Yurong Luanna Jiang

Dear Commons Community,

A Chinese graduate student drew wide applause with a speech at Harvard’s commencement ceremonies in late May. Online, it was a different story.

In her address, Yurong Luanna Jiang, who studied international development at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke about her program’s diverse student body, recounting how on an internship in Mongolia last year she helped Indian and Thai classmates in Tanzania translate writing on a made-in-China washing machine over the phone.  As reported by The Wall Street Jounral.

Wearing an embroidered and beaded Chinese collar over her graduation robe, Jiang used the anecdote to extol the idea that “humanity rises and falls as one.”

The speech, as Harvard grapples with the federal government’s attempt to stop it from enrolling international students, was delivered in an often trembling voice. Jiang seemed close to tears as she said, “If there’s a woman anywhere in the world who can’t afford a period pad, it makes me poorer.” Faculty and students clapped at the line and at the speech’s conclusion: “We are bound by something deeper than belief: our shared humanity.”

Then came the online attacks, from both Chinese nationalists and Beijing critics. At a time when Harvard’s links to China and Chinese students in the U.S. have come under the Trump administration’s microscope, it illustrated the no-win situation for a group of students often viewed with suspicion over their allegiances both at home and in their host country.

Jiang said the video was subtitled and uploaded by friends who picked up the translation as a familiar expression that is “quite common in everyday language.”

Exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law said in a tweet criticizing Harvard’s choice of Jiang as a speaker that her use of phrases such as “shared future” and “shared humanity” mirrored a “worldview designed to allow Beijing to bypass democratic norms and scrutiny.”

“In some ways, my own experience has become a living illustration of my speech that we are living in a divided world in a hard time,” Jiang said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s surreal to find myself accused simultaneously of being a U.S. spy and a Chinese spy.”

In China, online sleuths unearthed details of Jiang’s background, which led to more condemnation of her alleged privilege and ties to the West, including her education at a U.K. high school and Duke University undergraduate studies. Critics seized on her father’s alleged affiliation with a state-backed environmental organization, suggesting it had helped her get accepted at Harvard.

A few days after her speech, Jiang took to Chinese social media to defend herself. She said she grew up in an unstable family and had been bullied in middle school. She said her father had an unpaid position at the state-backed environment organization and hadn’t pulled strings to get her accepted at Harvard.

Other commentators drew attention to a video from a 2024 speech by Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng at the Harvard Kennedy School that showed Jiang standing behind the stage, watching as a protester was being removed from the audience by another student, an incident widely criticized by Republican lawmakers. Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), chairman of a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called the removal of the student the work of a “pro-CCP agitator” who faced no blowback from the university.

Jiang declined to comment on the event. A person close to her said Jiang wasn’t involved in either the organization of the event or the removal of the student.

Harvard declined to comment, citing student privacy but referred to a website detailing how the university selects graduate ceremony speakers.

For decades, Harvard has trained scholars, entrepreneurs, doctors and executives from humble backgrounds in China. The Ivy League university has also provided training to many Chinese bureaucrats and education to the children of some top Communist Party officials. Harvard’s alleged ties with the Communist Party have emerged as a leading line of attack in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Harvard.

It wasn’t the first time a Chinese student in the U.S. has faced online vitriol.

In 2017, Yang Shuping, a Chinese graduate of the University of Maryland, faced criticism after she called American air quality “fresh and sweet, and oddly luxurious” in a commencement speech and said that in China she wore a face mask against the pollution. Critics said she was pandering to her U.S. audience by implicitly criticizing China.

On her Chinese social-media account, Yang apologized, saying she loved her homeland and was proud of its prosperity and development.

Tony 

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