金刻羽美国演讲: 《中国的国运还有多少年？》【中文字幕】Dr Keyu Jin, London School of Economics

2025年11月20日, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qaZwgqt6j4

金刻羽教授于2024年4月8日在美国的演讲及问答环节，主题为《中国，超越社会主义和资本主义》。在演讲中，金教授深入分析中国经济的发展路径、政策选择及其在全球经济中的影响，同时与观众进行了互动答疑。希望大家喜欢这个精彩分享。

金刻羽（Keyu Jin），1982年出生于北京，父亲为中国前财政部副部长、前亚洲基础设施投资银行行长金立群。她自小接受优质教育，中学就读于北京市人大附中，14岁便赴美求学，在纽约著名的哈瑞斯曼高中完成学业。随后，她迁往马萨诸塞州剑桥市进入哈佛大学深造，分别于2004年与2009年获得经济学学士及博士学位，并在博士期间荣获哈佛最佳研究生奖。

作为国际宏观经济学领域的重要学者，金刻羽的研究涵盖全球资本流动、中国信贷市场、独生子女政策与人口结构变化对经济的影响等。她在博士论文中提出对“Lucas Puzzle”的新解释，为资本何以由发展中国家流向发达国家提供了独特视角。她的学术成果发表在多家顶级期刊，并在全球范围内产生影响。

在公共事务领域，她常受邀参与世界银行、IMF等机构的研究与咨询工作，并致力于促进中西方经济界的交流。2023年，她出版著作《The New China Playbook》，深入探讨中国经济崛起的路径与未来。她的婚姻成谜，但据报道，她已有一个三岁的孩子。

2025年11月，美国国会公开的爱泼斯坦相关文件中出现了涉及前财政部长劳伦斯·萨默斯的争议性邮件，外界一度将邮件中的女性指向金刻羽。对此，金刻羽明确否认任何不正当关系，萨默斯亦发表声明表达羞愧并辞去多项职务。

总体而言，金刻羽以其学术成就与国际影响力成为当代最受瞩目的华人经济学者之一。

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I am so happy and so thrilled to be to be here. In 1997,I moved to America. I was 14. I was alone. Um I arrived at the doorsteps of an American family who actually took me in. They thought I was only staying for a week during an exchange program and I stayed for three years.

Um, just months before I arrived, I was a proud member of the party youth league
in China. I was studying Marxist economic and political thought in school. And it never occurred to me nor to my friends that there was something called fun plans on a Friday night.

And of course that all changed when I got here to this country. I was genuinely mesmerized by the openness by the free thinking and I was a little shocked to be encouraged by my history teacher to question authority textbooks teacher and even facts. Woo what a foreign concept. Um and I was surprised to learn that in school life there was something actually more important than grades. And the China I knew from back home,
exuberant, dynamic, everchanging, so fast, was so different from the China
that uh Americans had in mind when they asked me questions when I got there, as
if it was kind of a dark place of terror. And that contrast and perspective really stuck with me ever since. Now, thinking back, this little story of mine, I think really embodies a lot of the differences, um, the misunderstandings, potentially the cultural gaps that we have between the two countries, US and China. And that's why I wanted to share it with you today.

Now I wrote this book that was published last year, the new China playbook and
trying to explain how China actually works, how it has come to foster a
really unique model uh that goes beyond conventional socialism or capitalism and
also how China has a new generation of Chinese radically different from the older generations and they're going to
change the face of China. So my goal was to hopefully give a perspective from the
inside based on data, facts and huge amount of wonderful serious scholarly
works that has been done on the Chinese economy by international scholars over the years and most of all rise above the
emotions and sensationalism and the news cycle. And so I wanted to tell a
different side of the story and there is always a different side of the story. And given how tense things have become
between the two countries, US and China, I think it is important to tell that story. Uh so allow me to offer you a
different perspective and lens to look through uh in the next hour.
So people ask me often what are the biggest misunderstandings about China?
Now, one of it is actually how the model works. Now, 30 million private companies
sprung out from nowhere like mushrooms spring up from a desert in so little
time, 20 years uh in the beginning stages and beginning ages of 1980s. It
was China was a thoroughly anti- capitalistic uh uh economy and suddenly 30 million out of nowhere. And we tend
to think of China's system as being extremely centralized, as if everything is decisions are made on the top by a
few people, maybe even one person. But that's not quite accurate. Politically, it's very centralized, but
economically it's extremely decentralized. decisions, implementation
um uh are all made on the ground decided by local officials who actually go about
helping private entrepreneurs to succeed. In my book, I call this the mayor economy, local provincial leaders.
I mean, they could be mayors, they could be party uh uh secretaries in charge of turning backward fishing villages into
global technology hubs like Shenzhen. And that's what they did.
I don't know what we expect our mayors to do for us in this country, but in China, that was their mandate. It was to
help growth. It was to implement these radical reforms. It was to help protect the environment to to really encourage
the private entrepreneurs to build um uh something uh new. And so currently, even
fast forward many years today, they're running around all over country uh all over the country building many Silicon
Valleys, helping private entrepreneurs find talent, coordinate financing, build a
whole industrial clutter around key companies like EVs or semiconductors.
The Shanghai government actually gave money and cheap land to Tesla, hoping
that they would build factories and sell um cars there. Chinese local governments
giving subsidizing American companies in China. People were fine with that. They liked it. They bought Tesla cars.
They're all over the streets of China today. And so a lot of people don't understand what what are the incentives
behind these mayors, you know, the decentralized economy that they would want to do this uh for the private
entrepreneurs and help the economy. Well, that comes back to some pretty unique institutional features in China.
So to be promoted to the higher runs of the political p hierarchy and everybody
wanted to be promoted um you needed to do a good job for the local economy and
on top of that by doing that you got more jobs filled your fiscal coffers
um and the land you own which the local governments own are actually worth more
and most of all you needed the private entrepreneurs to help you right we usually think about China as if the
state kind of suppresses the private or surprises. No, actually it's quite the opposite. They need the private
entrepreneurs because they're the most productive and they're the most innovative. So, there were huge incentives. And on top of that, there
was a lot of competition across the regions in China. It was like a beauty contest, you know, contesting for the
best and promising entrepreneurs. And you had to be friendly to them. You had to be nice to them. You had to be helpful. So in the data we see that the
cleanest, friendliest uh local governments saw the fastest growth and the rise of the largest companies and
those that were more corrupt, more extractive, they lost out. So there's an
incentive to behave, to actually lend a helping hand rather than a grabbing
hand, which some might expect in a country with a poor rule of law or too
much political power concentrate in the hands of too few would have been uh very difficult. But that was uh what the
mayors did. And you didn't need every mayor to be like that. You know, China's a big country. there tens of thousands
of local governments and many of them were corrupt and money went into their pockets but the majority were
incentivized and that was enough to lead to this seismic change at breakneck uh
pace now leaving aside what we think about China and their problems their
challenges their challenges with the model we're seeing the economy slowed down as a significant pace today uh it
is still a fact that it is the country that has been growing the fastest for
the longest period of time in all of human history and that is a fact. So
something has must have gone right. Now this comes to a broader point and a more
contested point which is what do we actually think about the role of the state? Now I'm a western trained
economist. I can tell you in our models, in our intellectual thinking framework, there's very little room for the state
except for maybe regulations, maybe stepping in when there are market failures.
But I can also understand culturally and historically why we feel so uneasy about state interventions. And we've also seen
the state overreaching and being too heavy-handed, of course, and these are problems. But sitting around many of
these meetings with politicians, leaders, experts talking about development in developing countries, a
perennial thing that comes up is not enough state capacity. Emerging markets
need to double their infrastructure in the next few years. Not enough state coordination, not enough uh investment.
That's a fact as well. And China didn't have that problem. China actually had
the opposite problem. too much infrastructure which was also wasteful. It was inefficient.
But it was still a better problem to have than to not have enough
connectivity to unleash people's productivity on balance.
Now, for all of its expedience, the model has serious challenges. It's being tested. It's much less effective now.
Growth is slowing down. Huge amounts of debt. 140 million vacant homes to be
filled in who knows how many years. There's too much capacity, too much supply, not enough demand. The financial
system is really a living dinosaur. Too little credit for the small and medium-siz enterprises.
And that's the other side of this high growth, highcost model. It was costly.
There were waste. But to the Chinese on net, the benefits still outweighed the
cost because a billion people were lifted out of poverty. And even today,
it's the first time that you have a developing country being able to do things like cutting edge technology.
And despite the problems, and I'm sure there'll be many questions about Chinese economies today, and I'll share with you
my muse, I still think it's too early to write China off. This country, this very
country, the US, we've had 12 recessions in the last century. It took more than
10 years to recover from the great recession of 2009. China is currently experienced its first
serious economic recession uh in the last 40 years. The potential is still
there. There's a vast majority of people undermployed, undereducated in the or
rural areas and even just between China where China sits today and its potential
whether it's in terms of urban urbanization, tertiary education, the service sector, productivity, there's a
big gap still yet to be filled. And again, even in this country, we've seen
over time that poor states converged to the richer states. It's in the data and
it's also going to happen to China. So there's still room for growth. Now the second misunderstanding is about Chinese
aspirations. Some in this country may think that
China's sole goal is to overtake the US. Geez, that's a lot of responsibilities
in the world. No, thank you. Um and no, not feasible.
The daily preoccupation of the vast majority of Chinese today is still about putting food on their table and keeping
their kids in school. Not really having a dangerous obsession about America.
Really, it doesn't believe that worrying about America is actually going to solve its
own problems. And the government needs to keep its own house in order. There's a lot of domestic challenges.
And by the way, talking about aspirations and we have an ethical theme in this uh series of talks. We're going
to have to accept that there will be similar aspirations from India,
Indonesia, Vietnam, the entire African continent.
They are rising. They have huge aspirations to pedal their way to prosperity. And we'll have
to need to deal with that, too. They're going to start selling cheap goods to China, use its technology. And
by the way, some of that is already happening as factories are moving to Southeast Asia on mass. The Chinese
don't really have much time to talk about the Vietnamese stealing their jobs. We don't really hear about it in
the newspapers. Instead, what they hear about is they should invest more in
smart manufacturing, in uptooling, upskilling uh their workers, climbing up
the value chain so they're not forever stuck and condemned to producing cheap goods. Climbing up the global value
chain is what they're focused on. And maybe it's also another cultural thing to do. And again, culture and
history is something it's a theme in my book. I like to talk about it a little bit because I do think we kind of
sometimes underestimate how important uh they are and that contributes to some of the misunderstandings.
Um but it's a cultural thing to do in China to turn a crisis into motivation.
Now speaking of President Biden's export controls on uh semiconductors or you
know kind of asking companies to break off uh ties with China to stop selling to them. Well, initially it didn't go
down that well uh in in China. Um but then they kind of just turned it into a
positive attitude. It totally mobilized everybody. They whipped companies into
shape. For the longest time they were actually comfortably importing American
uh chips and now all of a sudden they have to start buying Chinese chips and not because the Chinese government
forced them to but rather it's because of um these policies from America. So
and in fact they said well thank you thank you for keeping us on our toes. There were huge accelerations in these
domestic industries and there was almost a national euphoria when they made breakthroughs in the chip industry.
Small victories but still small triumphs and the Chinese people were pretty happy. They turned this around and said,
"Oh, this is pretty positive." And by the way, President Biden, would you mind also sanctioning our national men's
soccer team, too? But thank you. Jokes aside, uh
to look at to the rise of African India, does China want to see that as a threat
or opportunity? I actually really think they see it as an opportunity and that rest of the world is is coming. 90% of
the people in the world still live in the developing countries and they too have that kind of aspirations.
Um, and third, finally, the Chinese people, the misunderstandings and the new generation. That's actually
what I enjoy talking about the most. Uh, it's what gives me the most hope that we
are going to do much better with a new generation and that we're not actually headed on a collision course. The new
generation born after the one child policy in the 1980s, I was among the first generation. I have lots of
thoughts about I've done lots of research about it. Um it's a fascinating topic. Uh they are radically different
from my parents age you know going through huge vicissitudes economic psychological hardships in China during
these turbulent times. Um the new generation they love leisure
consuming spending money on clothes uh traveling entertainment all of that.
They even like to borrow to spend. We used to think about China as a big saver. you know, saving so much and then
flooding the world with capital and products. Well, this generation is different. They borrow. They spend. 85%
of the consumer credit is actually accounted for by people under 35. One click on Alibaba's, you know, e-commerce
website. You can borrow to buy lipstick. That's what college students do. I don't know who who pays them back. Maybe their
parents, but anyway, they they still love to to borrow. that the mentality uh
has totally shifted. And despite what we think about the one child policy, the dark sides, there were
also some unintended consequences. For one, it seriously raised the status
of Chinese women. Why? Because you used to educate your sons first before your
daughters. And everybody now with a daughter pour all the resource into her,
the modern Mulans of every family, right? And we see in the data that the
gender gap completely closed in my generation for uh attainment in higher
education. And in the data among the business leaders, those born in the
1990s, 45% of the business leaders are women compared to only 6% of those born
in the 1970s 60s sorry or 10% for those born in the 1970s.
So it really accelerated the closing of the gender gap for China in this
formerly very traditional confusion society way above what economic growth would have predicted uh in uh uh in in
other countries. And moreover, this is a really open-minded generation. I've looked at lots of international surveys
about them. Uh they care about things like diversity, animal rights, um social
inequity. they feel more confident. Uh, you know, the the kind of factory workers that
opted for three uh shifts a night back in those days, that's not in that
generation. They're more relaxed, more chill, you know, it's not a bad thing.
Um, they're not going to be working as hard as tenacious, but they have a broader, you know, perspective about
life uh in general. And also, they communicate better. Many of them have
been educated in this country. A third of international students in this country are Chinese students and five
million visitors before the pandemic come to this country. They are fluent with the western culture, the language
uh and they would be great ambassadors uh for uh China and they connect much
better with the zen jenzes around the world and they are that bridge.
Um and they're also very innovative. Now, this is again a fact. Despite
what's happening between the two countries, I don't know if you noticed, but four out of the five of the most
downloaded apps today are actually Chinese. I don't know if it will stay the stay stay this way, but you know,
the new generation, they have much more they have much less of a cultural divide and gap.
And so, let me leave with this thought. our great leader Deng Xiaoing who really
pushed the country for reforms and opening up and really was um the forefather of this miracle success used
to say about intractable problems and we had many back in those days as well.
Let's leave it to the smarter younger generation to figure it out. They're going to they're going to sort it out.
But at the same time, we still need to hold the world together for them to actually give them that chance.
Um, I don't think that on top of all the debt that we're going to throw at them or the dirtier planet that we really
want to add a more dangerous world on the cusp of uh collapse uh to the mix.
So it's where places like this forums like this to offer this exchange
uh to get to know each better each other better to uh reduce these misgivings
that I think is so so important and it's really in this kind of country that such
curiosity and openness for different views can actually take place. So I really thank you uh for listening. Thank
you for giving me this uh opportunity and thank you for giving me and so many other students from China, from India,
from Africa to learn from this country. And we can also expect that when the
next global financial crisis comes around the corner, and I'm certainly sure it will, the two central banks in
US and China, they're going to have to call each other up, right? that if there's ever a hope of realizing
the green transition, we are going to need the cheapest, cleanest energy and
technology and a whole lot of investment and collaboration uh to make it happen.
And everybody here is here to stay. Nobody's really going anywhere. Uh we're here. So let's keep the peopleto-people
connection, keep the dialogues open, have some goodwill and maybe even just
start from small victories and I believe over time even more can be achieved.
Thank you.
So you kind you started to allude to this a little bit in your remarks, but the book came out last year. A lot has
happened in the last year in uh the world and in the Chinese economy in particular. We have a real estate sort
of uh crisis. I think it's fair to say in China that's been happening. Uh there's been a lot of questions about
the slowdown in uh growth and there have been some numbers that came out this
week that suggest that some of that maybe is coming back. But I guess maybe just a way to frame this is if you were
to write one more chapter of the book today reflecting on sort of what's been
happening over the last year or so since the book came out uh what would you say about the model and how it is holding up
now and maybe how it has to change going forward. Thank you T and that's that's a
really excellent question really important question the model is being tested in my book I really argue that
state coordination state mobilization was really important for a certain stage of development China has reached the
stage of development where there needs to be a lot more markets and a lot less state and so that has to change but
there's some signs that things are uh changing uh over time but you know we
also have to wonder as I alluded to this as Well, the ups and downs are part of the features of, you know, economic
cycles. And one big difference is that this country had something like a $5
trillion stimulus package over the pandemic. Chinese households had nothing. And there is, you know, a
serious uh loss of confidence and also loss of opportunities. So, it's going to take time for the economy to recover.
And by the way, China's already massive. It's already big. So to keep on growing that fast is going to be very difficult.
India, everybody talks about India and India is definitely an exciting place. But even if India grows let's say four
to five percentage points faster than China until 2030, China is still going
to contribute 130 trillion dollars more of GDP to the world uh than India. So
it's has to have slowed down anyways. But look, you know, I think a broader
question is can we have more expertise in the system? Can the people's
preferences be uh uh uh uh reflected more in the leadership's uh decisions?
That all requires a huge amount of reforms. I'm worried what I'm worried
about most is when countries get to a certain uh income level and they drop
the progrowth agenda and that would be really really sad for China and for the rest of the world too. Um there's a
question here about uh China potentially trying to a strategy to uh
take the place uh or at least compete with the US as the world's uh monetary
exchange. Uh and this this could probably get very technical, but I'm wondering if you can help kind of orient
us around what that spaces in that conversation. Um, China has among its
other ambitions or aspirations um, wants to internationalize the R&B. You know,
dollar is very powerful. Dollar is very very dominant. Uh, and so I think it has
the plans but realistically it is still very very far from
coming close to that goal of being even really an international currency. Why? very very simply and very briefly you
need a financial system like the US breadth liquidity size just look at the US treasuries it's not just trade
denominated in dollars but the lending is also denominated in dollars and it's very very hard to um replace that but
that said again we cannot forget the other part of the world the massive
emerging developing world they have a desire for a parallel movement of maybe
a common currency maybe an alternative a dollar, albe it being very difficult. That is a desire in the financial
system, but it's also very difficult to achieve. Uh there there's a couple of
different questions about uh Hong Kong and about uh Hong Kong's ability to to
self-determine, but also uh at least one about uh Hong Kong as a global financial
center and whether that uh changes as uh it is sort of it's in a different world
now where it's become part of mainland China in this way. So, I'm wondering if you can talk about both of those, both
uh sort of uh the relationship that we've seen over the last years with China and Hong Kong and then also the
financial sort of center implications of that. The fate of Hong Kong and mainland China
are inextricably linked. Uh if Hong Kong does well, it makes China look good. And
if China's economy does well, it would make it would be good for Hong Kong's economy because Hong Kong is the
financial center, the conduit through which a lot of the capital investment flows. And so I recently went to Hong
Kong last week uh two weeks ago and they were still pretty optimistic because even though a lot of people left, some
new people are coming back and they're reinventing themselves. I I'm not an expert on Hong Kong, but I do just want
to mention one thing. And in the spirit of just giving you another side of the story because we're all familiar with
one one side of the story. Um the the Hong Kong people told me that in 2003
SARS arrived in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong economy was completely you know
going under. At that time, Hong Kong asked mainland China, can you lift the
restrictions so that you can help us with our economy? They actually took the
initiative uh so that there could be more economic integration between the the two countries.
Many of you have been to Hong Kong. Most people from most countries will never need a visa to go to Hong Kong. Guess
who needs a visa? Chinese. mainland Chinese need to go get a visa. And um
just in the spirit of a broader audience, the cultural aspects I they they've cut they put up two beautiful
museums and gez the artist politically opposite to Chinese government are all
hanging there. I was very very surprised. So I think the the complexity of the issue is not something I have
expertise or the time to talk about. But anyways, they are kind of really linked
together and I still believe the Hong Kong people um have some hope that they'll be able to kind of reinvigorate
their economy and their livelihoods. Uh there's a question here that uh ties
together two. So you talked about the younger generation uh and this person is wondering what this younger generation
thinks of the Belt and Road uh initiatives. uh and that will probably require a little bit of explanation as
to the belt and road initiatives. Thank you. China also had a vision or
you know can say the leadership had a vision in China of building infrastructure around the world and as
we mentioned emerging markets need infrastructure. There's a1 trillion dollar infrastructure gap every year in
the world. And you know, I just came from the World Bank. They were talking about we need infrastructure investment.
But so China came up with this belt and road initiative. China wanted to put in money. They wanted to send construction
workers. They wanted to do these development projects. Um that was a good
idea in design. It was probably not well implemented. Huge amount of problems uh
emerging market debt. But there's also a lot of misunderstanding and that is also changing. By the way, just one
statistic, 90% of the developing countries debt is held by Western
financial institutions and that's just the data. It's not really just the Chinese um infrastructure that has uh uh
uh kind of cast them in into debt. So I have issues I have issues with with the
plan and implementation, but it was um an idea. I don't know what the younger generation uh thinks about it. The
younger generation obviously uber connected, they think about innovation. They don't think about hard power as
much. That's the older generation, you know, the infrastructure, the money, and all this hard politics. They think about
softer links and softer power. And that's also why I I'm more hopeful for them. I mean I I think it's fair to say
that there is a growing skepticism or or in certain parts in certain sectors of
this country in the United States of uh going out into the globe and trying to
uh set terms for other countries right like and and we have a long history of doing that but you hear a lot more of
people saying is that really our role and I guess maybe that's part of the question do you hear those kinds of
debates right now in China about like what is our role not just in how we take
care of ourselves but what values do we potentially like impose or ask of other
countries that we work with? That is a really really great question. Thank you Tane for that. I it is it
reminds me to say that people in China talk about really different issues and they they worry about different issues
partly because you know they're still they have you know developing country have different set of challenges.
um they want to stay engaged. I think it would be a mistake to think about China as wanting to kind of recede from the
globe. They want to be, you know, it's all about openness and sending their kids to school internationally and if
they can merging the businesses and by the way Starbucks everywhere, you know,
I said yes, McDonald's, that was my gift when I did well in school, a happy meal.
um uh uh that was luxury luxury and um you know Estee Lauder that I think
American business have when potentially can do really well in China and they they like that they like to be
internationally integrated. Now, just to be serious for a little bit and to be completely honest, I do think that
Chinese government feels somewhat of an existential threat um of not being able
to control their core components like chips or um uh uh core competencies and
in that sense they're trying to strive for greater independence as by the way Japan is spending 500 million dollars on
indigenous uh uh innovation. We haven't talked about the chips act, science act, inflation reduction act. Europe is doing
the same. UK is feeling it's, you know, falling behind and spending a lot more on compute. So we're we're getting that
kind of, you know, a return of, you know, more needs to be done. And I'm not sure it's all that bad because if it
does mean lots more cleaner energy and a faster transition, um, it has to be
managed. which is a complex relationship that has to be managed but it's not inconsistent with globalization. Maybe
protection on certain areas but more open uh on other areas. These are not irreconcilable paradoxes.
Uh there's a question here. Can you say more about China and intellectual property and particularly the use of
potentially of US intellectual property? Yeah, intellectual property protection was very weak for the longest period of
time. Um and the government has really tried uh to at least start the process
of cutting down you know theft and putting in a very comprehensive system. Why? It's not just with American
companies or German companies. Chinese companies are stealing from each other. And in order to get innovation, you need
to have intellectual property uh protection. And now there are many many things that are going into the courts. I
I've also met with um with lots of you know uh as I mentioned mayors and they were talking about German multinationals
in their city and when there was an inter IP leak how much they you know really tried to uh uh change things and
and manage things. So I think it is also um in the process of becoming more uh uh
more uh more serious. By the way um maybe this is part of confusion culture
but apparently to Chinese stealing books is not a crime. Um but so they they
started teaching people in middle school and elementary school the importance of
respecting other people's intellectual property. So I think they're serious but it's going to take some some time uh to
make it really happen. But it's also actually good for China too. So there's a related uh question here
about the the geopolitics. Um, and I promise we'll get back to some economics questions, but there there is a there is
a question here about how we account for China's support of Russia and North
Korea and what China's goals would be in those relationships. Again, a you know, a very difficult
question to to engage with and answer. Um, again, let me just give you a different perspective. not necessarily
something I personally agree or not agree but just give you a kind of an an angle from from China. First of all,
China shares a border with Russia. Any country that shares a border with Russia, you know, needs to manage the
relationship. Um, China also doesn't see that a substantially weakened China uh,
sorry, a substantially weakened Russia is good for China from a real politique point of view, you know, because of the
rising tensions between US and China. That triangular relationship, Russia,
China, America, you know, for years, for history, throughout history has always been short-termbased. I don't believe
there's a long-term commitment or real friendship but it is very much about you know a multi-olar world a different
different coalitions and whether right or wrong some Chinese believe that a
stam substantially weakened China would mean that all the attention and focus would be uh on China but at the same
time it is very clear and it's part of this five principles that foreign invasion is not something they support
and so um I think on the other hand uh you know the Ukrainian issue is something that they also openly
acknowledge as being very difficult but um uh uh so I think it's that that thing
that they have to grapple with that I know obviously al also confuses uh other parts of the world
okay I promise an economics question uh given this is a good question I think so given your description of China as a
market driven economy in what ways is it still communist thank you for that question. I don't
really know if there is any uh communist part of aspect of it. But you know when
I say beyond socialism and capitalism conventionally defined, I'm talking
about a pretty unique balance between um industry and state state coordination
and market mechanisms, individualism and communalism. And so China has decided
that it's going to be on one part of that spectrum. Now America might be totally you know on the one end of free
markets China be might be some somewhere in between but there's not just one model and so I don't think it's
necessarily communism but you know how much state coordination state role state uh uh uh intervention is allowed and as
I mentioned to you before personally I think that China has come to an age where it needs a lot more markets and a
lot less uh state switching to leaders in this country uh
just This week, President Biden has uh recommended that if he were reelected,
he would increase steel tariffs on steel coming from China. Uh former President Trump has offered to raise tariffs on
almost everything. Uh this is almost like an economics 101. Can you just sort of talk about tariff policy and like if
those came to pass, what would happen in this country? What would happen in China? What would that actually mean?
Um, there's been a lot of studies in America,
serious studies that show that the last round of tariffs were paid by Americans
and that was a fact and that increased the prices that's going to add to inflationary pressure. But still leaving
those studies aside and there's a really broad consensus among the economists that's been uh the case. You know, we're
going to see this because of a political uh issue. You know, I think about Chinese roads,
German cars, Japanese cars, American cars, the predominantly foreign cars
running uh on the streets of China. And China can now do EVs. It can't do its own combustion engine uh vehicles, but
it can do pretty good EVs, pretty cheap, pretty high quality, but they're going to meet it with a lot of resistance if
they try to go into Europe. And certainly, I highly doubt they will be able to come here. So then I think
about, okay, what happens if Chinese start to say, well, if you know, you're going to slap on tariffs on EVs, shouldn't we slap on even more tariffs
on German cars and American cars? And I think this is not we're not heading the right direction. It's a lot of
protectionism under the guise of national security, but this is, you know, not the really the the good
direction that we we we should all head. So it's going to raise some retalatory efforts. But the Chinese thinking is,
look, you know, we're expecting this anyways. It doesn't matter if it's Trump, it doesn't matter if it's Biden. It's kind of all just going to be like
that. So, um they're just going to have to keep going it. Maybe they'll work with more uh global uh partners. And by
the way, in the data, what do we see about trade? Yes, there's less direct trade between China and the US, but
they're all going through Mexico and Vietnam. It's just taking longer and
it's more expensive. Uh and Chinese money, g, you know, guess who's funding the factories in Vietnam? Chinese
capital. Chinese investment in Mexico has risen eight times. It's just taking a longer route. Why? Because ultimately
the ultimate supply and demand are still coming from the two largest countries largest largest economies in the world.
And even if they try to, you know, kind of break up in direct terms, they're
still deeply embedded indirectly through these links through other countries. Uh one more audience question here at
least. It says, "Could you discuss the potential effects of uh the Chinese demographic transition and how that
might affect the Chinese economy uh and political development over the next
generation?" Thank you. And that's that's a really excellent question because people are really worried about China's aging and
it's because the one child policy people don't really want to have kids anymore and that is seen to be a serious
challenge uh for for the Chinese government. My own view is there's something actually even more urgent than
that and that is the big deep skill and education mismatch. And by the way, this
is not an uniquely Chinese uh problem as well. There have been 100 million additional college graduates in the last
10 to 15 years. There's massive youth unemployment right now, but in manufacturing, there's 25 million vacant
jobs still needing to be filled. There's like a 300,000 talent gap in semiconductors and so many more. It's
not just being educated that's important, right? We're pouring so much into education, but it's about the right
kind of education, giving them the right kind of skills, the tools to adapt to this new age where AI and you know
supercomputing and all that new tech crop of technology. You need technical workers, you need vacation vocational
workers. And so that is a much more urgent problem than the potential reduction in labor force in so many
years. And by the way, China is one of the biggest exports of industrial robots. They uh if they wanted to
substitute robots for the labor force, uh that is something they can do. So I think before the aging problem, they
need to take care of their young people. Uh actually, as long as we're talking about young people, there's another question here about uh the educational
system. Uh and this is sort of just can you talk a little bit about how it works? H how much of it is state funded?
How much of it is individual families? Uh is higher education available to all?
Excellent. Um so education used to be free uh or at least uh come at a very very low cost and uh but that all
changed after the one child policy. Why? Because you have only one child, dragon or phoenix. You really wanted to invest
in that one one child that you have. And so they started paying huge exorbitant
sums for tutorials, outside tutorials. And I can't say thanks to the capitalist
system, um, not a lot of a lot of these companies actually exploited that angst from parents. And so, uh, it was really
exorbitant. Uh, on average in the data, people spent a quarter of their income on educating one child. So that was
really causing all that anxiety uh in in the country and hence our leaders came
in to step in and again you know maybe potentially wreaking havoc in the economy but it was it was for social
reasons that uh that it happened. The education system I believe is a
challenge. It's a challenge for China's goal of becoming a real innovator, a
real kind of um doing groundbreaking in innovation because uh we have we are
judged based on standardized testing. But I've been thinking well with a country with that many people, you can't
have an American system, you know, applications. Think about how much corruption there will be. uh and you
know this is actually the standard test testing is really the only way that the very bottom run of society those in the
poor areas actually had a chance uh uh for a better life and that's all and it's not perfect um so I think um it is
a big problem and is very hard to change our last speaker who is here Cara Swisser is a tech journalist and she
talked a little bit about Tik Tok ban that's in front of Congress and about some of these social media pieces uh I
am just curious if you were, you know, called to testify and talk about what the whether the US should be concerned
about something like Tik Tok or social media ownership by a Chinese company or
whether that's overblown. Just what would you say? Wow.
Geez, tough questions. By the way, I wasn't I got a really warm welcome yesterday, so I I need to answer some of
these questions, I guess. um you know data is becoming a national security
concern all around the world and and so I I understand that but at the same time from what I know and I don't know that
much tick tock has done everything it can in terms of having Oracle manage
some of its data and putting the data and keeping in the US I don't know if there's more uh that can be done um but
look you know this is America right it's not China why does America want to look more and more like China and So you know
the kind of principles we uphold in this economy the free markets I understand they're national security issues but uh
it's also really difficult to compare what would happen uh between the two two countries you know Tesla also some
people are saying EVs are of national security concerns because of the data right I don't think we should not we
should ban Tesla that would be a huge you know disappointment for Chinese people and I don't think we're going to do that um so I I do think though that
more and more countries are going going to use this national security as an excuse to do lots of protectionist
things. We just got to keep it really pretty narrow otherwise it's going to spread out throughout um all kinds of
goods and then this can kind of get go out of hand. So we've talked about a lot of things uh geopolitics a lot of big
economics things uh things that are in front of Congress and different governments around the world and I can
imagine people being like this is all very interesting but like what do I do with this and so I am curious maybe just
as a a way to end if if you would have anything that you would want people to take home or an invitation for what sort
of folks who are just watching today listening uh or on the radio later uh
that you would want them to sort of take from what you're talking about in the book or talked about here today that you
think would move us in a positive direction. Thank you. Well, I think you know let's
keep our communications channel open. Um people-to-people connection, business to business, but also at the leadership level, the military level. How important is that? Right? Leaders not talking twice a year. I mean maybe once a month would would help. and um I don't know keeping you know there are lots of Chinese students who really still want to come here and lots of universities that want to work together lots of scientists data scientists AI scientists that still want to see the collaboration so I think that to the extent that we can to keep those exchanges uh uh open that would be great and recently uh Anthony Blinken mentioned about I remember you know sitting in this meeting and pretty surprised to say that he said something positive about China and said uh talked about the fentanyl fentanyl uh crisis in this country and how China really did the Chinese government really took action and seriously implemented all these you know um uh uh uh uh restrictions or cutting down in China and that is an instance of collaboration and so that might be a small victory that might be a small victory but I think it would help build trust over time little by little.
So on that note, can you all please help me do a big warm thank you Dr. Ku Jin for speaking here at the Westminster Town Hall Forum.