Around New England

The Time Harvard Picked the Chinese Communist Party Over A Chinese Dissident

April 24, 2020

Chinese dissident Teng Biao was a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School on March 10, 2015 when a high-ranking Harvard official ordered him to cancel a talk about his experiences in China because the university’s president was scheduled to meet with the president of China and Teng’s talk would embarrass the university.

Teng was also ordered by the Harvard official not to tell anybody about the cancellation – which the Harvard official called a “postponement,” even though the event was never to happen.

Teng’s experiences with Harvard are detailed in a long story in The Harvard Crimson published Thursday, April 23 that describes Harvard’s long history of involvement with China.

In the late 1970s, when Harvard officials rekindled a relationship that had been cut off with the triumph of the Communist People’s Republic of China in 1949, Harvard officials were offering basic organizational and research assistance to a basket-case country unsure of how to run things, Harvard academics told The Harvard Crimson.

Nowadays, the article suggests, the relationship has changed.

“Though the Harvard-China relationship always entailed mutual benefit, it was for decades asymmetrical — China needed Harvard more than Harvard needed China, which perhaps gave the University more leeway to be critical of the Chinese government,” writes Harvard Crimson reporter Matteo N. Wong. “… As the geopolitical and academic balance shifts in China’s favor, the Teng Biao incident may indicate that, at least in some instances, Harvard depends on China more than the other way around.”

Chinese government officials demonstrate a unique interest in what is going on in the university, to the point of sending spies to classes, said Elizabeth J. Perry, a professor of government at Harvard, China scholar, and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

“We’ve had Chinese citizens at Harvard, who are clearly doing the bidding of the Chinese state, coming and sitting in on talks and taking notes and reporting back,” Perry said, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Harvard’s relationship with China drew a spotlight earlier this year when the chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, Charles M. Lieber, was arrested January 28 by federal agents and charged with failing to disclose substantial payments from entities connected to the Chinese government despite being required to do so under federal law.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Lieber was getting paid $50,000 a month by the Wuhan University of Technology plus upwards of about $158,000 in living expenses and benefited from a grant of more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at the Chinese university. Prosecutors say Lieber was legally obligated to disclose the payments because his research group at Harvard has received more than $15 million in grant funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense since 2008 – grants which “require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest” including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities.”

Prosecutors say China’s government recruits American academics as a means of trying to steal American intellectual property.