Civilization BONUS: Meet Professor Jiang

Professor Jiang is a Chinese-born educator who immigrated to Toronto at age six, earned a full scholarship to Yale (English literature), and returned to China to work in education reform across all levels—from kindergarten to university. He currently teaches at a private school in Beijing that prepares students to study abroad.

• He recently completed a 60-class course covering the entirety of human history from the Ice Age to the American Empire, originally uploaded for his Chinese students to review lectures in English.
• The channel unexpectedly grew from a few hundred subscribers to around 20,000 in about a month, with overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Predictive History is the intellectual movement Professor Jiang wants to build, inspired by Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory from the Foundation series.

• The goal is for history to accomplish three things: connect past events into a coherent story, explain the present, and predict the future.
• If history can achieve all three, Jiang considers it “true history,” which he believes would allow humanity to better organize and control its future.
• His long-term ambition is to found his own liberal arts and humanities school—modeled on Plato’s Academy or a “Jedi temple”—to train future intellectuals, historians, and writers who can lead humanity forward.

The course itself was born out of a practical problem: teaching Western great books (Homer, Virgil, Dante, the Bible, etc.) to Chinese students who lacked the historical context to understand them.

• Jiang responded by designing a sweeping survey of human history to give students that missing framework.
• He plans to re-teach the course in a condensed 30-class format starting mid-August, with new material, clearer themes, and more coherent underlying structures.
• A second semester beginning in February will focus on geopolitics—analyzing current events and making predictions about the future.

Summer plans include rest and recuperation in Toronto with his family (his first trip back with his children to meet their grandparents), deep reading, and self-improvement in areas he acknowledges as weaknesses.

• He plans to study philosophy (Marx, Hegel, Kant) and classical economics (Adam Smith and others) to strengthen his analytical framework.
• He also intends to engage more with commenters over the summer, having been unable to respond to most due to the demands of teaching, parenting three young children, and frequent illness.

Personal context: Jiang is turning 50, manages high pressure, and is deeply concerned about the accelerating geopolitical situation—specifically Israel’s attack on Iran, which he had predicted but arrived sooner than expected. He frames this moment as one of both hope and preparation for the worst.