Economic Dedevelopment and Reform

As a transitioning emerging economy with a long history, China's stories are fascinating. My interests in economics started with many questions about the relations between the market and governments in China when I was a college student. I was deeply influenced by New institutional economics then and decided to choose political economics as my first major. Game theories, contract theories, and evolutionary economics, economic geography, economic modeling in macroeconomics, econometrics.....complex training in economics and arguments in shools made me feel at loss. But, none of these could help me doing good research based on the observations of China's economic system. I turned to my advisor for help.  He made a concise and dialectical conclusion about all the challenges and opportunities in China in recent decades and how to do thorough research about a transitioning economy.

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"If you want to understand the development of China's cities, you can go to check the development in villages at first; if you want to solve the problems of rural areas, you need to focus on the problems in cities at first." 

"If you are doing research about public policy at a macro level, you'd better go to grassroots to see different market agents and individuals' preferences and choices; if you are doing research at a micro level, no matter in which field, you'd better be aware of the impact of laws, rules, policies, and culture at a macro level"

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Yes, I followed his first suggestion: I once focused on rural issues in urbanization in the initial stage of graduate training and then transferred from political economics to urban planning five years later. His second one still appears in my mind regularly until recently. I add the international aspects into the concerns of macro-level.  

As per success in economic development and remaining problems in modernization in China and many countries in the global South, I have discussions and debates with international scholars from the U.S. and other countries in Asia. I noticed that due to the unique regime and governance in China, we still need a more scientific, accurate, and understandable language about inclusive development to tell stories of the global South to the world in globalization.

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