Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman built a program to teach young leaders about China. It’s harder to get into than Harvard

Steve Schwarzman has spent his career on Wall Street—but he’s also been on a quieter quest on the other side of the globe, a decades-long journey to understanding China. That brought him, in late April, to the New Tsinghua Xuetan, the circular, brick-hued auditorium at Tsinghua University in Beijing, an architectural wonder that resembles a totem from another age. There, the CEO and Chairman of private equity colossus Blackstone was hosting some 1300 alums at the 10th reunion celebration for the Schwarzman Scholars program. Inspired by the Rhodes Scholar program, it’s a philanthropic initiative that brings students in their early-to-mid-20s, the best and brightest from across the globe, to spend a year immersed in understanding how China works and thinks. After giving the keynote address, and joining a panel on “Leadership in the 21st Century” alongside NBA Hall of Famer Yao Ming, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai, and Yang Lan, a media entrepreneur and on-air personality known as the “Oprah of China,” Schwarzman gets mobbed by Scholars in the audience, many of whom credit the experience for transforming their career paths. “Everyone wanted to take selfies with me,” the 79-year old Schwarzman told Fortune. “I felt like a rockstar!” Schwarzman avows that giving the generation that will run tomorrow’s governments, businesses and institutions a deep, in-person view of China’s never be more important. “We set up the program when U.S.-China relations were at their height in terms of cooperation,” he says. “I knew we’d go through cycles that would be tense. But I didn’t think the tension would come this quickly.” Put simply, Schwarzman believes that now more than ever, that engagement’s the name of the game, and China isn’t an elective course but should be part of the core curriculum. Schwarzman Scholars aims recruiting the world’s most promising candidates to give them an education that displays the realities and erases misconceptions about China In spearheading Schw