Turning now to a looming March deadline.
Nope, it is not Brexit, but rather the US-China trade deal.
China's top trade negotiator, vice president view is meeting President Trump today in Washington.
And if a trade deal is not made by March 1st, President Trump is threatening to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports.
Our next guest says President Trump needs to tone down the rhetoric and get the deal done.
Known as the woman who built Beijing, Zhang Jun is a self-made billionaire and CEO of Soho, China.
It's a real estate empire and a world away from her poverty stricken childhood and with business interests around the world.
She does have the ear of leaders in both Washington and Beijing.
And she told our Walter Isaacson, this is the worst she's ever seen.
US-China relations.
Thank you so much for joining us.
You grew up as a factory girl and then became a multi-billionaire.
And you were born during the Cultural Revolution.
How does that happen?
You know, my generation in China, we all were born during counterrevolution when there was really nothing materially.
There was nothing.
And and politically it was under socialism.
And so the the minute that China's door opened to the outside world, which was in the late seventies, and I went with my mother to Hong Kong in 1980, I was 14.
We had nowhere.
We didn't know how to start a life there other than just being from the very basic, which is to get a job in the factory.
So I worked in the factories for five years in Hong Kong, you know, Hong Kong.
There was a manufacturing center in Asia.
And, you know, I would work from floor to floor because these factories are in high rise buildings.
One floor would be the one that does collar.
The other four would do zipper.
The other floor would do the sleeves together.
So I would just do from factory to factory.
Whoever pays $1 more, I'd go to that factory.
So I did that for five years.
And obviously I was desperate to leave.
Hong Kong then was the English colony sort of the obvious place to go was to go to England.
I had saved a little bit money.
I had save about 3000 English pound.
That was enough to get to England.
But I didn't speak any English, so I had to go to an English language school.
So I started English language school, then went to high school, then to college, then to graduate school.
All of that in England.
And so you ended up after leaving Cambridge, working for places like Barings and Goldman Sachs.
When did you sort of realize I should go back to China?
Now there's opportunity to do something big in China.
I always wanted to go to China.
Go back to China.
It was, you know, going to Goldman was a temporary detour from what I wanted to do, because even at Cambridge, when I was writing my thesis, it was about China's privatization.
I was China at the time in the eighties was already become very, you know, exciting with all the talks of the reforms and economic reforms and open doors.
And I just wanted to go back to be part of that.
But, you know, I couldn't really get a job immediately back to China because I didn't know know how to do that.
It was it happens to be the investment banks who came to Cambridge to recruit.
And that's how I got the job.
But from the very beginning, when I went to Wall Street working in Hong Kong, I'd always wanted to go back to China.
And how big was this entrepreneurial explosion in China in the late eighties and nineties that you were able to tap into?
Oh, tremendous.
Tremendous.
I mean, like no one had an idea how to do anything right.
Like no one knew how to do a building.
Right.
I, I didn't either.
But one thing is, I remember I was always getting the fight with my husband.
I said, Look, I've seen buildings better than this.
I can do better than this.
So I was like, I took on the job as working with the architects to do the designs and thinking about how the buildings should be built.
And that's like every single industry started that way in China back in the eighties.
Right.
Today, when you see these state of art buildings got built and I just emerged, you know, I just remember like 25 years ago, 30 years ago, there was none.
You're known as the builder of Beijing because that's where the billions came from that you and your husband did when you did real estate.
Tell me about starting Soho back in 2000 year 2000.
That was a dot com boom, boom and bust.
And I remember I as a developer thinking that, you know, people who are thinking about change, well, you know, nobody everyone's going to be working in the garage.
No one's going to go to the office.
People can address casual and life and the world is about to change.
So I was thinking, so what does that mean to a developer?
We're going to be building different homes, different office, different people going to work and live differently.
So we then we came with this idea of small office, home office, therefore Soho.
And so essentially is a duplex of, you know, on the top is the home and the lower part is an office so you can work in and live together.
It was very popular.
That product was got sold like this.
You know, everyone was like, got this dot com buzz and and wanted to have something to do with that.
But we after, you know, after 2000, after the the the bust of the dotcom era, we went back to just building traditional office buildings and, you know, focus on architecture and creativity and no longer doing this.
SOHO'S Some of the Chinese investment overseas, including like you, I think put $1,000,000,000 or so into the General Motors building just a few blocks away, is starting to come back.
People are bringing that money back to China.
Are you doing that?
And is that important for the economy?
I think it's not.
The money being brought back to China is the money has been stopped coming because China a few years ago started a a capital control program, which is you cannot really get the money freely out of China.
So you're seeing a drastic decline of Chinese invest and investment coming to the US because of that.
Is that a bad thing for the US and then a bad thing for China?
What?
I think it's bad thing for the US because you always welcome, you know, investment, the more the better.
There's never a limit for China.
I think the Chinese government have to do it because otherwise, you know, they don't want to see the capital flight.
They have to put a gate and say you can't get the money out.
And that's the only way.
And so that's what they what they're doing.
How harmful is this trade war and talk of trade war between the US and China?
This is bad.
This is really bad.
I mean, it's it's you can see that here in the US it's, it sends the jitter to the market in China is the same or even more so I think you know China because people are this this one trade war thing, it really captures everybody's attention.
On top of that, you have this very political or at least it's interpreted in the very political way by Chinese media and public that the arrest of the Huawei CFO, you know, most Chinese believe that's a political move.
And she's been held hostage in order to advance the trade talks.
Trade talks.
So that was unfortunate.
So this Chinese are watching it and then I've been watching it.
It seems like the last two days have only been bad news coming out from this.
Let's hope that it's going to change and get better.
But aren't there serious charges against her?
I just don't know the details.
Maybe it is, but you still need to think about the timing.
You still need to think about what's the right way of doing it.
And it seemed to be I don't understand.
This is it seems to be the Chinese delegation arriving the day before that this was officially send out the official notice.
It seemed just to be to if it is not at all designed, it seemed to be too much of a coincidence.
Does Donald Trump have some point, though, that perhaps we have to rebalance and recalibrate our economic relationship with China?
I mean, if Trump Trump is very focused on trade deficit, right.
And I don't know, this trade deficit can be resolved this way.
Some jobs left the United States for reason.
That is, jobs are just things are done cheaper in other countries.
And and that's not just China.
It's like if you're producing a mug that's cheaper to produce in in Indonesia, you know, at half the price, you as a manufacturer will do that.
What can you do to bridge the gap then between the US and China, which seems to have become very aggravating recently?
Well, I think this is the worst time I've seen, you know, in my.
How long?
I mean, since 1980 I left China to Hong Kong to.
Now this is the worst time I've seen the US-China relations.
And it's worrisome.
And I think someone like me, who's always prided myself as part of the bridge bridging China and to the rest of the world.
And US-China relations is one of the most important relationships.
And yet we're seeing, you know, the the tension in build up to this level.
And I think the more communication, the better it is.
What advice would you give the American leadership of what to do to help bring down the temperature of this trade?
Well, the thing is, I think Chinese culture and American culture is so different and Americans are used to being aggressive negotiator.
Chinese are different.
Chinese are always like, we should create a friendship first.
And then it's easy to get the business done.
That's a very different approach.
Suppose Donald Trump were watching the show right now.
What would you say to him?
I think tone down the rhetoric and get the deal done.
And suppose the Chinese leadership were listening right now, what would you say to them also?
You know, just make sure that you get the deal done.
It's it's important to get deal done.
The, you know, billions of people dependent on this trade wars and just no one wins out of this.
You know, you put tariffs.
They put tariffs and you put more tariffs.
And ultimately, what consumers going to suffer.
You have on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, more than 10 million followers.
Wow.
That's I mean, making $3 billion and 10 million followers.
How did you do that?
Well, for a while, the Chinese Twitter called Weibo was very, very, very active.
You know, looks like tons, tons of like hundreds of millions of people were on that every day.
And very vibrant.
And so I was just tweeting a lot.
You know, I was always tweeting about my work, my life, you know, my running, my interviews, my travel around the world.
And people just find it interesting.
But now that is not as vibrant.
You know, Chinese Twitter has been heavily censored.
So it's not as vibrant.
I don't tweet as much now.
Do you worry sometimes about the censorship of the Internet and social media in China?
I do.
I mean, I do.
I think any constraints and controls is inevitably affects the entrepreneurship which needs a free environment.
And it needs to give people the freedom to imagine to to do things.
Yes, I do worry about that.
Would China be wise to just open up to American social media, to Google's, to the Facebooks and Twitter's as well as to its homegrown on social media, instead of making more restrictions on it?
Well, that's the well, I think when social media was invented, that was the whole idea.
Right.
You connect everyone around the globe, but I think inevitably you would hit some stumbling blocks because some countries want to control Twitter.
And that's the case with China.
So China has its own system, is own social media, is not small, is still got hundreds of millions of people there, but is not connecting with the rest of the world.
So it's not like connecting your view on Facebook.
You have on Twitter, you'd connecting with everyone around the world.
China's only connecting with the Chinese that system and that so far the system.
And I don't see how this is going to change immediately.
And as a billionaire businesswoman in Beijing, are you sort of the inspiration now for many, many other young people in China saying, I can aspire to be that?
Well, I get invited to speak to students a lot.
And I love it.
I really love speaking to students.
And if anything, I always encourage them to go out, study, you know, and be the bridge and connect with the world.
And, you know, the more ventures, the better it is.
And did that help inform your philanthropy that you're doing these days, this need to help kids that don't have privilege to get a great education?
Oh, oh, definitely.
Because I look back, the game changer in my life was education.
Had I stayed as a factory girl, I wouldn't have captured the opportunities later in life.
And so when I have the means to help others, the one thing that's very close to my heart is the financial aid program, because it wasn't at somebody's generosity to sponsor me to go to college, eventually go to Cambridge, I would never be able to do what I do.
So I a few years ago, my husband and I started a Soho China scholarship program, which is to provide financial aid to Chinese students coming to America to study.
This year, we have over 40 Soho scholars at Harvard and Yale.
These are fantastically bright kids, different from the days when I was a student.
I couldn't speak any English or very little English.
After, you know, language school.
But these kids all speak fantastic English.
That's how much China has changed.
Tell me you have stories about some of these students coming from rural areas and yet speaking English and you get to meet them.
What inspires you about them?
Give me one of those.
So I you know, I make a point of meeting them every year, multiple times.
Right.
So and then I hosted this forum every year in the fall.
Some of the older scholars have been there like a couple of years.
And some of the new scholars just came in and I would always try to learn their stories.
One of the girls really stood up and she's she's she's from a small town in China called Jinjiang.
This is a town that produces vinegars.
So we all know this place as a vinegar producer.
And I said to her, You speak fantastic English.
Where did you learn that from?
And she said, by listening to Taylor Swift's music, I thought, my God, that was amazing, that someone can learn English through listening to songs of Taylor Swift.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you.