Host

Alice Han

Alice Han

China economist and Director of China at Greenmantle, the macro-advisory firm, where she advises institutional clients on the country’s economic trajectory, policy direction, and global implications. She co-hosts China Decode with James Kynge.

Han holds an AB in history and economics from Harvard and an MA in East Asian studies from Stanford, with a focus on Chinese political economy and fintech. Her analysis has appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy. On China Decode she supplies the markets-and-macro read — currencies, bond markets, capital flows, and the fiscal machinery of the Chinese state — reporting directly from client meetings with bodies such as the People’s Bank of China.

Core positions

Han reads China’s currency internationalisation as real but gradual: the renminbi is picking up structural roles the Japanese yen has shed — carry-trade funding, bilateral trade invoicing with Russia and the Middle East — and creeping up in global reserves, yet remains a long way from threatening dollar dominance, which rests on the dollar’s dominant share of reserves, trade invoicing, and loans. She frames a low-rate, stable-regime China as a risk-off destination for investors wary of America’s fiscal and political trajectory.

On China’s domestic economy she is clear-eyed about the strain beneath the projected strength: youth unemployment, the tang ping (‘lying flat’) mood, and a labour market shedding traditional white-collar and manufacturing jobs even as a freelance content-creation economy absorbs some of the slack. She anticipates fiscal-reform pressure — inheritance or capital-gains taxation — as central and local governments hunt for revenue ahead of China’s largest-ever intergenerational wealth transfer.

In the wiki