The Xi Jinping You’ve Never Heard Of—Revealed by Former Goldman Sachs President
by Global Insight Hub [9-5-2025 published].
(RAD: This video shares insights about China and Chinese President Xi Jinping that are very important for us to understand. China was the world's largest economy during 18 of the last 20 centuries. They are now #1 when GDP is measured in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). They have lifted 800 million people out of poverty, which is more than twice the population of the US, for which they are very proud. Each year 10 million kids take the national examinations to go to the university. The top 3,000 go to the Chinua University, which accounts for 50% of the leadership in China. Listen to this interview to understand why China is NOT a communist system today.
I would like to share a personal relevant story about China when my wife & I lived in the Boston area. As a technician, she worked with graduate students in the Material Science Lab at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Like Xi Jinping, Wu had been sent to work on a farm during the Cultural Revolution. He was eventually able to continue his studies for a PhD in Material Science at MIT and became a good friend. He enrolled his daughter in the best high school in the MIT area. I had several discussions with her about the differences between the education system she was used to in China vs the US. In China, if someone in her class missed just 1 week of school, it was next to impossible to catch up because of the intensity of studies. She was very surprised at how easy it was in a top high school in the US. — RAD)
Forget the clichés about Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. In this rare and eye-opening talk, former Goldman Sachs President and Tsinghua University Professor John Thornton offers the kind of "insider perspective" few in the West ever hear.
Thornton explains:
How Xi Jinping’s harsh Cultural Revolution childhood shaped his lifelong obsessions with stability and the common people’s welfare.
The untold origin of the Belt and Road Initiative—including an offer once made to the U.S., later buried in Washington.
Why the very label “Communist Party” blinds the West to what the CCP actually is.
His provocative analogy: the CCP functions less like a Western political party, and more like the elite, meritocratic structure of the U.S. military.
This is not just analysis—it’s a direct challenge to Western narratives about China. Watch and decide for yourself: does Thornton’s framework reveal a truer way of understanding China’s leadership and ambitions?
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