The Real “Peril”: When the Gatekeeper Shows His True Colors

On the latest Larry Summers story in the Harvard Crimson

The Harvard Crimson’s story on Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein exposes how power, geopolitics, and gender still really work in 2025 In newly released emails and texts, Summers turns to Epstein as his “wing man” while pursuing a woman he repeatedly calls his “mentee”—a woman who appears to be the Chinese economist Keyu Jin.

In the messages, Summers frets that she might want to cut him off, but “wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.” Epstein reassures him, “She is doomed to be with you,” urging Summers to keep her in a “forced holding pattern.”

The woman they call “peril” is no junior grad student. Keyu Jin is a Harvard-educated economist, formerly tenured at LSE, now at HKUST. She’s published in top journals and a book, The New China Playbook. She sits on global corporate boards, advises governments, and has become the go-to interpreter of China’s economic rise. Her father, Jin Liqun, is one of China’s most powerful financial officials: former vice minister of finance, former vice president of the Asian Development Bank, and founding president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

“Peril”—that’s what a former Harvard president and a convicted sex trafficker called her.

The nickname itself carries violence. It echoes “Yellow Peril,” the racial panic that cast Chinese as civilizational threats to justify exclusion laws and lynchings. That same propaganda that demonized Asian men also fetishized Asian women as exotic, hypersexual conquests—Dragon Ladies and China Dolls for white men to possess. When Summers and Epstein code a Chinese economist as “peril” while calculating odds of getting her “horizontal,” they’re not being clever. They’re reenacting America’s oldest colonial script, in cavalier Gmail texting instead of government memos.

Summers casts her as “confused,” someone who “maybe wants to cut [him] off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.” Built into that framing is the mentorship trap: he controls the network; she manages his expectations as the price of entry. When Summers tells Epstein her “best shot” is deciding she “can’t have [his professional value] without romance/sex,” he spells out the deal: in this system, consent is never really free.

What makes “peril” so jarring is who Keyu Jin actually is. She’s positioned as the bridge between New China and global elites. Recently on Lex Fridman’s podcast, she pushes back against Western caricatures of monolithic Beijing. She explains China’s market-driven ecosystem, where local leaders are heavily incentivized to compete aggressively while operating under an overarching political framework that demands social cohesion and limits individual political influence. A Davos regular, she frames U.S.-China tensions as realignment rather than decoupling. Keyu Jin represents a particular vision of China to the world: confident, reform-minded, and legible to Western CEOs.

Yet in Summers and Epstein’s framing, she is the “peril”: “assertive and gorgeous,” with a father whose status adds intrigue, and the back-and-forth with her is dissected like a high-school dating game.

If Keyu Jin, with her Harvard credentials, LSE tenure, corporate boards, and a father in high office, can be reduced to “peril,” treated like a conquest, then credentials aren’t shields; they are just more assets for gatekeepers to price.

The Epstein files reveal an elite world where politics, finance, and academia function as different rooms in the same house. They have the Treasury jobs, the networks; younger women must be grateful mentees and game if relationships drift. Research shows male-mentor/female-mentee pairs emphasize career sponsorship above all—exactly what makes walking away impossible. Summers saying she “understands the tradeoff” just states the quiet part out loud.

The outrage has been swift. Harvard faculty called his Epstein relationship “disgraceful.” Elizabeth Warren demands Harvard cut ties. At the time of writing, Larry Summers retains his tenured position at Harvard.

But notice who’s silent: the women at the top who navigated these same dynamics. The senior economists, tech leaders, and companies that built brands around women’s advancement and the feminism narrative.

Where’s Sheryl Sandberg—Summers’ most famous female mentee, whose Lean In empire promised that brave, strategic women could climb the same ladders men did?

If prominent female leaders can’t say clearly that these emails are wrong, sexist, and depressingly common, the message to younger women is brutal: you’re on your own. Excel at the work, yes, but also calculate how much discomfort you’ll swallow to stay inside the bubble..

For those watching China’s rise and attempting to interpret it, “peril” carries extra weight. Keyu Jin translates China’s complexity while maintaining credibility in both worlds. That she is reduced to “peril” in their texts exposes the uncomfortable: to these men, Chinese women remain conquests to collect, not colleagues and voices to respect.

Jin didn’t ask to become the symbol of this moment. But how two of the West’s most notorious power brokers talked about her tells us something devastating about who the real peril has always been.