Jiang Xueqin (; born 1976) is a Chinese-Canadian educator and commentator. In the 2000s, he was involved in education reforms in China. Since 2022, he has worked as a teacher at Moonshot Academy high school in Beijing. He is also known for his YouTube channel Predictive History, on which he styles himself as "Professor Jiang".
Jiang Xueqin was born in Guangdong. His father was a high school teacher in China. At the end of the Cultural Revolution when he was 6, Jiang's family immigrated to Canada, where they settled in Toronto. His father became a short-order cook, and his mother worked as a seamstress. Jiang says he had a poor childhood including having to wear hand-me-down clothes.
Jiang says that he was awarded a scholarship and attended Yale College within Yale University<nowiki/> after being rejected by MIT, Princeton and Harvard, and obtained a B.A. in English Literature from Yale College in 1999. Jiang holds Canadian citizenship.
His belief in guanxi or social networking for career success came to be while studying at Yale, which he says he lacked.
In 1998, while still studying as an undergraduate at Yale, Jiang worked his first teaching job, a six-month stint at the Affiliated High School of Peking University in Beijing.
After graduation he fell into deep frustration when he failed to publish his own book or get articles published in magazines. "I felt lost, angry, and bewildered by the world. I jumped from one job to another, never settled down, and eventually fell into severe depression when I was almost 30," Jiang Xueqin recalled. While suffering from depression, which continued for the next five years, in 2000 Jiang moved to Beijing where he worked small stints as a freelance journalist. Jiang wrote for publications such as the American Christian Science Monitor and the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review.
In 2002, Jiang initiated educational reforms at Shenzhen Middle School.
In 2001, Jiang was contracted to conduct an undercover U.S.-funded PBS documentary about the labor movement in China. While filming one such protest in Daqing, Jiang was arrested and detained for two days before he was deported from China on 5 June 2002. A friend claimed that he was accused of "making illegal video recordings" and suspected of spying. No charges were filed.
In 2003, Jiang was allowed by Chinese officials to return to China, where he decided to abandon freelance journalism and pursue public education instead.
Jiang has since held senior administrative and teaching positions at several prominent Chinese secondary schools, including:
He was a researcher with the Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and has served on the selection committee for the Global Teacher Prize.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times (Chinese edition), China Youth Daily, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jiang created the YouTube channel Predictive History, in which he styles himself as "Professor Jiang" despite not teaching at the university level or holding a PhD. His description of the channel includes employing structural historical analysis, game theory, and concepts inspired by Isaac Asimov's fictional psychohistory to interpret and predict important geopolitical developments. Jiang also has a course, Western Philosophy, that has been recorded and uploaded to his YouTube channel.
Jiang's Geo-Strategy episode, "The Iran Trap" (2024), has attracted international attention, predicting the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 and escalating U.S. involvement in a conflict with Iran (cf. the 2025 and 2026 conflicts) and eventual U.S. loss in a prolonged conflict, the first two of which have come true . According to India Today, other analysts had made similar predictions but "Jiang packaged them early and memorably."
While some media outlets described Jiang's lecture on Iran in 2024 as prophetic (earning him the moniker "Nostradamus of China"), others criticized the predictions for relying on selective historical analogies, speculative game theory reasoning, and untestable assumptions. India Today said that his geopolitical analysis glaringly do not feature Chinese foreign policy or internal problems of China even though he resides in the country.
The Free Press described Jiang as a conspiracy theorist who has promoted conspiracy theories through his YouTube channel about the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits and Sabbateans controlling the Western world. Yang Meng, assistant professor at Peking University, argued that Jiang has promoted conspiracy theories relating to Israel, such as claiming that Israel has practiced ritual child sacrifice in the Gaza war.
Jiang's usage of the monicker "Professor", as a high school teacher, has also been described as misleading.
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