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Skyline Scholars Series

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 | 1:00-2:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

China's Economic Development From a Perspective of Modernization

China’s economic success can be attributed to its leadership’s pragmatic approach and its respect for grassroots initiatives. The near double-digit average GDP growth during the first three decades after 1978 was achieved through bottom-up industrialization, without fundamentally altering the “ancient regime.” With industrialization largely completed—as evidenced by massive excess capacities—the country faced an urgent need to shift its growth engine from investment to innovation, a transition that demands a very different set of institutions. Delays or failures in making this shift—namely, in modernizing its institutions—may lead to the so-called “middle-income trap” and diminish hopes of becoming a leader in the global race for cutting-edge technologies. This talk explores China’s developmental trajectory through the lens of modernization theory, highlighting both the achievements and the institutional challenges that lie ahead.

About the Speaker
 

Dr. Xiaonian Xu is Professor Emeritus at CEIBS, where he held the position of Professor of Economics and Finance from 2004 to 2018.  In recognition of his contributions, he was named an Honorary Professor in Economics from September 2018 to August 2023. He is also Skyline Scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions from 2024-25 at Stanford University.

Between 1999 and 2004, Dr. Xu served as Managing Director and Head of Research at China International Capital Corporation Limited (CICC). Before joining CICC, he was a Senior Economist at Merrill Lynch Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong from 1997 to 1998, and worked as a World Bank consultant in Washington DC in 1996. Dr. Xu was appointed Assistant Professor of Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he taught Economics and Financial Markets from 1991 to 1995. Earlier in his career, he was a research fellow at the State Development Research Centre of China from 1981 to 1985.

Dr. Xu earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis, in 1991, and an MA in Industrial Economics from the People's University of China in 1981. In 1996, he was awarded the distinguished Sun Yefang Economics Prize, the highest honor in the field in China, for his research on China’s capital markets. His research interests include Macroeconomics, Financial Institutions and Financial Markets, Transitional Economies, China’s Economic Reform, Corporate Strategy and Digital Transformation. His publications include: Freedom and Market Economy (《自由与市场经济》), There has Never been A Savior (《从来就没有救世主》), The Pendulum Swinging Back (《回荡的钟摆》), The Nature of the Business and the Internet (《商业的本质和互联网》), and The Nature of the Business and the Internet, 2nd Edition (《商业的本质和互联网》第二版).

A dedicated educator, he has been recognized with the CEIBS Teaching Excellence Award in 2005 and 2006, as well as the esteemed CEIBS Medal for Teaching Excellence in 2010.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu

Juan Manuel Santos was the President of Colombia, from 2010 to 2018, and the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for “his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end”. Before becoming president, he was Minister of Foreign Trade, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Defense.

Santos graduated from the Colombian Naval Academy in Cartagena. He holds a Business and Economics degree from the University of Kansas and did postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Harvard University, where he obtained a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School.

He is currently the Chairman of the Board of the Compaz Foundation, which he created to contribute to peacebuilding in Colombia. He is also a member of the boards of the International Crisis Group, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and the Planetary Guardians.

In November 2024, he was appointed Chair of The Elders, the organization founded by Nelson Mandela to advocate for peace, justice, human rights, and a sustainable planet.

About the Speaker 

Professor Maggiori is the Moghadam Family Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance. He is a co-founder and director of the Global Capital Allocation Project. His research topics have included the analysis of exchange rates under imperfect capital markets, capital flows, the international monetary system, reserve currencies, geoeconomics, tax havens, very long-run discount rates and climate change, and expectations and portfolio investment. His research combines theory and data with the aim of improving international economic policy. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Among a number of honors, he is the recipient of the Fischer Black Prize awarded to an outstanding financial economist under the age of 40, the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and the Bernacer Prize for outstanding contributions in macroeconomics and finance by a European economist under age 40.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

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Amir Tibon is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz and the author of The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel's Borderlands (Little, Brown, Sept 2024), which tells the gripping true story of how he, along with his wife and their two young children, were rescued from Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7, 2023 by Tibon’s own father—an incredible tale of survival that also reveals the deep tensions and systemic failures that led to Hamas’s attacks that day. The story was featured on 60 Minutes, and the film rights have been optioned by Leviathan Productions, with Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz (Fauda) set to write the script. 

Tibon has previously served as Haaretz’s correspondent in Washington, D.C., and as a senior editor for its English edition. He is the author of The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas (co-authored with Grant Rumley), the first-ever biography of the leader of the Palestinian Authority. He, his wife, and their two young daughters were evacuated from their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz after the October 7 attack and are currently living in temporary housing in north-central Israel. 

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Join the China Program at Stanford's Shorenstein APARC for a presentation by Hong Kong University of Science Technology Professor David Zweig covering his work on understanding the process of reverse migration of talent back to China. What he dubs “The Theory of Shortage.”

Drawing on surveys, interviews, and documentary searches, and employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, Dr. Zweig's presentation will show that a key to understanding the process of reverse migration of talent back to China was the returnees' ability to find a skill or a technology which was in short supply in China, thereby giving them a comparative advantage vis-a-vis locals who had not gone abroad in China's marketplace or in China's scientific or academic institutions.

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David Zweig (Ph.D., The University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard in 1984-85. He lived in Hong Kong from 1996 to 2019 and now lives in New York with his family. Zweig studied in Beijing in 1974-1976 and did field research in rural China in 1980-1981 and 1986 and explored the internationalization of southern Jiangsu Province in 1991-1997. Since 1991, he has surveyed and interviewed returned academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, and employees all over China as well as those who have remained abroad. He has authored or edited ten books, including Internationalizing China (Cornell University Press). His most recent book, The War for Chinese Talent in America: The Politics of Technology and Knowledge in Sino-U.S. Relations was published in August  2024 in the Asia Shorts Series of the Association of Asian Studies, distributed by Columbia University Press.

"China’s Vulnerability Paradox,” recently published by Oxford University Press, presents an original framework to explain the uneven transformations in global commodity markets resulting from the dramatic expansion of China’s economy. At times, China displays vulnerabilities towards global commodity markets because of unequal positions of market power. Why is it that Chinese stakeholders are often unable to shape markets in their preferred direction? Why have some markets undergone fundamental changes while other similar ones did not, including uneven liberalization dynamics across markets? And what does this mean for current debates around critical minerals and economic security? At a time of deepening US-China economic tensions, this book provides an alternative, granular understanding of the interacting dynamics between the political economy of Chinese and global markets.

Join the China Program at Stanford's Shorenstein APARC for a presentation by the book's author on this critical topic for China and the world.

Pascale Massot is an associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is also non-resident Honorary Fellow, Political Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, and a Senior Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. In 2022, she was a member and adviser to the Co-Chairs of the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs’ Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee, which was tasked with providing recommendations to the Minister on the development of Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy. She also served as the Senior Advisor for China and Asia in the offices of various Canadian Cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of International Trade, between 2015 and 2017 and again between 2020 and 2021. She was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and at Peking University’s Center for International Political Economy. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.