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Meredith Chen

A proposal to build a Boston campus of Tsinghua University, China’s most prestigious tertiary institution, with the help of Harvard University faculty was unexpectedly revealed in Friday’s release of emails related to Jeffrey Epstein.
The plan eventually fell through and has little chance of revival as the US and China engage in a heated science and technology rivalry. Tsinghua is now a bastion of China’s efforts to break US tech sanctions and controls.
But the proposal offers a glimpse at how things could have gone differently.
The Tsinghua proposal was not related to Epstein’s sex crimes or the human-trafficking allegations against the well-connected financier.
According to several emails dated 2016, prominent figures including Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, Harvard mega donor Gerald Chan and Harvard mathematics and biology professor Martin Nowak discussed the idea of bringing China’s top university to Boston to promote academic exchanges. They sought to bring Epstein, a well-known deal maker, onto the project.
Email exchanges between Epstein and Yau, the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre at Tsinghua, show that the latter was eager to obtain funding for the proposed Boston campus.
In an April 2016 email, Yau told Epstein’s assistant that the Chinese university had agreed to build a campus in the Boston area to “have full interactions with local universities in Boston and America”.
“The ambition is to build it to be a first-class institute connecting research and academic activities between China and America, or the rest of the world,” he wrote in the email, which was forwarded to Epstein.
The documents reveal years of coordination from 2016 to 2019, with Yau acting as a middleman between Epstein and senior Tsinghua officials.
The SCMP has reached out to Tsinghua University for comment but has not yet received a response.

Yau mentioned a potential site for the campus at 1550 Soldiers Field Road in Boston. He said that in addition to building the campus, they would need an annual budget of US$50 million to fund faculty positions, postdoctoral fellows and students.
About a week later, Epstein sent Yau an email saying the university plan “holds great promise” and that he would like to “see a real plan”.
Yau then sent Epstein a “preliminary proposal” for Tsinghua’s Boston campus, marking it as “confidential” and asking Epstein to “keep it to yourself”, according to the newly released records. The files attached to the proposal email have not been made available to the public.
The proposal came as Beijing was encouraging Chinese universities to expand globally as part of its goal to make China a “strong nation in higher education” by 2050.
In 2015, Tsinghua and the University of Washington launched the Global Innovation Exchange Institute, aimed at “educating the next generation of innovators”, according to a news release from the Chinese university. The partnership marked a milestone in the international expansion of Chinese higher education.
While it is not uncommon for Chinese universities to have overseas branches in Southeast Asia and Belt and Road Initiative countries, they have very few campuses in the US.
Since 2020, educational exchanges between China and the US have been affected by geopolitical tensions and the Covid pandemic.
In recent years, a number of joint programmes and collaborative initiatives have closed or been suspended in the face of growing pressure from Washington, which has cited national security concerns.
The exchanges between Yau and Epstein continued until May 2019, less than two months before the latter was arrested on sex trafficking charges.
In an email that same month, Yau told Epstein’s assistant he had spoken with “several people in Tsinghua” and they were considering forming a centre on the brain with a parallel centre on AI, machine learning and data analysis.
The emails do not indicate any wrongdoing. The names of other scientists, including Stephen Hawking, also appear in the millions of files that have been released so far, without any indication they were involved in Epstein’s crimes.


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Epstein files reveal proposal for Tsinghua University campus in Boston

Emails from 2016 suggest China’s Tsinghua University had agreed to build a branch campus in Boston, but the plans later fell through.
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A view of 1550 Soldiers Field Road in Boston, Massachusetts, taken in October 2020. Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau was eyeing the site for a possible Tsinghua University campus expansion from 2016-2019. Photo: Google Street View

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News

China

Diplomacy

Prominent figures affiliated with the top Chinese university and Harvard discuss the plans in newly released emails


Prominent figures affiliated with the top Chinese university and Harvard discuss the plans in newly released emails.


United States

Shing-Tung Yau

Harvard Medical School

Tsinghua University

Epstein files reveal proposal for Tsinghua University campus in Boston

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Prominent figures affiliated with the top Chinese university and Harvard discuss the plans in newly released emails

Prominent figures affiliated with the top Chinese university and Harvard discuss the plans in newly released emails