The Rural Roots of China’s Macroeconomy: Why Rural China Mattered before and still Matters for China and for the World
Introduction
Urban high rises and technology dominate discussions about Chinese economy, but many of the salient features of Chinese economy, such as overcapacity, surging export, have roots in rural China. This talk traces how the developments in rural China have shaped China’s economic model and its growth patterns.
About the Speaker
Yasheng Huang is a professor and holds the Epoch Foundation professorship of global economics and management at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2013 to 2017, he served as an associate dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s global partnership programs and its action learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.
Professor Huang is the author of seven books in English and another six books in Chinese and of many academic papers (such as on regulatory transparency, historical autocracy, statistical falsifications, tax, financing, sectoral and regulatory biases, history of reforms and strategy, political economy of controls, etc.) Professor Huang was a co-Principal Investigator in a large-scale multi-disciplinary research project on food safety in China.
Outside of his academic research, Professor Huang has written for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and Project Syndicate, Caixin and Caijing. He is working on several policy projects related to US-China relations. He was one of the coauthors of MIT’s report, “University Engagement with China: An MIT Approach” and he is a co-chair of an implementation committee of that report. He is a member of a taskforce at Asia Society on US-China policy and a member of Brookings-CSIS Advisory Council on Advancing US-China collaboration. During 2023-4, he was a visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.
Professor Huang founded China Lab, ASEAN Lab and India Lab, which have provided low-cost consulting services to hundreds of small and medium enterprises in these countries. From 2015 to 2018, he ran a program in Yunnan province to train women entrepreneurs (funded by Goldman Sachs Foundation). He has held or received fellowships and grants such as Sloan Foundation Grant, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Walmart Foundation Grant, National Fellowship at Stanford University, and Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Fellowship. National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States. He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank and OECD, and serves on advisory and corporate boards of non-profit and for-profit organizations. He is a founding member and is serving as the president of Asian American Scholar Forum, an NGO dedicated to open science, protection of rights and well-being of Asian American scholars.