Update | Top Chinese university mistakes businessman surnamed Rothschild for heir of the wealthy banking dynasty
Tsinghua University admits gaffe after businessman welcomed to institute as big potential donor and invited to share his views on education
Not every Rothschild is from the rich and well-known banking dynasty, the head of a top Chinese university has learned to his embarrassment.
Qiu Yong, president of the prestigious Tsinghua University, met a businessman named Oliver Rothschild in Beijing on February 1 and thought him a big potential donor from the banking family.
A press release on the Tsinghua website said the visitor was welcomed by Qiu and treated as “a core member and chief asset manager for the Rothschild family in the UK”.
It was revealed only later that Oliver Rothschild had nothing to do with the Rothschild family, apart from sharing the family name. He is the chairman of a London-based corporate advisory firm.
Yang Bin, a vice-president at Tsinghua, admitted to the media on Wednesday that the university failed to carry out proper checks.
“We should be more discreet in checking the true identity of potential donors,” China News Service quoted Yang as saying.
The gaffe has triggered hot debate on Chinese social media with some suggesting the incident revealed an ignorance and lack of knowledge among China’s university bureaucrats appointed by the Communist Party.
“It also reflected deep-rooted problems with China’s education institutions – the people in charge of such institutions always want to be close to power, money and even celebrity, instead of truth,” said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
The name of Rothschild gained popularity in China largely thanks to writer Song Hongbing’s best-selling Currency Wars, a series of books on conspiracy theories that the Rothschild family had been pulling strings behind all major historical events in the last two centuries.
Qiu told the visiting Rothschild that Tsinghua attached great importance to the international training of its students and hoped to enhance cooperation and communication with him.
He told the businessman that his family was a financial household with great reputation “not only in Europe but also in the whole world”.
Qiu also gave Tsinghua souvenirs to the visiting Rothschild and he in turn “shared his views on education”, according to the university statement about the meeting.
Tsinghua University, which President Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao attended, is not the only Chinese institution to have mistaken Oliver Rothschild as a representative of the wealthy banking dynasty.
China International Technology Transfer Centre, for instance, also believed him to be a “core family member” of the Rothschild dynasty.
There is no evidence to show that Oliver Rothschild deliberately misled his Chinese hosts.
According to a report by China Philanthropist, the Chinese-language journal conducted an interview with the businessman in 2014, in which he said he was lucky to be linked with a banking family but that he “had no relations with that Rothschild family”.
“The problem is still with the Chinese society,” said Hu, the Beijing Institute of Technology professor.
“In a democratic society, even a princess or a king can live like a normal person. But in China, there’s still blind worship of titles and fame.”
