


Harvard University chose Chinese student Yurong “Luanna” Jiang to speak at its spring commencement on Thursday as the Trump administration “aggressively” revokes Chinese student visas.
On the same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
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Jiang, who studied international development, spoke alongside several Harvard commencement speakers, including Harvard President Alan Garber. Her speech, titled “Our Humanity,” doesn’t mention President Donald Trump, though she told Harvard Magazine the day before her speech that she kept him in mind during the writing process.
She said she felt a “moral responsibility” to share a message of “common humanity.” Jiang said that she hopes her speech shows “humanity rises and falls together,” and that in “a very divided world, we should refuse to demonize those we disagree with and learn to see the human in them.”
In her speech, Jiang focused on the “shared humanity” of the world without condemning the administration or Trump outright. “But today, that promise of a connected world is giving way to division, fear, and conflict. We’re starting to believe that people 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,” she told graduates.
“If we still believe in a shared future, let us not forget: those we label as enemies — they, too, are human,” she added.
She received a short standing ovation for her remarks, in which she said she grew up believing the “world was becoming a small village.”
Garber received a loud ovation in the same ceremony when he said the university’s global reach is “just as it should be.” Salutatorian Aidan Robert Scully, speaking in Latin, said, “I say this: … Neither powers nor princes can change the truth and deny that diversity is our strength.”
The Trump administration has gone after international student enrollment in its targeting of the school over antisemitism and ties to the Chinese Communist Party. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Harvard should reduce its international enrollment from 25% to about 15%.
The president has threatened the school’s federal funding if it doesn’t make leadership changes or other changes. Harvard has resisted these efforts, with Garber saying the federal sanctions are an “unlawful attempt to control fundamental aspects of our university’s operations.”
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The founder and CEO of Republicans Overseas, a political organization for Americans overseas, called on Rubio to cancel Jiang’s visa over the speech.
“.@marcorubio, this Chinese student Yurong ‘Luanna’ Jiang is using her commencement address at .@Harvard to propagandize #XiJinping‘s ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’ This #CCP infiltrator’s visa should be cancelled. Her internship in America must be terminated,” Solomon Yue Jr., who was born in China and immigrated to the U.S., posted on X.