The administration has frozen funding and targeted international students as it presses the university for a stronger response to alleged antisemitism.

President Donald Trump has been waging a campaign to pressure elite US colleges to make a wide range of policy changes, in what his administration has framed as an initiative to fight campus antisemitism and enforce civil rights protections.

China will safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of its overseas students and scholars, the foreign ministry said on Friday, responding to the Trump administration's decision to block Harvard University from enrolling foreign students.

Some of Harvard’s sports teams would be virtually wiped out by a Trump administration decision that would make the Ivy League school ineligible for international student visas.

An attempt to bar the school from hosting international students is just the latest escalation of an ongoing back-and-forth over Harvard's ideological future.