Speaker

Keyu Jin

Keyu Jin

Chinese economist specialising in international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and China’s economic model, and author of The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (2023). Born in Beijing in 1982; educated at Harvard (BA 2004, PhD 2009 in economics, under Kenneth Rogoff). Taught at the London School of Economics from 2009, latterly as Associate Professor (2017–2024), before moving in 2025 to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she is Professor of Finance.

Jin’s academic and public work argues against reading China’s economy through a single lens — either as centrally planned communism or as ordinary capitalism — and instead describes a deliberately hybrid model: politically centralised but economically decentralised, with local governments run as competing profit centres against a yardstick set by Beijing. She writes and speaks from a first-person vantage as well as an academic one, having grown up in Beijing during the early reform era and attended American high school and university on exchange. She serves as a non-executive director of the Richemont Group and was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2014.

Core positions

  • The mayor economy. China’s growth is driven less by central directive than by local officials competing against each other on a metric — GDP growth, later environmental compliance and technological innovation — set and enforced by Beijing through the power to promote, demote, or dismiss them. See Mayor Economy.
  • State-guided industrial policy has a defensible logic, at a cost. A state ‘big push’ can launch a strategic sector (EVs, solar, semiconductors) faster than the market alone, provided the state withdraws once genuine market competition can allocate resources among competing firms; the trade-off is wasted capital and misallocation while the state is picking winners.
  • Capital answers to politics in China, not the reverse. Where she argues US capital shapes US politics, Chinese capital must stay subordinate to the political class — visible in the containment of prominent entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, whom she reads as a warning against political prominence rather than against ambition itself.
  • Production without consumption is China’s central imbalance. A savings-heavy, investment-heavy growth model — reinforced by the one-child policy’s effect on household saving — has left China without the domestic demand a genuinely rich economy requires, a problem the real-estate crackdown has sharpened rather than solved.
  • Tariffs are bad economics; blockades can backfire. She argues tariffs are distortionary and address the wrong (macroeconomic, not trade) cause of the US trade deficit, and that US chip export controls plausibly accelerated, rather than prevented, Chinese semiconductor catch-up.

In the wiki