On Saturday, April 20, 2024 Cosette Wu disrupted a talk by the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
“You robbed Hong Kongers of the most fundamental freedoms and devastated their democracy,” Wu, then a Harvard junior, shouted from the audience, according to videos of the disruption that went viral on social media. “Now, in my country Taiwan, you sought to do the same.”
Wu’s heckling of a Communist apparatchik, and the rhetoric she employed, were comparatively tame.
That made it all the more shocking when a Harvard student from mainland China grabbed Wu and, in an incident that the university’s police department logged as an assault, forcibly dragged her from the event.
The student was Hongji Zou, a master’s candidate in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and an officer in Harvard’s chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association—a group overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. Twisting Wu’s arm and pulling her into the aisle, Zou, who had helped to organize Xie’s talk, shoved the struggling protester past the stage and out of the room.
The case sparked outrage on social media and led to an investigation by the House Select Committee on the CCP, which demanded to know what sanctions, if any, Harvard had imposed on the students involved.
If Harvard were going to bring the hammer down on anyone, surely it would be Zou and not the woman he manhandled, everybody would think.
But when the House Select Committee finally obtained the documents it had requested—police reports, disciplinary records, and emails between senior university officials, among others—it turned out Harvard had done the opposite.
The university placed Wu on disciplinary probation in May over her “inappropriate social behavior.” And it gave Zou, who had been identified and disparaged on social media, a letter of apology.
Zou had violated Harvard’s “Policy on Physical Violence,” the university informed him in an email. But the academic dean of the education school, Martin West, had decided “not to impose any sanctions in response to this violation”.
West also expressed understanding in the email to Zou on May 22, saying, “I understand that your intentions were to prevent the event from being further disrupted.” He also apologized for the online response to Zou’s actions.
The official correspondence from Harvard did not mention that Zou’s actions had been reported to the Massachusetts State Police as an assault and battery on April 20.
Harvard also placed two other students who had protested the ambassador’s speech on probation. One was Tsering Yangchen, the co-president of the Boston chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, while the other student’s identity has not been disclosed.
