The Great Recession left Harvard University in a financial crisis. Its endowment had plummeted by nearly 30 per cent, or more than $10 billion, in 2009.

To help recover, Harvard’s leaders found part of the answer in China. Already, American business was pouring in, as Washington and Beijing encouraged — if at times warily — a policy of engagement as the best way to build bridges between the two countries.

China promised enormous academic and economic opportunities, and Harvard had something wealthy and well-connected Chinese craved: prestige and access to influential networks for themselves and their children.

Between 2010 and 2025, Harvard attracted $560 million in gifts and contracts from China and Hong Kong, the most of any American university, partly from private donors and foundations, as well as a small amount through contracts with government entities like universities.

“The confluence of new, enormous property wealth and especially favorable relationships” — with China’s leadership — “have happily converged”, wrote Harvard Magazine, a university-affiliated publication, almost breathless in describing the optimism in Sino-American relations at the time.

Now Harvard’s ties with China are coming back to haunt the university. Those connections were forged when Harvard was more financially vulnerable and when much of the foreign policy establishment believed that higher education could play a part in pushing America’s democratic ideals to China and the rest of the world.

But American foreign policy has turned sharply hawkish against China, and even though Harvard has steadily reduced its ties there, the Trump administration has made the relationship another line of attack in its broader effort to bring the university to heel. The administration has stripped away billions of dollars in federal research funding and is trying to revoke its right to host international students and also end its non-profit tax status.

President Donald Trump has portrayed Harvard’s ties to China as a national security risk. Secretary of state Marco Rubio has called for an investigation into the university’s ties with a Chinese company whose leader had been subject to American sanctions.

Alan M. Garber, the university’s president, has described the administration’s overall assault on the school as a power grab “unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how it operates”.

New York Times News Service