The Great Recession left Harvard University in a financial crisis. Its endowment had plummeted by nearly 30 percent, or more than $10 billion, in 2009.
To help recover, Harvard’s leaders found part of the answer in China. Already, American business was pouring in, as Washington and Beijing encouraged — if at times warily — a policy of engagement as the best way to build bridges between the two countries.
China promised enormous academic and economic opportunities, and Harvard had something wealthy and well-connected Chinese craved: prestige and access to influential networks for themselves and their children.
Between 2010 and 2025, Harvard attracted $560 million in gifts and contracts from China and Hong Kong, the most of any American university, partly from private donors and foundations, as well as a small amount through contracts with government entities like universities.
“The confluence of new, enormous property wealth and especially favorable relationships” — with China’s leadership and scholars — “have happily converged,” wrote Harvard Magazine, a university-affiliated publication, almost breathless in describing the optimism in Sino-American relations at the time.
Now Harvard’s ties with China are coming back to haunt the university. Those connections were forged when Harvard was more financially vulnerable and when much of the foreign policy establishment believed that higher education could play a part in pushing America’s democratic ideals to China and the rest of the world.
But American foreign policy has turned sharply hawkish against China, and even though Harvard has steadily reduced its ties there, the Trump administration has made the relationship another line of attack in its broader effort to bring the university to heel. The administration has stripped away billions of dollars in federal research funding and is trying to revoke its right to host international students and also end its nonprofit tax status.
President Trump has portrayed Harvard’s ties to China as a national security risk. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for an investigation into the university’s ties with a Chinese company whose leader had been subject to American sanctions over its treatment of workers, which could lead to criminal charges.
Alan M. Garber, the university’s president, has described the administration’s overall assault on the school as a power grab “unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how it operates.”
Ruling in a lawsuit that Harvard filed over the administration’s efforts to block its enrollment of international students, a federal judge in Boston, Allison D. Burroughs, called the Trump administration’s actions “misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints, seemingly because they are in some instances, opposed to this administration’s own views.”
Harvard is not the only American university with a presence in China. New York University operates a degree-granting campus in Shanghai. Duke has a campus in Kunshan. And Kean University, in New Jersey, has a campus in Wenzhou.
International students comprise a quarter of Harvard’s enrollment — with 6 percent of students coming from China — but, overall, the relationship has waned. Harvard officials point out that the Chinese donations are a relatively small percentage of the more than $9.6 billion the school raised from 173 countries in a global capital fund-raising campaign after the recession.
Since 2020, Chinese money flowing into Harvard has fallen by more than half, to $30 million in 2024 from a high of $78 million in 2020. Harvard has moved a summer language program out of Beijing to Taipei in Taiwan. Its hub for Harvard events in Shanghai, which opened in 2010 with great fanfare, has shrunk to a quarter of its previous footprint.
Michael J. Green, director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said many research universities developed China connections before paring them down as the political climate changed.
“But probably not to the satisfaction of the Trump administration,” he said, “which is motivated by more than just national security concerns in its war with Harvard.”
A Mutually Beneficial Relationship
Harvard enrolled its first Chinese students in 1880. By 1908, Chinese students had formed their own club. For many families in China today, Harvard, or Hafo, as it is called there, has become a symbol of success, so much so that it has inspired copycats.
William C. Kirby, a Harvard professor and former director of the university’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, found 375 attempts in China to register the name as a trademark — an S.U.V., a child-care center, a fast-food restaurant and even a company that offers to take college exams for students.
“When we went to register our center in Shanghai in 2008, I was told by the general counsel that we couldn’t use the name Harvard — a Harvard University already existed there,” said Dr. Kirby, author of “Empires of Ideas,” a 2022 book on universities.
In 2015, Drew Faust, then the Harvard president, met in Beijing with President Xi Jinping of China, whose daughter had recently received her Harvard degree. After it began its fund-raising push there, Harvard brought in donations from executives of major real estate companies.
Some had close connections to the Chinese Communist Party, often a prerequisite for success for Chinese businesses. They included Wang Jianlin, the head of Dalian Wanda Group, who had been a longtime Communist Party member; Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China Evergrande, who rubbed shoulders with officials in the highest levels of government; and Xiao Jinhua, the founder of China’s Tomorrow Group, who served as a de facto banker to China’s Communist Party elite.
An American foundation controlled by Ronnie and Gerald Chan, American citizens who made billions in Hong Kong real estate, also donated. It gave $350 million, at the time Harvard’s largest gift ever.
Orville Schell, a Harvard alumnus who directs the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, said that China was then regarded as a new landscape of potential big donors.
“Everybody made a China play,” Dr. Schell said.
In 2002, Harvard’s Kennedy School began the program known as China’s Leaders in Development, which continued until 2016, training Chinese government officials, some who went on to high-ranking roles in the Chinese Communist Party. The school emphasized what Harvard called “values of freedom, democracy and human rights” in hopes of exposing a new generation of leaders to democratic values.
“No one thought that was craven,” Dr. Schell said. “The idea was that, if we interact more, things will change more, and maybe China will slowly vacate its old Leninist past.”
In retrospect, he said, it is clear that strategy failed.
In a statement, the Kennedy School said it ended ties with China years ago, including the program for training Chinese civil servants.
“As the Chinese government became more internally repressive and externally assertive,” a spokesman for the Kennedy School said, “the school has discontinued those relationships.”
Perry Link, a Harvard alumnus and China scholar, said that American universities had sought to exchange academic ideas but also to raise money and attract wealthy and well-connected students.
And China welcomed the arrangements, he added.
“The Communist Party’s interest has been to catch up with the West in science in order to be as strong and wealthy as the West,” said Dr. Link, who was barred by China after assisting a Chinese dissident’s escape from the country.
A Deepening Distrust
As the U.S.-China relationship deteriorated, some politicians, mostly Republicans, expressed concern about Chinese influence in academia — and pointed out vulnerabilities with Harvard’s ties. In 2020, President Trump began an investigation into whether Harvard had properly disclosed its Chinese donors.
Harvard’s full list of Chinese donors and contracts is not public, but the university has said that its contracts primarily involve executive education programs and the sale and licensing of academic publications and materials produced by Harvard’s two presses.
As a result of the 2020 investigation, Harvard made additional disclosures and the Biden administration closed the investigation. The Trump administration opened a new investigation this year.
Then in May, House Republicans sent a letter to the university demanding documents related to a large Chinese state-owned agricultural enterprise called Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, which is subject to American sanctions for its treatment of Uyghur workers.
The Department of Homeland Security followed with a letter claiming Harvard “hosted and trained” representatives of the company at conferences in China sponsored by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health — named for the Chan family. Mr. Rubio followed with the call for a sanctions investigation.
A Harvard spokesman declined to comment.
Several administrations in Washington have raised concerns about academic collaborations and accused China of trying to steal scientific secrets. In the past year, both Georgia Tech and the University of California, Berkeley, announced that they are severing ties.
In 2023, a Harvard scientist was convicted of lying about a deal with China to establish a research laboratory there. (No evidence emerged suggesting that Harvard was aware of the arrangement.) The researcher, Charles M. Lieber, the former chairman of the university’s chemistry department, served a brief prison sentence. He is now on the faculty of Tsinghua University.
At times, critics have accused Harvard of currying favor with actors in an increasingly authoritarian state. A survey published in 2020 by the Ash Center at the Kennedy School drew criticism from Mike Pompeo, secretary of state in the first Trump administration, after the Chinese government touted it as evidence that 90 percent of citizens were satisfied with their central government.
A spokesman for Harvard’s Kennedy School said that, contrary to the Chinese government’s messaging, the study found that Chinese residents held nuanced views about their government.
An author of the study, Tony Saich, a Harvard professor of international affairs, is on the board of AMC Entertainment. The company had been controlled by Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate that sold its controlling interest. Dr. Saich’s compensation from AMC last year was more than $300,000, according to the company’s report.
Dr. Saich said he became familiar with Wanda Group as a result of his appointment to the AMC board in 2012, adding that he learned about the donation after the fact.
Wanda is controlled by Mr. Wang, who was once viewed as the richest man in China and whose American acquisitions once raised concern on Capitol Hill. In 2015, Dr. Faust met with Mr. Wang in Beijing, according to an announcement on the company’s website. The university subsequently announced a gift of $3.75 million from Mr. Wang to create a global institute focused on climate change.
Over time, Mr. Wang donated more money. In 2015, The New York Times disclosed his company’s ties to relatives of Xi Jinping, whom he would later defend in a presentation at Harvard.
His business and influence, like those of several Chinese donors, has declined, however.
Evergrande, whose founder, Hui Ka Yan, was a donor, filed for bankruptcy. The company reneged on its most recent pledge to Harvard, paying only a portion of a $115 million Covid research project.
Mr. Xiao, the founder of China’s Tomorrow Group, fell out of favor with China’s leadership and is serving a 13-year jail term for financial fraud.
In the fallout from President Trump’s attacks on Harvard, the Chan School of Public Health, which receives close to 60 percent of its budget in federal grants and contracts, and the Kennedy School have announced budget cuts.
Citing “unprecedented new headwinds,” the Kennedy School’s dean said last week that it would be forced to lay off employees.
Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
Steven Rich is a data reporter at The Times, using data analysis to investigate major issues and contextualize current events.
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