Top 15 Keyu Jin Quotes

Keep borders open, student flows, academics, knowledge flows, and leaders should talk more often.

[C]oming back to the recalibration, look at trade. Yes, U.S. and China's structural trade is declining, but... it's just being rerouted from Vietnam and Mexico, but ultimate sources of demand and supply are still coming from the two largest economies. It's just taking a much longer route and adding to the trade costs. And it's going to add to the cost of innovation... to the cost of inflation... [C]oming back to the American voters... ultimately defining this year's election is still going to be overwhelmingly pragmatic about the everyday livelihoods of these people.

[T]here's one fundamental misunderstanding about the Chinese from the American side... that China's sole goal is to try to overtake the U.S. That is not the Chinese aspiration. The Chinese people, with a billion people still trying to have a better life... It's overwhelmingly pragmatic. Chinese people... still think about getting an apartment in the cities and sending their kids to school... [T]hat is the ultimate source of legitimacy, also, for the party. When we talk about war and all that, it's about peace and stability, which is the best conditions to make that happen.

After reading Jake Sullivan's reviving national American economy, it sounds... like the China model with industrial policies, subsidies and a huge national boost... The China model is about having a unique coordination between government and markets... individualism and communalism...

The two biggest themes this year, AI and sustainability: one represents competition between the two; the second represents collaboration. There's no way we're going to get to green transition without the collaboration... So my advice would be first... start from small victories to build trust... and recalibrate and readjust to real time circumstances.

Collaborative competition is the way we should define the relationship. ...U.S. and Japan had similar... economic... technology competition, and... everybody was better off because Japan pushed the U.S. to do much more. Lots of these... important innovation pushes were because of Japanese competition.

[I]t's leaky. You cannot really restrict technology flows... [Y]ou're basically enriching the intermediaries. ...There are a lot of third [party] countries where we're seeing a huge surge in imports of chips. I wonder what happened there.

Before, they were comfortably importing chips. ...Of course Chinese companies would love to import chips. Now they have to turn to domestic substitution, and that's accelerating... making domestic chip companies much more profitable... in many, many different areas.

[R]ecalibration comes from two important things... First... is that internal challenges for both countries, China for sure on the economic... political... military... A lot of the focus is now inward. Chinese don't think about Americans all day long. ...Second, there's a huge unintended consequence of these technological restrictions... We've seen it in history... that whenever there are restrictions or... walls, it accelerates technological development. So what we have seen in China recently is a national mobilization. Unlikely partners from the big techs, working together. Universities, industries, governments, all trying to tackle the hard and impossible... [T]hat's... accelerated some of the endeavors to leap frog... [W]e're going to see much more of that, because of these restrictions, not despite them.

President Xi recently said, We hope that America would be prosperous, and hope that the U.S. would wish China to be more prosperous as well. I think that does send a message, but I do think that the two countries are recalibrating the relationship, learning from what has happened. I don't... think there's a set, specific idea of how it's going to look...

At the core... the U.S. China competition is about the China... development model, Chinese aspirations and most of all, Chinese technology, or technological competition. ...[I]t's as bad as it is because of a lack of mutual trust and very different world vision, values and culture, which I think we underappreciate.

In so many ways China is in transition, and... requires a bit of patience, whether it's real estate, or debt, or ...

Coming back to the trade challenges... We're seeing in the data that trade is simply being re-routed... from countries like Vietnam and Mexico, but... the ultimate demand and suppliers for that is... still the U.S. and China. It's... taking a longer route... that's going to increase trade cost, and... some Chinese companies... have also set up factories in Mexico and... Vietnam to... circumvent some of these... trade barriers, but it still has to come ultimately from countries like the U.S. and China.

Confidence has to come from somewhere... There are underlying factors that alter confidence and consumption, and... we've seen the scarring effects of the pandemic. Don't forget that Chinese households did not get the support that European and American households got during the pandemic... [M]ore importantly, could be declining, and we don't really know for sure, but it's not climbing, so without that you can't possibly get consumption to be really... enthusiastic. Of course, there's real estate and the stock market. ...Retail investors account for the majority of turnover for Chinese A shares and... that has also been performing problematically. And... youth unemployment is a challenge, but is it coming from a cyclical feature which is a demand deficit, in which case policies could potentially work, but... As we'll hear from Mr. Zhu, there are also constraints... There's a on s... the key implementers of economic drivers of growth, but now they are suffering from mountainous debt burdens. So these are some of the... short-term challenges.

I totally agree with Mr. Zhu's assessment of transitioning to a productivity, innovation driven economy. That's the only way that's going to sustain growth in the long run. So that's a good thing. But... renewables or digitization in the short term... can't possibly displace real estate as a provider for growth and employment in the way that it had in the last 10 years or so. Second, services right now... only accounts for half of GDP and only 48% of employment. That number is 80% in advanced economies, so you can imagine a whole amount of room for also absorbing the youth who are underemployed, highly educated. They account for a more educated skill force than manufacturing. And you also have almost a billion people who haven't really reached middle income by international standards, living under $300 per month. ...So I could go on and on, when even Japan and Korea leveled off their growth, their productivity as a share of... the US was already 80% and China is still very low... a lot of room for convergence. ...[W]e want to separate the cyclical problems of demand from some of the longer term challenges.