(More) proof Harvard deserves to lose its federal funding.

Harvard University is once again sending its students on delegations to China – trips secretly organized and underwritten by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign influence machine.

Through my previous reporting, I revealed how the Harvard Kennedy School has partnered for years with the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a group founded and funded by top CCP officials running Beijing’s United Front – the network tasked with co-opting foreign elites and shaping overseas narratives.

Now, I’ve uncovered new evidence showing these delegations are still happening today. Harvard students were brought to Beijing, Xi’an, and Shenzhen for hand-picked meetings with Communist Party officials, lectures at state-run universities, and curated discussions on “environmental cooperation.”

CUSESF described the trip as a “delegation of 18 students from Harvard University, organized in collaboration with the Harvard College China Forum (HCCF), for a ten-day cultural exchange program across China.” The students focused on environmental and cultural exchanges.

This new discovery proves Harvard’s partnership with CUSEF is not a relic of the past but an ongoing pipeline funneling America’s “future leaders” into propaganda tours designed to soften their view of the regime.

Harvard’s Decade of CCP Partnerships

CUSEF’s chairman, Tung Chee-hwa, is not some neutral philanthropist. He doubles as the leader of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the United Front seeks to “neutralize potential opposition” to the Party and manipulate foreign governments and opinion leaders into advancing Beijing’s preferred policies.

For over a decade, Harvard Kennedy School delegations of 18 graduate students at a time have been sent to China for ten-day “study treks.” They’ve met with:

Officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) — which the U.S. State Department has labeled an arm of the CCP’s influence apparatus.

Executives at Huawei and professors at state-run universities like Peking University.

Even a former Major General of the People’s Liberation Army.

These delegations were never neutral exchanges.

CUSEF brochures show Harvard students being lectured by CCP apparatchiks and their own published testimonials reveal how effective the indoctrination was.

One Harvard participant from 2016 dismissed Western media’s coverage of Chinese repression, praising communism as “the only possible system” to lift people out of poverty. Another in 2019 lauded China as a “modern and advanced country” and pledged to carry its lessons into their professional career

A member of a 2016 Harvard-CUSEF trip wrote a reflection entitled “The Foreign Media Doesn’t Do Justice To China,” which was published on the organization’s site. The student noted that the trip reversed the “negative connotations in me about China’s aggressions in the region, China’s oppression, China’s pollution…”

“What I found was astonishing and rather positive,” they noted before adding that communism was “the only possible system to lift the country from massive poverty to incredible growth”:

“Chinese officials are not the autocratic rulers that are depicted in some of the press. Obviously, China is not a democracy and there still are many human rights topics to be solved, including censorship and freedom of the press. However, in the many officials we have met, I found that they all shared a pragmatic approach to solving public policy problems. Using more analytics and less politics is their motto and the United States may greatly benefit from relying further on analytics and less on politics given the current gridlock in our system. The political system in China, with its many weaknesses, has probably been the only possible system to lift the country from massive poverty to incredible growth.”

The delegation member notes they “will do what I can, throughout my professional career in life, to promote further collaboration.”

.CUSEF promotional brochures also feature testimonials from students, including praising China as a “country that has made such incredible progress”:

Propaganda Disguised as Education

The pattern is unmistakable: CUSEF uses Harvard delegations as propaganda vehicles, grooming America’s brightest students into sympathetic messengers for the regime.

The latest material I uncovered shows the cycle is still ongoing as recent as August 17th, 2025.

For years, the CCP has leveraged CUSEF to court Western journalists, scholars, and politicians. Harvard’s complicity shows how deeply Beijing’s propaganda networks have penetrated even America’s most prestigious universities.

CUSEF and the Harvard Kennedy School have also collaborated on research reports.

A 2009 CUSEF promotional brochure describes the “Harvard Shared Vision Project”: a “joint research project involving scholars from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University” and from state-run institutions including “Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.”

The project culminated in a book – Power and Restraint – which “upholds the message of the CUSEF, that China and the United States can, and must, work together to improve mutual understanding in order to confront the challenges that are common to both nations.”

To launch the book, CUSEF hosted an event in Washington D.C. featuring speeches by Biden’s climate czar John Kerry, CUSEF founder Tung, and Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School David Ellwood.