House Republicans Take Aim at Harvard Over Ties to China in New Report

House Republicans published a sweeping report on Thursday accusing Harvard of failing to protect national security interests through repeated academic collaborations with China.

The 53-page report — released jointly by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the Education and Workforce Committee — is the product of a 15-month investigation into Harvard’s ties to China and the CCP. It slams Harvard’s research compliance program as “devoid of substance” and claims the University enabled a long history of research relationships with China that put sensitive military technology at risk.

Though some of its findings rehash previous investigations, the report makes a broader case against the University’s protocols for monitoring foreign entanglements, based on interviews with top Harvard officials and a review of thousands of documents shared with the committee by Harvard.

The report alleges that Harvard researchers engaged in risky collaboration with Chinese entities, that members of a government-sanctioned Chinese group attended Harvard conferences, and that the University’s nonprofit entity for administering international research was used to bypass federal disclosure requirements.

It claims Harvard researchers co-authored 3,500 publications with Chinese affiliates in a single year and wrote more than 140 with researchers from “Seven Sons of National Defense” — a group of public universities with close ties to China’s military sector — since 2004. An open source database reviewed by The Crimson identified roughly 1,700 publications that Harvard researchers have co-authored with researchers at Chinese institutions this year.

“Harvard’s pattern of conduct suggests an institution that prioritizes preserving lucrative financial ties to China over enforcing its own standards, American interests, and upholding its institutional responsibilities,” the committee wrote.

The report urges Harvard to consolidate its procedures for evaluating research under a “single centralized authority” rather than across schools and backs the DETERRENT Act, which seeks to widen disclosure requirements.

A Harvard spokesperson pushed back against the report’s findings, saying the University “follows national security standards and guidance set by the federal government for its international collaborations.”

“Harvard disagrees with the report’s mischaracterizations that fail to reflect the University’s documented record of compliance, cooperation, and commitment to protecting and advancing U.S. interests, national security, and global standing,” the spokesperson wrote.

The findings are the result of a congressional investigation opened last May, when House Republicans penned a 14-page letter to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and requested that Harvard turn over a slew of records related to CCP-linked events and gifts. The committee sent a second letter last July that accused the Harvard Kennedy School of training high-level Chinese government officials.

It is also the latest episode in a renewed effort by the federal government to scrutinize Harvard’s foreign entanglements. The Department of Justice is currently investigating whether the University’s acceptance of “Chinese-linked” financial aid gifts violated civil rights law and the Trump administration has long pointed to Harvard’s ties to China to justify its campaign against international students.

Much of the committee’s report focuses on a series of executive education training sessions held by Harvard School of Public Health professor Winnie C. Yip in 2020 and 2024. Officials from the Xinjiang Production and Constructions Corp, an organization sanctioned by the U.S. government for human rights abuses, appear to have attended the conference.

The committee first cited the Harvard China Health Partnership conferences when it opened the investigation. Though it didn’t name Yip at the time, the letter sent to Garber requested testimony from Yip about her links to the CCP and XPCC.

The report shifts the blame for the conference away from Yip and onto Harvard’s compliance system, which it says “failed” to provide Yip with adequate information on potential national security implications in hosting officials from sanctioned Chinese entities. Yip said in an interview with the committee that she was not aware that XPCC officials had attended the executive education seminars.

According to the committee, when the issue was first raised with Yip by a reporter, she claimed to have no idea what the XPCC was and called the allegations “totally false and ungrounded.” When mentions of XCPP were later wiped from an HSPH website, Yip told the committee she was not involved in the removal. Yip did not respond to a request for comment.

The Select Committee also takes aim at Harvard’s “top research official” — who appears to be senior vice provost for research John H. Shaw — portraying him as a lax enforcer with a background ill-suited to lead the office.

The report draws heavily on a transcribed interview with Shaw in which committee staff pressed him to answer wide-ranging questions about the CCP’s activities in Xinjiang, export control laws, and the bounds of military-related research.

Though the Select Committee acknowledges Harvard was largely cooperative in the lengthy investigation, it claims the University hindered the process by stonewalling a request to produce a list of partnerships with Chinese entities.

The report documents a long back-and-forth between Harvard and the government in which the University resisted turning over the data, arguing that producing the information would be “burdensome.”

Though Harvard eventually provided a spreadsheet listing the entities, the committee expressed surprirsed that it had been an apparent challenge to pull the data — fewer than 50 entries — from databases that could be searched by country.

“This conduct does not reflect administrative oversight or resource constraints,” they wrote. “It shows Harvard was either unwilling or unable to provide transparency on its relationships with entities that undermine U.S. national security.”

The report also takes aim at Harvard Global Research and Support Services, a nonprofit founded by the Harvard Corporation and staffed by University employees that coordinates donations to the University on behalf of international entities.

The Select Committee alleges that the organization was built as an intentional workaround to mandated gift reporting requirements, though Harvard Global’s activities are included in the University’s biannual disclosures.

It cites language from the Harvard Global website spelling out cases in which the nonprofit stands in as a proposal applicant and awardee if “legal or financial reasons” preclude the University from accepting funding.

The report claims that the text on the website was changed soon after it was presented to the Select Committee for their review. An archival search shows that the phrasing remained online at least through April.

The version of the policy now on the website does not include the flagged language and clarifies that Harvard Global stands in for the University only when an award “restricts activities to a certain country and requires a local organization to accept it.” It also specifies that Harvard Global abides by University research policies.

“We do not accept sponsored awards that violate our values of academic freedom and integrity or that conflict with substantive University criteria and research policies (e.g., intellectual property, freedom to publish) or applicable legal obligations,” the updated statement reads.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.