On another list, discussion about the possibility of a world language continues and I wrote the following. Also, by coincidence, there was an interesting article in the Financial Times concerning what must be the most elitish university in the world. Until I read it, all I knew of this university was that, every year, several million young Chinese take the entrance examination for 3,000 places.

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Although I think that English is a strong candidate as a world language, I wouldn't bet on it. Chinese is a much stronger candidate in the longer term. It is basically easier to learn than most others. It has lost all the appendages that other languages still have -- conjugations, declensions, irregular verbs, subjunctives, ablatives, and so on -- nightmares that plagues learners of most other languages. Chinese has also lost inflections, cases, persons, genders, degrees, tenses, voices, moods, affixes, infinitives, participles, gerunds and articles. It lost all these in the course of several thousand years of a largely unified culture and literature. There are no words of more than one syllable and every word has only one form. It proceeds by means of subject and predicate -- that's all -- and explicates by means of metaphors. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. More poetry has been written in Chinese than in any other language.

Chinese is just about the most finely chiselled language in the world -- the most fully developed. And when China gets to the forefront in science, technology and commerce I think it will probably whop the confused and convoluted language that we call English (much as I love it).

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A LEADER AMONG MANDARINS

John Thornton tells why he has left Wall Street to teach the Chinese elite at Tsinghua University in Beijing

Lionel Barber and Charles Pretzlik

In the early 1980s, a brash young investment banker at Goldman Sachs named John Thornton took the City of London by storm. While English merchant bankers engaged in an agreeable lunch, Mr Thornton would arrive unannounced at prospective clients, make his pitch and seal the deal.

Virtually single-handedly, Mr Thornton turned Goldman into a dominant force in European investment banking. In the 1990s, he pulled off a similar coup in Asia. Working a rich mine of contacts, he clinched several large deals and made Goldman a serious operator in China and Japan.

Now, at 49, Mr Thornton is about to become the first western businessman since China's 1949 revolution to become a full-time professor at Tsinghua University, the country's leading university and training ground for its ruling elite. Always a thinker and operator on a grand scale, he describes his goal as nothing less than to make a decisive contribution to the evolution of China.

"If I can contribute to the way China evolves and how that relates to the outside world and the US, that would be a good thing," he says in his first interview since leaving Goldman. He is at his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, a magnificent, sprawling estate once owned by Douglas Dillon, the investment banker and former Treasury secretary under President John F. Kennedy.

Mr Thornton's switch from investment banker to academic was not entirely planned. He had hoped to crown his career on Wall Street, where he coveted the top job at Goldman. But for once this highly competitive individual (he is ferocious on the tennis court) failed to achieve his ambition.

Hank Paulson, Goldman's chief executive, had his eye on succeeding the hapless Paul O'Neill as US Treasury secretary. But his own hopes were dashed by the Wall Street scandals and the White House decision to choose another industrialist, John Snow, for the Treasury job. When Mr Paulson made clear he was staying put, Mr Thornton quit after 24 years at Goldman.

So how did he come to Tsinghua University? At one level, he says, the decision was logical. "There are four big themes in the early 21st century: the emergence of China; the turmoil in the Islamic world; the disgraceful way the world treats Africa; and the environment. China is the only area where I believed I oould make a significant impact."

Mr Thornton also enjoys a personal relationship with the Chinese university. It dates back to an encounter he had in 1999 with Zhu Rongji, the reformist former Chinese prime minister. Mr Zhu asked Mr Thornton and Mr Paulson to find a replacement dean of the economic and management school, a post he had held with distinction since 1984.

Mr Thornton replied that Mr Zhu was irreplaceable. But Mr Zhu persisted. And so Mr Thornton drew up a plan, along with the help of McKinsey, the management consultants, for a new Tsinghua advisory board whose membership would be split equally between westerners and Chinese.

The idea was to introduce good chief executives to Tsinghua and develop ties with top-class universities around the world. The first session (which included Lord Browne, boss of BP, and Jorma Ollila of Nokia, among others) went swimmingly.

When the opportunity came up to teach a course called the global leadership programme at the School of Economics and Management, Mr Thornton leapt at the chance.

"If you were to put Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, etc, all together you still wouldn't have the concentration of future leaders you do at Tsinghua."

From next month, he will spend 30-50 per cent of his time on campus. Some former colleagues wonder whether the irrepressible dealmaker will have enough to do. Mr Thornton is dismissive.

"The intellectual, educational side of this is of sufficient interest to me that it can sustain me for a very long time," he says. "There is a new dimension to my life." (Just as well, as he is about to take an intensive course in Mandarin.) Still, Mr Thornton is not going to China simply to stand in front of a blackboard. He has spent a dozen years doing business there, including helping Richard Li sell Star TV to News Corporation and helping Mr Zhu prepare the initial public offering of China Mobile, the mobile telephone company.

Mr Thornton is enormously enthusiastic about the potential in his job. The Chinese leaders are at a point in history where they are looking abroad for know-how to help manage the process of modernisation, he says. He would like to play a part in this historic process.

"They have to have a growth rate that is high if they're not to have a problem. They have got to have ideas of sufficient scale ... to have an impact."

The key is to create a critical mass of leaders to usher in change. Here China has an advantage. The country's elite, says Mr Thornton, is much more easily identifiable than the American elite, which is more culturally diverse and more geographically dispersed.

By training 50-70 students a year, mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, he aims to have a direct impact on China's future business and political leadership.

So far he has approached some 30 western business leaders about taking seminars on his course. They should be warned that he will expect more than a speech and a snappy question and answer session.

"I would prefer to bring John Browne [CEO of BP] into a classroom, ask him what interests him, then it's my job to draw him and the students out over a two-to-three-hour period." While the students will learn first hand about leadership, western-style, their lecturers will "really see what the future looks like".

Mr Thornton also wants to sensitise western elites to China and to Chinese history. "The single greatest need, certainly in this country, and probably in the world, is education for the elites about Chinese history. The basic facts just aren't known."

In the US he has already begun working with the Brookings Institution, the Asia Society and Yale University, helping them to become more exposed to China. He also intends to draw on his formidable array of contacts in the US and Europe to network with the Chinese.

"China is hard but not unknowable -- it's not so strange that you can't figure it out," he says. The problem is that westerners have failed to invest time and energy in China. "You can't . do it synthetically, by just flying around and dropping in. China is a culture" where personal trust, confidence,| matters most." Mr Thornton sets great store by underi standing the decision-making process in China. "This is a "priceless commodity", he says. The question is how to put it to good use."

This is not a straightfor ward issue. Mr Thornton has ' an advisory role at Goldman and still has an office in New York. He sits on the board of Ford Motor Company, Intel, British Sky Broadcasting and Pacific Century Group. And he has had plenty of chief executives urging him to act on their behalf in China.

He says he will be "helping certain clients I have known for a very long time and certain clients who are interested in China". But he adds: "I don't want it to be a major part of my existence because I've done that... I don't want to get very enmeshed in prosaic things." Above all, he says, he will not be doing anything to upset the Chinese.

So if the dealmaker extraordinaire does not wish to exploit his position for commercial gain, what use will he eventually make of it? He toys with the idea of one day establishing an institute in the US devoted to China, or "doing something for an international body or not-for-profit body".

But he also makes no secret of his interest in public life. Another former Goldman Sachs banker, Jon Corzine, gained election to the US Senate; but Mr Thornton seems to favour a political appointment to high office.

Although a Democrat, he says he would be open to working for a Republican president; indeed, he voted for both Bush presidents.

"The answer depends on who is president, what is the nature of my relationship with that person, how important is it to him or her."

The decisive question is whether he can have an impact. For the moment, China is the target of Mr Thornton's relentless focus and energy. But the US is surely next.

Financial Times 22 August 2003

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