Professor Li Jinliang of Tsinghua University's PBC School of Finance opened our first session with ninety minutes on China's economic trajectory since Reform and Opening Up. It was also the Forum's own opening night. Before he spoke, our founder gave a short address on the vision for the Forum itself, the first real test of standing in front of a room rather than just having an idea for one.
Decoding the growth
Professor Li built his lecture around long-term growth patterns, situating four decades of rapid GDP expansion within the broader dynamics of industrialization, urbanization, and integration into the world economy. The number he kept returning to was 8.8 percent, China's average annual real GDP growth from 1978 to 2024.
What stood out most was his refusal to explain that growth through miracle or patriotic shorthand. He presented it instead as the outcome of specific, traceable decisions: fiscal and supply-side policy, industrial development, and a long sequence of planning and execution that compounded over time.
He grounded the abstraction in specifics. One was the story of a small village factory founded in 1975, which grew into Sha-Steel, a producer that by 2019 was turning out more crude steel annually than Germany. Another was a set of three photographs of Lujiazui in Shanghai, taken in 1990, 2008, and 2015, the same waterfront becoming one of the world's most recognizable skylines within a single working lifetime.
Growth has not come without strain
The lecture did not stop at the success story. Professor Li turned to two specific pressures the growth model now carries. The first was a shifting balance within the economy itself: investment's share of GDP rose from 22 percent in 1952 to a peak near 49 percent in 2010, while household consumption's share fell from over 65 percent to roughly a third over the same stretch. The second was financial stability. By 2024, China's M2 money supply had reached roughly 313 trillion yuan against a GDP of about 135 trillion yuan, a gap Professor Li flagged as one of the structural questions the next phase of growth will have to answer.
A question about what comes next
The discussion that followed the lecture turned out to matter as much as the lecture itself. A student asked whether China's growth model could remain sustainable given a declining population, and the room moved quickly from one country's story to a broader one: structural transformation, productivity, and the slow shift toward higher-value sectors of the economy.
A return to the norm after reentry to the world market, the opposite of a miracle. Rooted in a socioeconomic foundation already in place before the reforms began. From Professor Li's closing takeaway, paraphrased from his lecture slides
The conversation stayed nominally about China, but it kept opening outward. As countries everywhere weigh climate change and energy security against growth, it became harder to talk about structural transformation in any one economy without asking what the same forces mean for the rest of the world.
What stayed with us
For a first session, this was as much a test for the Forum as it was a lecture for its participants. The fiscal and supply-side material lined up closely with material from economics coursework, which made the connection between classroom theory and an actual policymaker's read of history feel immediate rather than academic. That is the gap the Forum exists to close.