Zhang Jun

Why organisations work with Zhang Jun

• He reads China’s economy from inside its policy apparatus, sitting on the Shanghai Municipal Government’s Special Advisory Committee and having briefed Premier Li Keqiang directly in 2015.
• His thesis in End of Hyper Growth in China? (Palgrave, 2016) is a specific, defensible counter-position on Chinese consumption data and structural imbalance, not a directional take.
• He won the 2018 Bergson Prize from the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, the field’s recognised award for serious comparative work on transition economies.
• He has held visiting positions at LSE, Harvard, Yale, SOAS and UNU-WIDER, so he writes and speaks for Western analytic audiences without losing the China interior view.
• He has written 70 commentaries for Project Syndicate since 2005 and contributes regularly to the South China Morning Post and the World Economic Forum agenda, which means his framing is already legible to senior international readers.

Biography highlights

• Dean, School of Economics, Fudan University; Cheung-Jiang Professor of Economics.
• Founding Director, China Center for Economic Studies (CCES), Fudan.
• Member, Special Advisory Committee to the Shanghai Municipal Government.
• Bergson Prize (2018), Association for Comparative Economic Studies; China Economics Innovation Prize (2015) with Justin Yifu Lin and Fan Gang.
• Author of End of Hyper Growth in China? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Unfinished Reforms of the Chinese Economy (World Scientific, 2013).
• Project Syndicate columnist since 2005; contributor to SCMP and the World Economic Forum.

Biography

Most foreign reads of the Chinese economy are constructed from data releases, export figures, and a handful of much-quoted Western analysts. Zhang Jun’s view is constructed from inside the room. He sits on the Shanghai Municipal Government’s Special Advisory Committee and was one of three economists chosen in 2015 for a direct dialogue with Premier Li Keqiang on macroeconomic policy.

As Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University and founding Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, he runs one of mainland China’s most serious institutional platforms for analysing the country’s growth model. His 2016 Palgrave book End of Hyper Growth in China? made a specific counter-argument against the consensus that China’s reliance on investment and low consumption made its growth unsustainable. The 2018 Bergson Prize from the Association for Comparative Economic Studies recognised his comparative work in the same field.

Zhang publishes for international readers as well as Chinese ones. He has been a Project Syndicate columnist since 2005, with more than 70 commentaries, and writes for the South China Morning Post and the World Economic Forum. Visiting positions at LSE, Harvard, Yale, SOAS and UNU-WIDER over the past two decades mean he speaks the analytic language of Western investment committees while reading Beijing’s policy moves at source.

What this gives a boardroom is rare: a voice on China who is neither cheerleading nor catastrophising, who has skin in the policy debate, and who can tell a foreign audience which structural reform signals from Beijing are real and which are rhetorical.

Key speaking topics

• China’s growth model and the post-hyper-growth economy
• Structural reform and the policy direction of Beijing
• Chinese consumption, savings, and household demand
• Supply-side reform and industrial competitiveness
• China and the global economy: trade, capital, supply chains
• Shanghai and the role of regional governance in Chinese reform

Ideal for

• Boards and investment committees weighing China exposure or repositioning regional strategy
• CFOs and Chief Strategy Officers in firms with significant China-linked supply chains or revenue
• Banks, asset managers and sovereign investors with active China allocations
• Senior policy and government audiences engaging with Chinese counterparts

Audience outcomes

• A specific read on what Beijing’s current reform signals actually mean for capital allocation in China
• A sharper sense of which Western narratives about Chinese consumption, debt and growth are overstated and which hold up
• Direct context on how Shanghai’s policy apparatus thinks about reform priorities and foreign investment
• Better questions to take into the next China-strategy conversation at executive committee or board level