In the contest for economic supremacy between the US and China, “we’ve already lost,” Blackstone chairman Stephen Schwarzman said on Thursday night.
“China is creating 10 million jobs a year. The US has been flat,” Schwarzman told the crowd at the China Arts Foundation dinner at Le Cirque.
Schwarzman said he is afraid Americans will start blaming the Chinese for their economic malaise, having already condemned financial institutions and the dreaded One Percent.
To foster better relations between East and West, Schwarzman launched Schwarzman Scholars, which will send worthy American college graduates to Tsinghua University in Beijing, much as Rhodes Scholars go to Oxford University in Britain.
Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. — whose family donated a huge collection of Chinese porcelains to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — was also applauded by dinner host Angela Chen, Fortune magazine’s Andrew Serwer and George Landegger of Parsons & Whitman Capital.