> Tim Cook will work closely with Chinese government officials to promote Tsinghua University's economics and management school

Tsinghua is not a random Chinese school - it’s China’s Harvard.

It's their MIT. Peking University is their Harvard.

Checking both of these universities' websites, I see that they have social networks listed on their footers. Tsinghua's Facebook and Instagram accounts have been inactive for 2 years, but Peking's are active, both with posts from today.

I find this interesting given the Chinese censorship of these sites. Sure, a VPN would work, but I would be pretty amused if Chinese educational institutions are actually bypassing the censors.

With high probability, the links on the website are outdated. I'm an international student at Tsinghua, and a lot our lot of English web presence is stale. Both of the official instagram [1] and facebook [2] accounts have posts from within the last 24 hours.

On-campus IPV6 gets you a connection to most "banned" sites. Imagine trying to do research without google scholar? Aside from "sensitive" times (anniversary of tiananmen, 70th anniversary, etc.), it's relatively easy to hop the GFW from campus.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/tsinghua_uni/ [2] https://www.facebook.com/pg/Tsinghua/posts/?ref=page_interna...

So the rumour of Qinghua uni shipping a VPN from under the counter is true then?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Schwarzman building has unrestricted internet without needing to jump through any hoops--just connect to the wifi and you're good to go. I don't _know_ that the uni is shipping a vpn, but...

Can you checkout you IP in google there?

> Tsinghua is not a random Chinese school - it’s China’s Harvard.

Qinghua is more of an alternative central party school than Harvard.

The amount of kids of all kinds of influential people there is over the top

PKU also. I think the cool kids mostly prefer PKU over more utilitarian Qinghua. I never really like the latter’s campus, way more sprawling and nowhere as nice as PKU across the street, but I’m biased.

> Tsinghua is not a random Chinese school - it’s China’s Harvard.

But it's still not Harvard.

The question is, "Why not Harvard? Or any other top school in the US?"

Because China is important. And, unlike the Arab oil producers, China actually has the human capital to create a university that competes with Harvard for prestige. Get used to stuff like this. Tim Cook is about 10 steps ahead of everybody who gives him a hard time for how Apple deals with China.

Tim Cook is 10 steps behind if you look at the rest of the board members list. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Nadella, all have already found a spot on the board.

Depends, if you want to create an independent company of governement influence.

He's 10 steps behind, his internal mail in Apple showed that.

Why now? Are they using Tim Cook or is he a visionary?

It's mutually beneficial. The university gains the prestige of having the CEO of one of the world's largest companies on their board. And it allows Tim Cook to be on the board of one of China's most prestigious university. See my other replies down thread for why doing this in China specifically is important.

Can you elaborate on the importance and how that factors into Apple’s strategy? Saying that China is important and Tim Cook is Very Smart doesn’t make for a very enlightening comment nor a suitable rebuttal. If you’re onto something, I’d like to know what! :)

China is already Apple's second largest market. Right now China's GDP per capita is about $9,600. South Korea has a GDP per capita of about $31k and Japan has a GDP per capita of about $39k. Assuming that China reaches those levels at some point in the not too distant future (which seems likely given cultural and genetic similarities), China will be Apple's largest market. And they will be where Apple manufactures most of its products. At that point, China will be as important to Apple as the U.S., possibly more so. This is the long game that Tim Cook is playing.

Cost of doing business. Hedging a no deal scenario.

> The question is, "Why not Harvard? Or any other top school in the US?"

Because Hardvard or "any other top school in the US?" didn't invite Tim Cook to be the on their board?

> Anything that's the "something" of the "something" isn't really the "anything" of "anything".

-Lisa Simpson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs

Technically that could still be random ;)

Arguably serving on the board of a very powerful education institution can have way more positive influence on future generations than trade wars and sanctions.

Now whether it will, that's a different story.

A lot of countries rewrite their own history first in school and then elsewhere.

It's hard to deny the influence Harvard has on US foreign and internal policy.

You don't even need to influence many people to have lasting change on the world in the right education institutions. A handful is enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_schools_attended_b...

When has that ever happened in history?

>It's hard not to think there's a quid pro quo going on

"The day before the advisory board meeting, Cook met with Xiao Ya-qing (肖亞慶), director of China’s State Administration for Market Regulation in Beijing. According to the bureau’s official website, "The two sides have conducted in-depth exchanges on expanding investment and business development in China, protecting consumer rights and fulfilling corporate social responsibility."

Having recently watched how the Soviet Communist party worked in HBO's Chernobyl (one official showing the scientist the "Hero of the Soviet Union" award that he'll get if he testifies the way the party wants in Vienna), this stinks to me.

But oh well, they didn't make him CEO of Apple to save the world (Hongkong specifically), they made him CEO so he cam maximize profits. Fuck Apple...