As an international school student in Hong Kong, Kumiko Mita remembers feeling “paralysed” when a teacher asked her classmates whether they, like the teacher’s former students in China, also “hated the Japanese”. She was so upset that she left the classroom.

At university back in Japan, Ms Mita majored in international studies with a focus on Chinese security issues. “Being Japanese and coming from an international background, I was interested in how our two countries’ relationship will be forged in future,” she said. “We have so many issues already and they are not going away.”

On Saturday, Ms Mita and more than 100 other students formally begin their studies at a new college in Beijing founded by billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, who is worried that established powers such as Japan and the US could be on a collision course with China.