A House committee report accuses Harvard of co-authoring more than 140 research papers with Chinese universities tied to Beijing's military, while collecting over $600 million in Chinese funding, more than any other American school.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released the findings ahead of their public debut, detailing what investigators describe as years of research collaboration between Harvard-affiliated scientists and institutions the Pentagon has identified as central to China's defense modernization. Committee Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, paired the report with a blunt demand for the university to overhaul its approach to foreign research partnerships.
Separately, Rep. Pat Fallon unveiled legislation that would strip federal intelligence-related funding from any college or university maintaining ties to CCP-linked organizations, a measure that, if passed, would give Harvard's compliance failures a direct financial consequence.
At the center of the committee's case are the "Seven Sons of National Defense," a group of Chinese universities the Pentagon and other U.S. officials have flagged as pillars of China's defense research apparatus. Harvard-affiliated researchers co-authored more than 140 publications with researchers at those schools, Fox News Digital reported, spanning dozens of academic disciplines. Engineering made up the largest share.
Two 2023 papers drew particular scrutiny. One involved a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a colleague at Beihang University, also known as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, working on bio-inspired soft robots designed for deep-sea exploration. Beihang has sat on the Commerce Department's Entity List since 2001, a designation that restricts U.S. exports to the institution over national-security concerns. The committee report argues the soft-robot work carries potential military applications, including underwater detection. Harvard's own research-compliance office characterized the project as nonmilitary.
The second paper involved Harvard researchers and a scientist at China's National University of Defense Technology, which also appears on a U.S. restricted list. That study focused on magnetic materials, and acknowledged partial funding from the U.S. Army Research Office.
American taxpayer dollars, in other words, helped fund a joint project with a Chinese military university that the U.S. government itself has flagged as a security risk.
Harvard has received more than $600 million from China under the federal Section 117 foreign-gift disclosure system, a reporting mechanism that requires universities to disclose substantial foreign funding. That figure, drawn from an Education Department dashboard cited in the report, exceeds the Chinese funding total at any other American university.
The committee also raised questions about Harvard Global Research and Support Services, a nonprofit affiliated with the university. The entity can accept research awards when Harvard itself cannot agree to a sponsor's terms. Investigators allege the arrangement could be used to circumvent federal foreign-gift reporting requirements, a charge that, if substantiated, would mean Harvard found a side door around the very transparency rules Congress designed to track foreign influence on American campuses.
Beyond the research collaborations, the report examined Harvard's executive education program with China's National Healthcare Security Administration, which trained Chinese health officials on international health-insurance systems. Attendance and registration records show officials affiliated with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps were listed in connection with some sessions. The Treasury Department sanctioned XPCC in 2020 over human-rights abuses against Uyghur and other ethnic minorities in China's Xinjiang region.
Harvard professor Winnie Yip, who helped organize the program, told committee investigators she did not know XPCC was a sanctioned entity at the time and had not received training on sanctions compliance. The report alleges Harvard had advance participant information for a 2020 online session that included XPCC-affiliated officials, and did not act on it. The committee acknowledged it remains unclear whether those officials ultimately attended every program in question.
Chairman Moolenaar was brutally honest in his statement accompanying the report:
"From allowing violence against anti-China protestors to collaborating with entities linked to the PLA, Harvard has made serious mistakes and must act now to prevent more. It should use this investigation as a catalyst for significant reforms that end CCP influence on campus and prioritize secure American research."
The reference to violence against anti-China protesters was not elaborated on in the report's public summary, but Moolenaar's framing placed it alongside the research-collaboration findings as part of a broader pattern of institutional failure.
An unnamed Harvard research official testified to the committee that the university evaluates research collaborations on a case-by-case basis and does not prohibit all work involving robotics or Chinese institutions. A Harvard spokesperson told Fox News Digital the university "shares the Committee's concern about geopolitical risks, including threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party" and remains "committed to continuing to conduct research and academic programming with protections that prioritize U.S. interests and national security."
The spokesperson added that Harvard "follows national security standards and guidance set by the federal government for its international collaborations" and that "federal agencies who are best able to assess real-time national security risks work with Harvard to put in place agency approved risk mitigation measures for federally funded research."
Harvard also pushed back on the committee's characterization of its record:
"Harvard disagrees with 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."
Rep. Fallon's proposed legislation would create a financial trigger: colleges and universities that maintain ties to CCP-linked organizations would lose access to federal intelligence-related funding. The bill's exact name and number were not disclosed in the committee's materials, but its intent is plain, force schools to choose between Chinese partnerships and American taxpayer support.
The committee report itself recommends that Harvard prohibit research relationships with any entity on U.S. government restricted or sanctioned lists and centralize its research-security oversight under a single authority. It also urges Congress to strengthen the Section 117 foreign-funding disclosure requirements that universities must follow, a tacit acknowledgment that the current system has not prevented the kind of entanglements the report describes.
Harvard's defense rests on the claim that it follows existing federal standards. But the committee's findings suggest those standards were not enough to prevent a professor from running a program that included sanctioned officials without knowing they were sanctioned, or to stop joint papers with universities the Commerce Department blacklisted a quarter-century ago.
When the nation's wealthiest and most prestigious university cannot keep track of which foreign partners are on the government's own restricted lists, the problem is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of seriousness, and taxpayers who fund the research have every right to demand better.
