At this year’s Harvard graduation ceremony, Chinese graduate Jiang Yurong (蔣雨融) delivered a speech titled “Our Humanity.” With polished eloquence, she urged graduates to see beyond divisions, warning against a world where people who “think differently, vote differently or pray differently” are viewed not just as wrong, but evil. Her call for empathy and cross-cultural understanding struck a chord — particularly among those weary of the US’ partisan fight.
However, for others, Jiang’s speech left a curious void. She spoke about freedom, humanity and the dangers of polarization — yet said nothing about the country she came from, where political and religious differences are not just frowned upon, but criminalized. In China, you do not just get unfriended for speaking out, you get detained.
Her message, while sincere on the surface, exemplifies a troubling pattern among China’s privileged international class: using Western liberal language to lecture democracies, while staying strategically silent about authoritarianism at home.
Let us be clear: Polarization is a problem in the US. However, people in the US can publicly criticize their presidents in the harshest terms without fearing a knock at the door. In China, language itself is policed — words that suggest dissent are scrubbed from the Internet. There is no freedom of the press. There is no independent judiciary. The government censors words such as “democracy,” bans books, jails lawyers and disappears whistle-blowers.
Jiang, who reportedly comes from an elite background with family ties to state-linked organizations, surely knows this. She could have used her speech to challenge her birth country — to say what her compatriots could not. To speak for the Uighur detainees, the censored artists, the silenced activists, the imprisoned journalists. She chose not to.
Instead, she focused on criticizing a free society where she was given the platform to speak, study and flourish. Ironically, had she given her exact same speech at a Chinese university — aimed at the Chinese government — her microphone would have been snatched before the first paragraph.
However, the deeper scandal lies not with Jiang alone — it lies with Harvard. The university hand-picked this message and this messenger. A student from a one-party authoritarian state was given the platform to gently scold the US government about diversity and humanity, without uttering a word about the vast repression in the country of 1.4 billion people she comes from.
Do Harvard’s leaders not see the message beneath this performance? Or do they see it all too clearly?
In one move, they pleased Beijing and rebuked the administration of US President Donald Trump. No risk, no resistance. A perfect blend of cowardice and opportunism. Jiang’s speech was politically safe for China and politically useful against the US right — two outcomes that Harvard’s leadership, in its moral drift, seems happy to promote.
The message to Chinese dissidents is clear: If you speak out, you are on your own, but if you avoid criticizing the Chinese Communist Party and help shame the US instead, the most powerful institutions in the West would hand you a microphone.
Empathy matters. Cross-cultural understanding matters. However, they must not come at the cost of the truth. And truth demands that we not pretend all “divisions” are the same. In democracies, division is a feature. In dictatorships, it is a crime.
Jiang spoke of people failing to see each other’s humanity. The Chinese government does not just fail to see its people’s humanity — it actively suppresses it. If Jiang truly believed in the values she espoused, her speech would have acknowledged that. Harvard, if it remembered its own values, would have championed that.
The speech was elegant. However, history might remember it as an act of hypocrisy — and Harvard’s endorsement of it as another sign of a great institution losing its moral integrity.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now residing in Taiwan.
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