it follows “national security standards and guidance set by the federal government,” and rejects “mischaracterizations that fail to reflect the University’s documented record of compliance, cooperation, and commitment to protecting and advancing U.S. interests.” Duly noted. But “we met the minimum legal standard” is exactly the defense the committee is indicting — because the minimum legal standard is how a $600 million relationship with America’s chief adversary gets rubber-stamped, one soft robot at a time.
Committee Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) put it plainly: “From allowing violence against anti-China protestors to collaborating with entities linked to the PLA, Harvard has made serious mistakes and must act now to prevent more,” urging the school to use the investigation “as a catalyst for significant reforms that end CCP influence on campus and prioritize secure American research.” Rep. Pat Fallon has already unveiled legislation to strip federal intelligence-related funding from colleges that maintain ties to CCP-linked groups. Good. The report itself recommends Harvard bar research relationships with entities on U.S. restricted and sanctioned lists, centralize its research-security oversight, and asks Congress to toughen foreign-funding disclosure.
Here is the bottom line. Harvard wants the prestige of America and the paycheck of China, and it has spent years pretending those two things never conflict. The committee just called the bluff. You cannot be the conscience of the West on Monday and a research annex for the People’s Liberation Army on Tuesday. Pick one. And if Harvard won’t, Congress should pick for it — starting with the taxpayer money that made the whole cozy arrangement possible.
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