Xi Jinping’s surprising new source of economic advice
What China’s leader may learn from a pair of reform-minded academics
Zhou Qiren is an unusual economist. A professor at Peking University, he spent ten years toiling in the countryside during China’s cultural revolution. “The same farmer”, he observed, “worked like two totally different persons on his private plots versus on collective land.” Unlike most economists, Mr Zhou still studies incentives and constraints from the ground up, starting not with abstract principles, but with concrete cases, often drawn from his travels around China and beyond.
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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Who advises Xi? ”
Finance & economics June 1st 2024
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From the June 1st 2024 edition
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