It wasn’t the sort of speech you’d expect from a soon-to-be minster of the Chinese government. On Jan. 27, Chen Jining waxed philosophical to graduating master’s degree students at the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he was serving as university president. He talked about picking up Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers during a visit to Taiwan and about shooting the breeze with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during a recent campus visit. Unlike the standard Chinese Communist Party apparatchik, Chen eschewed impenetrable party theory or bureaucrat-ese for personal anecdotes and motivational comments. The difference between mediocrity and excellence, Chen said , dressed in robes and a mortarboard, was not talent but “continued perseverance [and] sustained effort.” He closed his speech with a quote from China’s former premier and Tsinghua dean Zhu Rongji who in 2014 penned a letter to Tsinghua students telling them to be bold and fearless. “You’re young […]