Shorenstein Fellow and former East Asian editor for the London Times, Jonathan Mirsky said, "China being the place that it is, the president and the assistant would have been questioned by the Security Service why they allowed themselves to be in the same room as a 'criminal.'"

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson recently named the exiled Wang a criminal when it was speculated internationally that Wang would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wang was nominated for the prize this year, along with Israeli President Ezer Weizman and Pope John Paul II.

"If those people win the prize, that is unacceptable to the Chinese people and the Chinese government," Zhang Qiyue told reporters. "They violated national law and are criminals," she said.

Though the gathering with Chen was not on Harvard's weekend agenda for the visiting university presidents, Christoph Wolff, dean of GSAS, said that student groups cannot discriminate when admitting students to their groups' functions.

"The student groups have to be open to everybody. That is stated very clearly in the guidelines," Wolff said. "All events, participation, must be open to all students."

"This man [Chen Jia'er] is a guest of honor of the President of Harvard, and he excludes a distinguished Harvard student on purely political grounds, this is very extraordinary," Mirsky said.