The Mistake Harvard Should Have Avoided

A graduate’s speech put Harvard under the spotlight. The university should have exercised more caution to avoid the unnecessary fallout.

Universities take varied approaches to selecting graduation speakers. Friends who have gone through the process have told me about the screening system: some candidates submit draft speeches for administrative review, allowing schools to evaluate both substance and tone. Even when speakers are pre-selected, the administrative offices typically review the final speech to ensure it aligns with institutional values.

According to my friends’ stories, these are not forms of censorship but reasonable guardrails, meant to assist students in crafting appropriate messages for such a high-profile occasion. The review process offers guidance, not restriction. Many speakers simply don’t know what the ceremony will feel like, and without feedback, risk striking the wrong tone.

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I presume Harvard follows a similar process. It is difficult to believe that no one in the administration reviewed Luanna Jiang’s (蔣雨融) speech before she delivered it. If so, I find it deeply troubling that the university did not flag its alignment, intentional or not, with the ideological language of Chinese President Xi Jinping. I was particularly bothered by how readily the university embraced the problematic speech, which did little to navigate Harvard’s complicated public position.

(Photo: Luanna Jiang delivering the speech.)

In hindsight, the decision to select Jiang as the graduate speaker was a mistake. While presumably intended to showcase the benefits of diversity and internationalism in American higher education, it actually had the opposite effect. It reinforced suspicions that elite institutions in the U.S. are disproportionately beholden to global elites, particularly those from authoritarian regimes, and are troublingly indifferent to malign foreign influence.

Jiang is not an ordinary student from China. Her father once headed a local CCP’s propaganda department (United Front Work Department of Suining City), and is a specialised project manager at the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), a state-affiliated environmental group. These government-aligned “civil society” organisations are a staple of Beijing’s strategy to co-opt NGO discourse while advancing state narratives. News reports from 2022 alleged that the CBCGDF helped facilitate Jiang’s admission to Harvard, a claim she has denied. Regardless, her father’s position places her within a well-connected and influential circle in China.

By contrast, Jiang He (何江), Harvard’s first commencement speaker from China, embodies the values the university often seeks to promote. Raised in rural China, where his family could afford meat only during holiday celebrations, He ascended through sheer dedication. He earned a degree from one of China’s top universities and later secured a prestigious Ph.D. scholarship at Harvard. In a nation where most citizens still live in rural areas and value education as a pathway out of poverty, He represents meritocratic success grounded in personal effort and scarcely available opportunities.

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Given the scrutiny Harvard faces today, I wish they had exercised greater caution. Instead, the university staged a speaker whose message mirrored key tenets of PRC propaganda. Jiang’s central theme was encapsulated in this line of her speech:

“Because if we still believe in a shared future, let us not forget those whom we label as enemies. They too are human. In seeing their humanity, we find our own.”

Viewed in isolation, this sentiment is defensible—perhaps even noble. But viewed through the lens of Chinese state narratives, it raises serious concerns. The concept of “shared future of humanity” is near-identical to “人類命運共同體,” or “community with a shared future for mankind,” a slogan Xi Jinping has promoted since 2017. The ideology it conveys is not one of universal cooperation. It is a projection of Chinese dominance cloaked in globalist rhetoric—an attempt to advance Beijing’s interests while evading democratic accountability. The vision is not pluralist; Xi’s narratives evolve around the imagination of a unipolar, Sino-centric world order where dominance is achieved through coercion and inducement, not consensus.

We fail if we don’t take the threats from malign actors seriously. Under Xi, the PRC has doubled down on authoritarian expansionism and actively undermines the international rules-based order. Whether we choose to call Xi an “enemy” is irrelevant—his actions speak for themselves. If democracies fail to respond, they will find themselves retreating while autocrats advance.

What worries me most is how such sugar-coated pacifist messages can cloud the judgment of even the brightest minds. This may ultimately lead to more suffering around the world because dictators don’t get as much scrutiny and accountability. In this case, Harvard’s speaker selection could deepen public distrust in institutions that appear, whether through naïveté or design, to be complicit in whitewashing authoritarian narratives.

If I were part of Harvard’s administration, I would have sought to highlight speakers who genuinely embody the university’s ideals: those who bridge internationalism with democratic values and personal merit. Refugees who fled civil war in Sudan; aspiring scientists tackling the world’s most urgent problems; young civic leaders from South Korea standing up to authoritarian threats up North. Any of them would have more powerfully represented what Harvard and America should stand for.

Instead, the university made a choice that only invited more questions. I feel sorry for it – in the time when the higher education sector receives so much unfair criticism, we all should be more aware of decisions and make sure we are marching for good.