For years, the Harvard College China Forum brought business moguls en masse to the university’s oak-paneled rooms, including Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Bridgewater Associates’s Ray Dalio. There at the invitation of students, some of whom also happen to be the children of Chinese billionaires, the moneyed classes of the world’s two largest economies would hobnob every year in a lively exchange of ideas, demonstrating wealth’s power to bridge geopolitical rifts.
Such scenes are now fewer and far between. U.S.-China tensions are so fraught, even the world’s richest are struggling to bring the two sides together. Only a handful of executives from mainland China came in person to this year’s China Forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As for the elite students who lifted the profile of the China Forum in the past, many are gravitating home.
One recent summit organizer, Zhang, is the daughter of the founder of one of China’s largest retailers. The 25-year-old, who asked not to be identified by her full name due to privacy concerns, grew up in the Bay Area with her mother, while her father stayed behind in Beijing. Zhang’s childhood straddled two cultures, thanks to this "astronaut” family arrangement that’s modus operandi for China’s uber-wealthy. She speaks with a Californian accent, rowed crew at Harvard and is proficient in Spanish.