The New Yorker was among the first to graduate from Peking's new academy for mostly foreign students. And he is an avowed believer in international harmony, whose home country had just veered sharply away from that pursuit.

So, what to say?

“I tried to find a theme that would be relevant — and relevant to what's happening in the world right now,” Abbey told The Washington Post. “I thought, I haven't been in the U.S. for two years, but I've heard there's been a lot of conflict between people, especially with the recent election.

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“People, I'd heard, would just stop talking to their neighbors.”

In the years that he'd been studying in Beijing, there had been talk in the United States of growing nationalism and a “great, great wall.” Of “Americanism, not globalism,” as Donald Trump would put it a few weeks before Abbey and his friends gathered in a classroom to watch the Republican nominee become president of the United States.

The 24-year-old wanted to give a speech that would resonate with Chinese and foreigners alike to reassure people that at least some Americans still believe they share this world.

“The reason the new president of my country likes China is because he admires the Great Wall,” Abbey told the university's graduating master's students Friday. Laughter rose from the room, though Abbey said he had not meant to be funny.

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“He admires it not because the Great Wall is a part of China’s cultural heritage,” he continued. “Rather, he admires it because just like the First Qin Emperor, he wants to build a barrier like this and cut off Americans from those outside our borders.”

In days to come, those lines would spread far beyond the campus walls.

Some of the thousands who shared Abbey's speech on social media lauded the American who spoke of “harmony despite differences.”

Some reporters, however, misunderstood him, Abbey told The Post. “U.S. student slams Donald Trump to loud applause,” wrote the South China Morning Post. That wasn't what Abbey had set out to do.

Learning 'a bit about everything' in Beijing

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As a teenager on New York's Long Island, Abbey began his exploration of the world by wandering around New York City's Chinatown. “I wanted to do something different,” he said. So he took Mandarin in high school and augmented his lessons with visits to Chinese chess players in the parks and the bubble tea shops of Manhattan.

Abbey, now fluent in the language, left Long Island to study international affairs at Princeton University. Between semesters he traveled often to China — sometimes to intern, once to teach in the countryside, he said.

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After graduating from Princeton in 2015, he returned to China through a new program called the Yenching Academy that enrolled students from all over the world at Peking University, based in Beijing. Abbey studied law and society but took as many different kinds of classes as he could.

“I tried to learn a bit about everything,” he said.

Everything and everyone. His dorm mates hailed from more countries than he could list: “From Lithuania, from Brazil, from Iran,” he said. From across Africa, not to mention Chinese students across the university. Borders dissolved within his dormitory.

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“There's so much conflict in the world,” Abbey said. “If there's anything that anyone can do, it's get to know people who are different from them. Slowly but surely, conflict will start to go down.”

He believed this strongly by now. But in the United States, there was an election campaign in full swing. When he and his classmates would gather to watch the U.S. presidential debates, Abbey heard the opposite of his philosophy from Trump.

The real estate businessman and TV celebrity told voters that China was stealing American jobs. He questioned the need for NATO and declared, “We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.”

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And Trump promised, again and again, to build a wall along the southern U.S. border with Mexico.

“Everywhere, people associated him with the wall, and our academy was no exception,” Abbey said. “The wall represents something more than just the wall. It represent being enclosed from other countries.”

One day in November, Abbey watched on a classroom projector as the U.S. election results rolled in. He learned that tens of millions of Americans chose Trump to represent the country.

“I had some friends that were sobbing,” he said. “I was just kind of standing there, stunned.”

A speech with a Confucian theme

Two students were chosen last week to speak to the graduating master's students at Peking University: a Chinese woman and an American man.

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A recital of Abbey's speech persuaded the university to give him the spot, a representative for the Yenching Academy told The Post. “The judges, after hearing me, decided I would maybe give a good speech,” Abbey recalled.

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When drafting it, he thought back to what he'd learned about Confucianism — a principle he would call in his speech that calls for “harmony despite differences.” That became his theme as he built the speech around stories of his experiences in China.

There was the Chinese doctoral student he'd roomed with whose exercises and dietary habits seemed strange to Abbey but with whom he “would talk late into the night about philosophy, religion, and life.”

There were his recollections of visitors to the university from an impoverished region of China who had all spoken in English about the consequences of the U.S. election.

And there were the rigid rules of the student cycling club, which seemed bizarrely harsh to Abbey — until, he would say in the speech, “I saw a veteran member push a bike 150 kilometers to help a new member that was injured.”

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He recalled these memories with humor or gravity, depending on each story, sometimes leaving the lectern to act out a memory. But those stories aren't what his speech is known for far beyond Peking University.

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Near the end of his address, Abbey turned from personal experience and ancient philosophy to current events -- to Trump.

“In recent years, international dialogue has been increasing, but populism and anti-globalization are also rising,” he said. “Terrorist attacks are a common occurrence, and the conflict of war has resulted in refugees with no place to go.”

Then he spoke of Trump's great wall, and another Great Wall.

“I think people — maybe they were a bit surprised in the audience,” Abbey said. To most of the world, the Great Wall was a relic and a cultural icon. “Before it symbolized China, a very long time ago, in the Qin dynasty, what it really was is a barrier between people,” he told The Post.

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When Abbey referred the wall's history in his address, there was loud, sustained applause.

Accusations of disrespecting Trump

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A video of Abbey's speech spread across Chinese social media. Then the reporters began to call.

Abbey spoke to them in the same language he began to learn in the parks of Manhattan's Chinatown. He was not always happy with the headlines they came up with. Several headlines called him the “foreigner” at a Chinese university who spoke of international harmony.

Some wondered if the Americans would punish him for his words. In a story that got Abbey's name wrong, the Beijinger accused him of disrespecting his president and “pandering” to China's authoritarian government.

He hadn't intended to do anything of the sort, Abbey told The Post. “It's not an ad hominem attack on Trump himself,” he said. “It had nothing to do with China being a particularly open and tolerant country.”

He had, he said, simply wanted to explain how he saw the world and the people in it.

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“Regardless of what they thought of President Trump, I wanted to emphasize that we shouldn't close ourselves off from other people,” he said.

A few days after Abbey's speech, Trump returned home from a conference of world leaders. His administration is now hoping to rally allies against China's economic policies, as The Post reported, though the United States appears to have veered toward isolationism under Trump's rhetoric.

Abbey, meanwhile, is still in Beijing, looking for work. He'll go back to his home country one day, he said. Just not quite yet.

Luna Lin contributed from Beijing.

This articles has been updated to reflect that the Yenching Academy enrolls students from China as well as other countries.