History has always been a story of talent on the move. War, climate, hunger, opportunity, these are the great engines that push and pull the ambitious from one place to another, and more often than not, they end up gravitating towards whichever civilisation happens to be leading the pack at that moment.
In the 19th century, that pack leader was unmistakably the West. Chinese reformers, students and future revolutionaries began heading in droves to Japan, Germany, Britain, the United States and France, hungry to understand how these societies had built the industrial and institutional muscle that China so conspicuously lacked. Sun Yat-sen studied medicine in Hong Kong before travelling the world raising support for revolution.
A young Zhou Enlai went to Japan and then France on a work-study programme, where he first encountered Marxism among fellow Chinese students in Paris. Deng Xiaoping was part of that same cohort, as a teenager. This was the deliberate, generation-defining pursuit of foreign knowledge by people who intended to bring it home and use it.
That pattern - talent flowing towards whichever system leads at the time - didn’t stop with China’s reformers. It simply reversed. Through the second half of the 20th century and into this one, it’s overwhelmingly been the rest of the world looking to the English-speaking world, and Anglo-American universities in particular, as the finishing school for its future leaders. Bill Clinton went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before he ever set foot in the White House. Countless prime ministers, presidents, central bank governors and business leaders across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf have a Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge degree on their CV – simply because for the best part of a century, the west was seen as the most advanced place to live and learn.
I saw this machinery up close during my time in the Foreign Office. The Chevening Scholarship scheme, and others like it, were never just generous acts of educational philanthropy…they were, quite explicitly, instruments of soft power. Bring the world’s rising stars to Britain for a year, let them fall a little in love with the country, and you’ve built a relationship with a future head of state or central banker before they’ve even taken office. It worked. Chevening’s alumni network now includes well over twenty current or former heads of state or government, from Jakov Milatović, now President of Montenegro, to Anote Tong, the former President of Kiribati, to Carlos Alvarado, former President of Costa Rica. Decades of quiet, patient investment in human capital, paying off exactly as intended.
Which brings me to why I’m writing this piece now. Just this week, Alexander Lukashenko flew to Beijing - ostensibly for a state visit, but really, by his own admission, to watch his youngest son Nikolai graduate from Peking University with a degree in biotechnology, the first cohort of a joint Belarusian-Chinese programme. He met with the university’s leadership, addressed the graduating class, and said he wanted these exchange programmes to be “comprehensive and in-depth” and genuinely “practice-oriented”- not just symbolic. In a separate interview with Chinese state media, he spoke with evident pride about his son learning Mandarin from the age of four, and about wanting the education to be substantive rather than a rubber stamp for the president’s son.
But it isn’t just authoritarian-adjacent regimes making this choice. Around the same time, Guto Harri - Boris Johnson’s former Downing Street communications director - posted proudly about his son Calum’s graduation, this time from Beijing Foreign Studies University, having completed a full bachelor’s degree in Diplomacy taught in Mandarin. Calum wrote candidly about sitting frozen in his very first lecture three and a half years earlier, unable to follow more than the odd word or phrase, wondering how he’d survive an entire degree taught in Chinese. That he came through it, and that his father chose to celebrate it publicly, tells you something. This will become increasingly less eccentric. It’s starting to look like a live option for the children of the Western establishment and aspirational too. Even Rosamund Pike, the famous British actress, finds pride in her sons achievements in learning Mandarin.
It’s worth pausing here though because the traffic still runs both ways. Xi Jinping’s own daughter, Xi Mingze, did the reverse journey - enrolling at Harvard in 2010, the pull of the Ivy League hasn’t vanished, even at the top of the Chinese system. What’s changed is that the flow is no longer quite so lopsided. A generation ago, it would have been almost unthinkable for a senior Western political operator’s son to choose Beijing over Boston. Now it’s happening in full public view, celebrated rather than hidden.
And it isn’t only students and princelings making the journey. This past week, Omar Yaghi - who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - left a near five-decade career at UC Berkeley to become a full-time chair professor at Tsinghua, leading a new AI-driven materials research centre. He’s not the first: German biochemist and Nobel laureate Hartmut Michel took up a full-time post at Jilin University earlier this year, and French Nobel physicist Gérard Mourou accepted a chair at Peking University to build a new physics institute. These aren’t honorary, ribbon-cutting appointments, they’re full relocations of active researchers, drawn by Chinese funding and ambition at precisely the moment US research funding has been squeezed and its visa environment has turned hostile toward Chinese-origin scientists. If laureates in their sixties and seventies are willing to uproot decades-long careers for Beijing, that’s arguably a stronger signal than any graduation ceremony, the pull isn’t just reputational, it’s about where the resources and attraction now actually are.
None of this means Oxford and Harvard are about to be eclipsed overnight. But it’s worth asking honestly whether the old pattern i.e. elites dispatching their brightest to a handful of storied Western universities, can simply continue on autopilot, given that Western tertiary education is not in the rude health it once was. Grade inflation, ballooning fees, ideological capture on some campuses, and a broader crisis of confidence in what a liberal arts degree is for are all chipping away at the assumption that Oxbridge or the Ivy League is automatically where a future leader ought to send their child. If the brand erodes, so does the magnetism.
So what replaces it, or at least supplements it? I don’t think it will look like a straightforward swap of Oxford for Peking University, at least not yet. It will be messier than that. We’re already seeing the rise of the China tech tour: Western executives and policymakers paying to spend a week or two touring Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Shanghai, trying to understand first-hand how China’s manufacturing and innovation ecosystem works, because reading about it from afar no longer feels sufficient. I expect this kind of short, intensive exposure to become far more common, concentrated doses of understanding for people who are already established, rather than degree-length commitments for those starting out.
And then there’s the political dimension, which I think is the most underappreciated of all. China has begun sharing its own version of elite formation: the party school. The Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania, built with $40 million in Chinese funding and jointly run with six ruling liberation-movement parties across southern Africa, takes inspiration from China’s own Central Party School, training cadres in governance and ideology - the first time the CCP has partook in a political training institution of this kind. Meanwhile, Western academics who visit Beijing routinely squeeze in a few hours at the Central Party School itself, keen to understand the latest thinking on governance and the Party’s internal debates. That access is coveted because it offers something no Western institution can: a direct line into how the world’s most consequential one-party state thinks.
Put all of this together - the tech tours, the party school diplomacy, the graduating sons and daughters of presidents and elites, the potential erosion of Western academic prestige - and a pattern starts to emerge. The direction of travel for the world’s talent has reversed before, and I suspect we’re at the early stages of it reversing again. For China to lead on such a reversal it will have to emulate the west’s ability to previously ensure economic growth, technological innovation, political stability, and the attraction of soft power. When facing a choice of where to send one’s kids to learn, parents would rather choose the excitement of economic development over the excitement of civil unrest.
My family loved Shanghai, Mark. We lived there from 2012-2018. It was amazing even back then, and the people were the happiest and most friendly I have met anywhere in the world. We could learn much from Beijing - I am hoping for more "Socialism with British Characteristics" from the new administration. Let's hope Burnham can deliver it. It may be a while before any State Visits are arranged though. Let's wait and see.