Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman built a program to teach young leaders about China. It’s harder to get into than Harvard

Steve Schwarzman has spent his career on Wall Street—but he’s also been on a quieter quest on the other side of the globe, a decades-long journey to understanding China.

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That brought him, in late April, to the New Tsinghua Xuetan, the circular, brick-hued auditorium at Tsinghua University in Beijing, an architectural wonder that resembles a totem from another age. There, the CEO and Chairman of private equity colossus Blackstone was hosting some 1300 alums at the 10th reunion celebration for the Schwarzman Scholars program. Inspired by the Rhodes Scholar program, it’s a philanthropic initiative that brings students in their early-to-mid-20s, the best and brightest from across the globe, to spend a year immersed in understanding how China works and thinks. After giving the keynote address, and joining a panel on “Leadership in the 21st Century” alongside NBA Hall of Famer Yao Ming, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai, and Yang Lan, a media entrepreneur and on-air personality known as the “Oprah of China,” Schwarzman gets mobbed by Scholars in the audience, many of whom credit the experience for transforming their career paths. “Everyone wanted to take selfies with me,” the 79-year old Schwarzman told Fortune. “I felt like a rockstar!”

Schwarzman avows that giving the generation that will run tomorrow’s governments, businesses and institutions a deep, in-person view of China’s never be more important. “We set up the program when U.S.-China relations were at their height in terms of cooperation,” he says. “I knew we’d go through cycles that would be tense. But I didn’t think the tension would come this quickly.” Put simply, Schwarzman believes that now more than ever, that engagement’s the name of the game, and China isn’t an elective course but should be part of the core curriculum.

Schwarzman Scholars aims recruiting the world’s most promising candidates to give them an education that displays the realities and erases misconceptions about China

In spearheading Schwarzman Scholars, Steve Schwarzman forged the largest internationally-funded philanthropic program ever in China. It’s based at Tsinghua, renowned as the MIT of China. But the school occupies its own campus, Schwarzman College, modeled on the individual venues at Harvard and Oxford, boasting their own historic facades, where students live and dine. The medley of buildings designed by famed architect Robert M. Stern encompass 200,000 square feet. The campus-within-a-campus evokes both traditional Chinese architecture and the historic look you’d find in the Ivy League or the aristocratic academies in the U.K. Of the 150 students chosen each year, 40% come from the U.S., 20% from China, and 40% from around of the world. All the students are ages 22 to 28; around half just graduated from college, and the balance arrive from a remarkably diverse variety of jobs. Many have been working for as long as five years.

Schwarzman Scholars is agnostic as to the backgrounds and careers of its students, but looks for those seeking to be leaders in their fields. It heavily recruits people looking to work in government, to create their own non-profits, and join international aid organizations, as well as break new ground as entrepreneurs. A dentist from Ireland who wants to reform the way his nation provides public health won admission, and so did a Harvard grad who’s launched a VC-backed biotech startup in California.

The admissions vetting is extremely tough. “Our goal is to choose the leaders of tomorrow, whether it’s in business, law, medicine, politics, non-profits or another field,” says Schwarzman. The group conducting the interviews includes CEOs, and former government officials and high level professors from sundry nations. The admissions rate for the incoming class picked outside China is a miniscule 2.5%. “The best universities in the world have a rate of 3.5%,” quips Schwarzman. “So we’re getting in many cases 2.5% of the most outstanding 3.5%.”

The curriculum rests on three pillars: leadership, global affairs and China. The students take their classes in the lecture halls at Schwarzman college, but can also choose classes at Tsinghua. At Schwarzman, each course runs four to eight weeks; all of the faculty is visiting, and the professors hail both from the top U.S. names such as Stanford and Harvard, but also foreign institutions as varied as France’s Sciences Po and the University of Singapore. Most courses are elective. Among the three required: A full-year “China Core” offering that focuses on exploring that nation’s role in the global economy, its historical and political transformation, and its foreign relations.

Part of Core is mandatory instruction in Mandarin for the non-natives, and “deep dive” trips to different cities in China, where students meet with business heads and local officials. The regime also requires students to write a pass-fail thesis called the Capstone, and defend it before a jury of professors. At the end of th