Speaker

Yasheng Huang

Yasheng Huang

Professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specialising in the political economy of China and comparative economic development. His two most influential books are Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (2008), which argued that market-friendly rural reforms in the 1980s were later reversed by a pro-urban, state-centric turn, and The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline (2023), which traces the long-run consequences of the imperial civil service examination system.

Core positions

Huang’s central claim is that the examination system — meritocratic in procedure, stultifying in content — was the dominant institution shaping Chinese political culture from the 6th century to 1905, and that its legacy persists. By channelling the most talented people into rote memorisation of conservative Confucian ideology, it homogenised intellectual life, suppressed heterodox social movements, excluded women from public life, and foreclosed the kind of decentralised ideological competition that drove European innovation. He argues that China’s most creative period — measured in inventions per capita — was the fragmented interregnum of 220–581 AD, when no single ideology held a monopoly.

On the contemporary economy, Huang holds that China’s chronic consumption weakness is a symptom of suppressed household income, not a cause in its own right; that the country’s growth is investment-driven rather than productivity-driven, despite rising R&D spending; and that Xi Jinping’s reliance on formal titles rather than founding-father charisma makes future succession failures harder, not easier, to contain.

In the wiki