John Thornton's wish to have it all — in China, in the U.S. and in the U.S.-China relationship.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
In August 2021, John L. Thornton decided to take a six-week trip to China. At the time, the Delta surge of Covid-19 was raging around the world, but the former Wall Street titan couldn’t wait. After four years of turbulence under former President Donald Trump and a rough first year under President Joe Biden, Thornton was on a one-man mission to right the shaky ship of U.S.-China relations.
He quarantined for three weeks in Shanghai and then traveled to Beijing to meet with senior Communist Party officials, many of whom he considered old friends. Thornton, who helped Goldman Sachs build its presence in China, had spent decades cultivating China’s political elite, including the country’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, whom he had first advised when he was the Party Secretary in Shanghai. On this trip, Thornton’s interlocutors included Han Zheng, who serves on the seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, Vice Premier Liu He and Xie Zhenhua, China’s top climate neg
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