The South China Morning Post was the first to report on John Thornton, and Guanwang also reported it. The name Thornton is unfamiliar to most people (including myself), but it's a fake blue-blooded elite. According to wikis:
Born into a wealthy family in 1954, his father John V. Thornton was the vice president of United Eddie and his mother, Edna Lawson Thornton, was a lawyer. He attended Hodgkos School in his early years and later served as Chairman of the Trustee Board of Trustees of the School.
He graduated from Harvard University in 1976, Oxford University in 1978, and Yale University in 1980. In 2003, he was awarded the honorary doctorate title by the Bank Street School of Education. In 2007, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [10] In 2009, he was elected Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.
He joined Goldman Sachs in 1980 and worked as a partner at the age of 34. He founded goldman sachs' European M&A practice in 1983 and began working in London in 1985 and co-CEO at Goldman Sachs International in London from 1995 to 1996. From 1996 to 1998, he was transferred to Goldman Sachs Asia, where he continued to expand the company's franchise during the Asian financial crisis. In 2003, he announced his retirement from Goldman Sachs to take up academic positions at Chinese universities, but remained an expert consultant on China. According to the New York Times, Thornton's choice to retire was based on "Mr. Paulson, 56, who decided to work for another three to five years, and this delay affected Thornton's promotion space." When he retired, he held a stake in Goldman Sachs for $207 million. Compensation also exceeded $40 million over four years.
John Thornton's interest in China dates back to the 1980s, when he was Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia, and by the time he retired, Goldman Sachs became the lead underwriter for many of China's largest state-owned enterprises.
Founded the John Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in 2006 and in 2009 he became a member of the International Advisory Board of the Sovereign Wealth Fund China Investment Corporation.
In 2013, he supported the establishment of the Schwarzman Scholars Scholarship and attended the launching ceremony of Tsinghua University. and is an honorary member of the Committee.
In 2008, he was awarded the Chinese Government Friendship Award by the People's Republic of China, which is the highest honorary award for a foreign citizen. The Chinese government also listed him as one of fifteen 'foreign experts' who have made significant contributions to China's development over the past three decades.
Because of his friendship award and the special status of a foreign expert who has made significant contributions, China attaches great importance to his opinion. He said he pointed out that Biden had three major events in office: fighting the epidemic, reviving the economy and uniting the United States. He didn't need to tell him, even I could see it.
Later, Biden's continuation of Trump's China route may be unexpected by China, nor may it be what Biden thought out at the beginning, and it may be a move to accumulate political capital with China issues when the "three major events" (especially the last two) cannot be pushed forward.
In August, in preparation for the U.S.-China Financial Roundtable (he and Zhou Xiaochuan are the double chairmen), he was ordered by the White House to come to China to deliver a message before leaving (I don't say who it is, personally guessing that it is National Security Adviser Sullivan, who seems to be directly grasping China's affairs, and China affairs are no longer in the hands of the State Council). After three weeks of quarantine in Shanghai, he stayed in China for three weeks, including a week in Xinjiang. It is said that the White House twice cautioned him not to go to Xinjiang to avoid the passive Xinjiang policy of the United States. As a businessman, he can't talk about how passive U.S. policy can be, but he may be able to bring his insights back to Washington and persuade him not to waste time and create obstacles on things that are not shadowy.
At that time, there were no diplomatic relations between China and the United States, and National Security Adviser Kissinger secretly visited China to match Nixon's visit to China; now there is a direct telephone line between the White House and Zhongnanhai, but it is very difficult to make a phone call, and the US secretary of state will not even let China's door in, and he cannot arrange a visit to China, nor can he arrange a visit to China through Sherman.
China is now deliberately refrigerating the United States, with the intention of taking some thought. It seems not just to put pressure on Biden's current China line, but to secure pressure on the Democratic Midterm Election. It is customary for US domestic politics to make fun of China, and all kinds of clamor have become "no-cost speculation". But too much nonsense, it will be taken seriously. Now the U.S.-China relationship has fallen into a freezing point, causing substantial damage to the United States, especially the deadly economy.
Inflation is no longer a threat, but a reality. Shipping tension has been outrageous, Shanghai to Los Angeles a container freight of more than 10,000 US dollars, a ship of 20,000 is 200 million freight, running a trip (at most two) will run out of the cost of the ship. Another algorithm is that the cost of container ships is 11,000 US dollars / TEU (TEU is a standard unit of containers), the cost and freight are the same, no wonder the return trip would rather empty ships do not want to pull the box, would rather pull the empty box than pull the container, because in the United States this head loading time, in China this head quarantine, unloading also time, there is this time to run more, what money is out. The pressure on the ship outside the port of Los Angeles is strong, and it is simply unloaded in Vancouver, and the total freight cost is lower and the time is faster.
It's not just a matter of logistics, it's about prices. It is said that there may be a shortage of Christmas goods across the board, which will affect the stability and unity of the United States.
The lagging effect of helicopter money has also come out, and even the price of beef, daily chemicals and paper products produced by the United States has also increased, which has nothing to do with China. Oil prices have fallen to around $70, but pump prices are still high.
In terms of US debt, there is a danger of peaking and shutting down again. Biden's rebuilding of the United States also requires Congress to throw another 3.5 trillion dollars.
As soon as the U.S.-China technology decoupled, Chinese students were restricted, U.S. companies could not sell to China, and the impact came out.
The Phase 1 agreement expires in February 2022. It seems that it is difficult to postpone it again, and there is no atmosphere in the second stage, what should we do next? Higher tariffs from the United States are theoretically possible, but in practice there seems to be no room for maneuvering. But it is entirely possible for China to reduce its purchases of imports from the United States.
This is not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is how the Sino-US economic and trade relationship will be positioned in the Biden era. This is a matter of Sino-US trade policy assessment, but Biden has been in power for 9 months and has not yet been introduced, and it is not known when it will be introduced. The U.S. business community is in a hurry because it's about what they're going to do next.
There are more military and political things. The interests of the United States in Afghanistan can only be managed by China, the Taiwan Strait must also ask China not to read the wrong signal and really pull the trigger, and the global climate and anti-epidemic must also be pretended by China to support the US leadership.
There are too many things that Biden is anxious to talk about, but China refuses to give Biden a political straw and refuses to become a political straw for the Republican Party, because whether China confronts the United States or cooperates, it will become the political straw of the Republican Party. Simply political decoupling. The two parties in the National Assembly really haven't talked about China for a long time, except for Meng Wanzhou, who squeaked twice when he returned. Since The beginning of Trump, the United States has been hyping up economic decoupling and technological decoupling, and it has not come to think that China has returned to the political decoupling, which has surprised the United States and disrupted the political thinking of the United States: I am the world boss, how can you decouple from my politics?
But if these problems are not solved, the US economic, military, cultural, and scientific and technological policy toward China is duckweed, and if we talk with China about the extension of the first stage or the second stage, we don't know where to put our foothold.
On the other hand, it seems that China has lost confidence in the US government and directly deals with the US deep government?
Some people compare Thornton to Kissinger 2.0, but he is more like Edgar Snow 2.0. It seems that the Western media still have to study Chinese history well, so as not to use the wrong examples.