Harvard quietly trained members of Chinese ‘paramilitary organization’—after the US sanctioned it over Uyghur genocide
Harvard University quietly trained members of a Chinese “paramilitary organization” on two occasions after the U.S. government sanctioned the group for its role in the Uyghur genocide.
The Ivy League institution could face “a big legal problem” as a result, according to one foreign policy expert.
In 2019, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health partnered with Beijing’s National Health Security Administration (NHSA) to launch an annual health financing course, training government staffers from across China.
Harvard originally noted in a blog post that officials with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) participated in the inaugural training, but that language was scrubbed following a Washington Free Beacon inquiry.
The Trump administration sanctioned the XPCC in 2020 “in connection with serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” describing it as a “paramilitary organization … that is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party.”
But Harvard continued to train its members, once in 2023 and again in 2024. On those occasions, the Ivy League university didn’t include their participation on its webpages.
China-focused research group Strategy Risks first uncovered the 2023 training in a recent report titled, “Beijing Exercises Strong Influence Over Multiple Areas of Harvard University.” XPCC officials’ 2024 involvement, noted on the NHSA’s website, has not been previously reported.
The revelation comes as Harvard faces mounting challenges, with the Trump administration freezing more than $2 billion in federal funding over the university’s failure to combat campus anti-Semitism.
Since the sanctions restrict U.S. entities from engaging with the XPCC, Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik believes Harvard could face legal trouble, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
“It’s one thing to partner with the XPCC before the U.S. government declared a genocide in Xinjiang. It’s another thing entirely to continue that cooperation afterwards,” Sobolik told the Free Beacon.
“Harvard officials should have known that training the XPCC risked complicity in Beijing’s atrocities against Uyghurs and other ethno-religious minorities. Either they didn’t, and it’s gross negligence—or they did, and it’s beyond the pale. Either way, Harvard may have a big legal problem.”
