Extraordinarily insightful talk by John Thornton on China and its relations with the US. Truly a must-watch!

To a typical braindead question that the Chinese are brainwashed and, if only they knew about the world, they’d be “on our side”, Thornton has a masterful reply: “I’ve been teaching at Tsinghua now for 20 years so I know a lot of young Chinese… I don’t know a single one of them who doesn’t know what’s going on in the outside world.”

Here he explains the “fundamental disconnect” between public statements that China-US is the most consequential relationship in the world and the utter lack of action to actually cultivate the relationship. For instance he says that if you asked US cabinet members the names of their Chinese counterparts, 90% of them wouldn’t know the answer.

Thornton is probably the single American who best knows the Chinese system. He is a personal friend of most of the Chinese leadership, including Xi Jinping. In 2003 he became the first non-Chinese full professor at Tsinghua University since the establishment of the PRC. He is also one of America’s foremost business leaders, having been co-president of Goldman Sachs and seating on the boards of companies such as Ford, Intel, ICBC, China Unicom, IMG, BSkyB, DirectTV, or News Corp.

He says, rightly, that the only way one can ever hope to have an impact on China is by building trust (with an interesting personal anecdote of a diner he had with Xi Jinping).

China will obviously never listen to someone it is convinced is trying to contain or destroy them.

He also says that Chinese leaders lament that US leadership never actually read or hear what they say, only seeing China through the writings of “China watchers” – like Kevin Rudd – who get China completely wrong.

One thing he says the West misunderstands about China is its aspirations, which isn’t to have “a Chinese century” but a “century of diverse civilizations, a new era in which there will no longer be a single civilizational hegemon”.

John Lawson Thornton (born January 2, 1954) is an American businessman and professor and director of the Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is also executive chairman of Barrick Gold Corporation and non-executive chairman of PineBridge Investments. Thornton stepped down as co-president of Goldman Sachs in 2003.