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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.
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