“If we were to rank the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘overseas party schools,’ the one deserving top spot has to be Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the US.”
For decades, the CCP has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on US campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.
Other US colleges that have offered executive training to Chinese officials include Syracuse, Stanford, the University of Maryland and Rutgers. Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, for instance, helped set up postgraduate programs in public administration at Chinese universities in the early 2000s.
Beyond the US, Chinese officials have also flocked to leading universities in countries including Singapore, Japan and the UK.
Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University is among the most popular, having trained thousands of Chinese officials since the early 1990s, mostly through postgraduate programs colloquially known as the “Mayors’ Class.”
Harvard enjoys a sterling reputation among Chinese officials thanks to its record in training highflying bureaucrats who went on to take senior government roles and, in some cases, join the party’s elite Politburo. Some observers dubbed Harvard a de facto “party school,” as the party’s own training academies for promising bureaucrats are known.
Some children of top Communist Party officials have also attended Harvard for undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
Xi’s daughter, Mingze, attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the early 2010s under an assumed name, though Harvard administrators and some faculty members were aware of her identity. She had enrolled while her father was China’s vice president and leader-in-waiting and graduated after he took power.
Other Harvard alumni with elite backgrounds include Alvin Jiang, a grandson of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, as well as Bo Guagua, the son of the former Politburo member Bo Xilai.
Bo Guagua attended Harvard Kennedy School from 2010 to 2012 and earned a master’s degree in public policy. His father was purged in 2012 and was sentenced to life imprisonment the following year on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.
wsj.com/world/china/ch
