The Harvard Crimson identifies the official who in 2015 pushed to call off a campus event with a prominent Chinese dissident because then-President Drew Faust was in Beijing having just met Xi Jinping: William Alford, vice dean at the law school thecrimson.com/article/2020/4…
This is part of an in-depth look by @thecrimson at Harvard’s history of engagement with China, which carries such risks of self-censorship. I mentioned this episode, and the pressure universities can feel, in this story on Chinese students in the US google.com/amp/s/amp.econ…
Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer who was a visiting fellow at Harvard at the time, talked to me about the incident but, as with the Crimson, wouldn’t name the official who pressured him because he feared retaliation — in the US. The long arm of the CCP, externalizing censorship
In an emailed statement, Alford, vice dean of Harvard Law School, confirmed, “I did ask that he schedule the event in question after our University President had left Beijing.” Crimson describes him as having met presidents of China and spoken to the CCP’s Central Party School
Here a story from 2007, alleging Yale decided not to invite the Dalai Lama to campus so as not to alienate China. Note the aversion to discussing the matter by email
The Crimson article about Harvard and China covers a lot of history, worth reading in full, tho I wish it had mentioned that a number of children of the CCP elite have gone to Harvard, including Xi Jinping's daughter (she graduated in 2014, a year before the Teng Biao incident)
Here’s another canceled Dalai Lama event, in 2016. It doesn’t get much attention b/c it’s about the absence of something, and seen as old news, but so many universities now would never invite the DL in the first place because they don’t want to upset PRC
