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Meredith Chen

Beijing-based high-school teacher Jiang Xueqin may not seem like an obvious candidate for a geopolitical “prophet”.
Dressed casually in a polo shirt, the greying Chinese-Canadian looks unassuming.
But through his hugely popular Predictive History YouTube channel, Jiang has become known as “China’s Nostradamus”, gaining a following for his outlook on world affairs.
While most of his fans are outside China, his lectures and interviews have been translated and uploaded on Chinese social media sites, prompting a range of discussion about his programmes and perspectives.
Jiang is best known for three “big predictions” he made in May 2024, when US president Joe Biden was still in office.
First, he said Donald Trump would win the presidential election later that year. Second, he said the United States would then launch a war on Iran.
Now Jiang’s fans are waiting to see if the third forecast will also come to pass – one that predicts a turning point in the global order.
However, “Professor Jiang’s” ideas on the existing order can be controversial, veering into well-trodden conspiracy theories on shadowy secret societies.

Jiang was born in China in 1976 and moved to Toronto when he was six. He has described his parents as “very poor” and “not well educated”.
Despite his humble background, he graduated from Yale University in 1999 with a degree in English literature.
Jiang then went on to work as a freelance journalist. According to Reporters Without Borders, he was detained by police in the northeastern Chinese city of Daqing in 2002 after recording a workers’ demonstration. He was later expelled from the country.
However, Jiang was allowed to return and began working as a teacher, beginning a long history of involvement in educational reform.
From 2008 to 2012, he worked to move the curriculum of high-profile schools in Shenzhen and Beijing away from their laser focus on gruelling test prep – ultimately unsuccessfully. His efforts gained him coverage both in Chinese and foreign media.
As recently as this February, he was listed as a researcher by Harvard University’s Global Education Innovation Initiative, though this page is no longer public.
He now teaches philosophy and English at Moonshot Academy, a Beijing school known for its innovative approach to education.
In his classes, some of which he posts to his YouTube channel, he analyses history, explains current affairs and forecasts global developments, with lectures such as The Hellenistic World and Church and Empire.
Others are more eccentric, such as his video on St Paul’s role in shaping Christianity titled The Organisation of Evil.
Jiang’s lecture in which he made his “big predictions” first went viral in June 2025, when Israel and the US attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites in a 12-day war.
But interest has soared again since the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28.
Now, his channel has more than 2 million subscribers and there is a cottage industry of channels that repackage his content. One, which dubs his lectures into Portuguese, has more than 200,000 subscribers.
Beyond his own channel, Jiang has been making appearances on podcasts and online video news shows, including an interview on British broadcaster Piers Morgan’s channel and an hour-long chat with US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. During the Carlson show, which refers to him as a “political prophet”, Jiang said the US would become mired in a drawn-out war of attrition in Iran that could last years.
That forecast doubled down on the third of his 2024 “big predictions”: that the US will lose the war in Iran, leading to a reshaping of the world order.

So, what could this new order look like?
In Pax Judaica, the concluding lecture of his Secret History series, Jiang describes one theory of what might happen after the United States is forced from the Middle East. Namely, a secret society called the Illuminati – supposedly an alliance of Freemasons, Jesuits and a now-defunct Jewish cult – would control the world from Jerusalem. While conceding that this is just a theory, Jiang says it does help “connect the dots” and explain “why things are happening the way they are”.
In his interview with Piers Morgan, he described such secret societies as the “real power base” of the US.
He’s the ‘monkey with a typewriter’ version of Nostradamus
Social media commenter
Jiang’s fans often praise him as a fearless truth-teller. Many of the comments on his videos say his lectures feel like university-level courses. “The fact that we are all tuning in to Prof Jiang’s class really shows our tiredness of BS and extreme hunger for truths … simplified and digestible,” one comment under a recent video read.
Others are more sceptical.
“He’s the ‘monkey with a typewriter’ version of Nostradamus – make [thousands of] predictions, get praised when a few turns [sic] out right. What’s really weird is how many people are amazed by this”, one detractor wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
In a conspiratorial twist, some have claimed his sudden rise may have been orchestrated by hidden forces.
While Jiang has not achieved widespread fame in China, some in the country have tried to explain why a teacher making predictions from a Beijing high school appeals to Western audiences.
“Jiang seems to carry a certain ‘Orientalist’ aura of mystery, appealing simultaneously to conservative values, liberal expectations of minority voices and left-leaning perceptions of China’s rising influence,” one commenter on question-and-answer site Zhihu said.
Some critics said that despite Jiang being known as “China’s Nostradamus”, there’s little Chinese about his world view.
“Judging from his remarks, he appears to believe in the superiority of the Western-led order and does not seem particularly sympathetic towards China, but as an intellectual, he cannot simply dismiss China’s objective rise and growing strength,” one commented.


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Jiang Xueqin, a Chinese-Canadian teacher at a Beijing high school, has attracted a huge online audience after some of his geopolitical predictions came true. Photo: Handout

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‘Professor Jiang’ has been dubbed ‘China’s Nostradamus’ after forecasting Trump’s election win and the war with Iran. But some of his ideas veer into conspiracy theory


‘Professor Jiang’ has been dubbed ‘China’s Nostradamus’ after forecasting Trump’s election win and the war with Iran. But some of his ideas veer into conspiracy theory.
