A Sanctioned Chinese Entity Finds a Friend in Harvard. Plus, Trump Moves To Unmask Foreign Nationals Funding US Universities.
A different kind of sanctions relief: Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health partnered with China's national health insurer in 2019 to offer an annual "training course on health financing." Included in the inaugural training were officials from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-run "paramilitary group." The United States sanctioned the XPCC in 2020 over its central role in China's Uyghur genocide. "But Harvard continued to train its members, once in 2023 and again in 2024," our Jessica Costescu reports.
The revelation comes amid the Ivy League school’s battle with the Trump administration over billions of dollars in federal funding. It could bring legal trouble, according to Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik, who said Harvard "should have known that training the XPCC risked complicity in Beijing's atrocities against Uyghurs and other ethno-religious minorities."
The Chan School of Public Health's dean for communications and strategic initiatives, Stephanie Simon, blamed XPCC's inclusion on China. It was the Chinese government that invited "the local officials who administer health insurance and elder care programs in each administrative region of China," according to Simon. In Xinjiang, she said, that happened to include the XPCC. Nothing to see here.
Pulling back the curtain: American universities are supposed to disclose their top foreign donors to the federal government. Historically, that included the donors' names—until the Biden administration took power and stopped publishing them, instead releasing the donations’ country of origin. Not anymore.
The Trump administration, the Free Beacon's Alana Goodman reports, is out with a new executive order "outlining more robust enforcement of the Higher Education Act of 1965's foreign donor disclosure requirements," and it's already bringing results. Back in February, the Free Beacon filed a state records request with the University of California, Berkeley asking for the identities of foreign donors. It didn't respond for weeks. "On Friday, shortly after Trump signed the order and launched a foreign funding investigation into the school, it sent a list of major foreign donors from 2023 and 2024."
The order and more aggressive enforcement approach "could bring startling revelations regarding the size and scope of U.S. higher education funding that has come from China, Qatar, Russia, and other adversarial nations," writes Goodman. Berkeley's list, for example, "includes at least three Chinese nationals or entities. Among them is Duane Ziping Kuang, the founding managing partner of China-based venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners, an early investor in ByteDance. He contributed $75,000 to Berkeley's business school between 2023 and 2024, according to the list."
READ MORE: US Universities Don't Like Unmasking Their Foreign Donors. A New Trump Order Aims To Make Them.
Away from the Beacon:
- The White House correspondents' dinner came and went with no president and no comedian. "What remained," ABC News wrote in a straight news piece, "were the journalists and the First Amendment." Sounds like a blast.
- The New York Times is out with a lengthy profile of Hasan Piker, described as "a progressive mind in a MAGA body." The "progressive mind" consists of loving socialism and defending 9/11. The "MAGA body" consists of… exercise.
- Hamas may have accepted a recent Israeli proposal for a temporary ceasefire if not for an act of "sabotage" by Qatar, which "exerted counter-pressure to reject the proposal," according to the Jerusalem Post.
- Dems in disarray update: After Michigan's Elissa Slotkin criticized the branding behind her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders's "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, arguing that the term "oligarchy" does not resonate with normal people, Bernie fired back: "I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are."
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