Did "shared humanity" Harvard speaker help suppress 2024 campus protest?
These re-surfaced videos are causing concern
"Shame on Xie Feng! Shame on Xie Feng" a protestor yelled in front of the Chinese Ambassador during his April 2024 speech at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Moments earlier, a Chinese graduate student at the event, said to be Zou Hongji (鄒宏基), had aggressively dragged another protestor out of the auditorium. That violent intervention drew considerable attention at the time, particularly for Zou's role in the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) at Harvard.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) noted last year, Harvard's "baffling" response was to discipline the protestors and absolve the perpetrator.
But a second Chinese Harvard graduate student is now in the spotlight for their actions at that event. That student, Jiang Yurong (蔣雨融 / Luanna), went viral for her May 2025 commencement speech in which she called for understanding and “shared humanity”.
Collective Study is less concerned with Jiang's much-discussed elite background and whether or not her speech drew on Xi Jinping’s rhetoric, and more with her actions during a 2024 Harvard campus protest against Ambassador Xie Feng (謝鋒).
In this first video Jiang can be seen behind the stage in dark trousers, a white shirt and wearing a scarf. Let's watch her movements as the protest gets underway.
Starting at the beginning, on the right, we see the man in a black suit, thought to be Zou Hongji, dragging one protestor out. At that same moment, on the far left, we can spot Jiang striding behind the stage towards where Zou is violently taking the protestor.
Now at 00:07 in the the video it cuts to the moment another protestor stands up and begins shouting. Immediately we see Jiang reappear in a hurry on the left. Jiang can be seen looking at the protestor, turning her head towards where Zou was at that moment, before running over to that side of the stage.
At 00:12, with Jiang out of shot behind the stage, Zou appears on the right of the stage and looks towards the protestor.
Then, at 00:18, both Jiang and Zou appear on the left side on the stage, with Zou moving in and Jiang hanging back. A non-Chinese man, perhaps event security, prevents Zou from going into the audience, and can be seen possibly reprehending him for having dragged the other protestor out.
A second concerning video adds to the impression Jiang and Zou were working together to ensure disruptors were removed.
At 00:20 we revisit the moment Zou dragged the protestor. This time, the footage is shot from the audience level. As Zou drags the woman out, we can now see Jiang come right up to Zou and stand still and watch as he removes the protestor. This point now corresponds to the start of the previous video.
Those videos came to Collective Study’s attention via Taiwanese-American Youtuber Sona Eyambe, who included them in a video posted yesterday.
Jiang’s actions seem in stark contrast to her Harvard commencement speech, and how it has been hailed in the US.
Take this credulous report from the AP which could pass for a China Daily piece:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A day after her emotional speech at Harvard University’s commencement, Yurong “Luanna” Jiang kept running into classmates who praised her message that people should see everyone’s common humanity rather than demonize others for their differences.
“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently — whether they’re across the ocean or sitting right next to us — are not just wrong. We mistakenly see them as evil. But it doesn’t have to be this way,” she said in her address, which drew wide applause.
Finally, an extract of Nathan Law’s (羅冠聰) analysis of the controversy, which takes on added significance in light of the 2024 protest.
Selecting Luanna Jiang as Harvard’s graduate speaker was not a wise decision. The choice presumably aimed to showcase the benefits of internationalisation and diversity in American higher education. It had the opposite effect: it has unintentionally reinforced the stereotype of elite U.S. institutions as serving global elites (criticism particularly arose from those of authoritarian regimes) while appearing indifferent, if not complicit, to malign foreign influence. — via twitter @nathanlawkc
Questions, comments, correctons? collectivestudysession@protonmail.com
04/06/2025: This article has been updated to correct a misspelling of Jiang Yurong’s Chinese name and a mistaken usage of the former name of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).