Jiang Xueqin: a CIA-created doppelganger?
'China's Nostradamus' is more likely to be a CIA created social media phenomenon
I started this Substack in February 2024. The catchphrase I used at the time on my Twitter account was, “Studying the present, in light of the past, for the purposes of the future”. I later changed it to something more descriptive, but I still use the same phrase on my scholarly Twitter account and on my ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ page.
The phrase comes from the economist John Maynard Keynes, and as an economist myself who writes on political economy it makes complete sense that I would have come across and used it.
In August 2025 a Chinese-Canadian by the name of Jian Xueqin started a Substack with the tagline, “I analyze history to connect the past, explain the present, and predict the future”. Xueqin does not attribute this phrase. He is also not an economist, but an English graduate who is unlikely to have ever read Keynes. That Substack account acquired a staggering 44,000 subscribers in half a year: already becoming the #1 ranked Substack page in the ‘world politics’ category.
His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers: almost all of them gained in the last year. His videos on ‘game theory’ have gone viral, even though it’s quite obvious to anyone who knows formal game theory that Xueqin doesn’t. The YouTube channel was started in early 2023 but its first post on geopolitics was only in April 2024.
In a previous post, I explained how an important tool for Western intelligence agencies in manipulating elections using social media is amplification and deamplification. Such tools can of course be used for manipulating societies more broadly. I have observed how my own X account has, for instance, been heavily ‘deboosted’ [the term used by X itself] every time I have posted critical content about US foreign policy.
Xueqin’s content suddenly went viral in mid-2025 for no apparent reason. A Newsweek article - which of course served to promote him further - claimed that it was because Xueqin “Predicted Trump’s Return and War With Iran”. In reality, he simply sketched a scenario in which there might be an attack on Iran under Trump: hardly a new insight given that this almost happened in Trump’s first term and Trump’s dislike of Iran has been publicly documented since at least a 1988 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Xueqin’s arguments may seem persuasive to some less informed viewers, but not to those with deeper knowledge. His biases are also not very hard to discern. In one video he claims that ‘Russian civilisation is based on violence’ while arguing that the United States was not because the genocide of indigenous Americans was met with little resistance.
You do not need to know anything other than basic logic to see how both biased and flawed that combination of claims is.
Xueqin’s YouTube account says it is based in Canada even though it appears to post videos of him lecturing to Chinese high school students.
His main Twitter account claims to be based in Beijing but its actual location - now revealed by X - is Hong Kong. His other Twitter account also claims to be based in Beijing but X shows it is based in Australia.
Xueqin was raised in Canada and then went to Yale where he studied English. He then moved to China, shortly after graduating from Yale, where he ‘advocated for educational reforms’. Until 2024 he had no background in economics or geopolitics of any kind.
Yale is an institution well-known for CIA recruitment, ranking only below Georgetown. And has been referred to as ‘a great nursery of spooks’.
All of the above led me to conclude that Xueqin was almost certainly a CIA constructed social media phenomenon who, bizarrely, appears to have used some content from my account as part of his fabricated persona.
Having reached that conclusion, I decided to do some more thorough research before publishing this theory. Lo and behold, I discovered an article from 2017 from CNN in which Xueqin himself describes how Chinese counterintelligence concluded back in 2002 - shortly after he had arrived from Yale - that he was an American spy and deported him.
Case closed.1
Note: the article was edited after publication to include the video of Xueqin making the remarks referred to about Russia in comparison to the United States. Some readers had questioned the veracity of that claim.
For those readers wondering, Xueqin came to my attention today when an analysis he wrote of Mark Carney’s visit to China came across my Twitter feed and I noticed that it bore a resemblance to my own - published a day earlier. My first reaction was that it’s great to have another analyst reach a similar conclusion in independent analysis; my second thought was, ‘wait, this is too similar…’. Small clues can ultimately unravel big secrets.
The article has been edited to add the video of Xueqin making the statements about Russia versus the USA I referred to in the original piece. The video is from a clip he posted on his Predictive History TikTok account.
Everything wrong with your thesis:
1. Correlation ≠ causation, viral doesn't mean intel ops
2. "Yale = CIA recruitment" is guilt by association
3. Circular reasoning "I concluded he was CIA, then found he was deported as suspected spy in 2002, case closed"
4. Your footnote reveals real trigger: you think Xueqin copied your analysis
5. Classic conspiracy thinking: "someone is more successful than me must be artificially boosted
6. Missing the obvious alternatives, Chinese-Canadian with Yale credentials and fluent English analyzing China has natural appeal to Western audiences right now, controversial takes get engagement, etc
Where's the classified document leaks, paper trails to intelligence budgets, coordinated messaging across multiple "independent" accounts? Have you ever thought he might have hired virtual assistants to do his twitter, like I do? Or that he might have been on vacation recently, because he has?
This reads like someone bitter about another analyst's success constructing a conspiracy theory to explain it.
I have actually talked to Jiang in real life a couple times. He's no plant or op. He's also been called a CCP agent, been called a lot of things. But maybe just maybe he is who is says he is.
I struggle with my own substack with ony 730 follows and 8 paids subs, but I am not jealous or make up silly attacks on Jiang. I just do my thing which is 3-4 geopolitical articles a week in the hopes people pick me up. John Mearsheimer and Glenn Diesen follow and recommend me, so I think I'm in the right direction.