Collaborators

Professor Li is Chair Professor and Chair of the School Council at the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, with a joint appointment at the School of Economics and Management, where he once served as Associate Dean. For nine years he was Dean of Global Engagement, helping shape the University's international strategy, and he founded the Institute for Industrial Innovation and Finance, an interdisciplinary platform for research on industrial innovation and sustainable development in China. He earned the CFA designation in 2003 and has served on the CFA Institute's Standards of Practice Council and the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal. Earlier he was the J.G. Riesman Research Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and he has advised bodies ranging from the central bank and the China Securities Regulatory Commission to China Construction Bank and State Street. He took his PhD in Finance from Syracuse University in 2001 and his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua in 1997.

Professor Li opened the Forum's very first session with ninety minutes on China's economic trajectory since Reform and Opening Up. He set four decades of growth inside the longer history of industrialization, urbanization, and the country's reentry into the world market.

His argument, that the growth was the product of deliberate policy and long-term planning, gave the Forum its first real bridge between the economics we read in class and the way it plays out in the world.

Mr. Wei is Executive Vice President of the Freudenberg Automotive Sector, responsible for global business development, innovation strategy, and cross-border operations, with long experience leading multinational industrial firms. Earlier, as CEO of NOK-Freudenberg China, he led growth and organizational transformation, sharpened operations, deepened customer partnerships, and aligned global technology with local market needs. He pairs an international outlook with strong local execution, holds an MBA from Tsinghua University, and works at the meeting point of international management practice and China's fast-evolving automotive and industrial sectors.

Mr. Wei joined the Forum straight off a flight to talk about global industry from the inside. Drawing on a career that ran from sales into senior leadership across Germany and China, he introduced us to Germany's tradition of industrial “hidden champions.”

He walked through how firms manage innovation, governance, and competition while operating between two very different business cultures, and what it takes to keep adapting when success is never permanent.

Professor Li is a professor of economics at Concordia University in Montreal and a research fellow of CIREQ and CIRANO. He took his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and works in microeconomics, game theory, and information and political economics, with research on strategic information transmission, persuasion, and the game theory of elections and political processes. His work has appeared in journals including Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, and the Canadian Journal of Economics, and he teaches across microeconomics, industrial organization, and mathematics for economists.

Professor Li reviewed the Forum's inflation research, reading the essays the way he would a colleague's work and returning notes that were both encouraging and exact.

He praised the group's instinct for evidence and references, and pointed each writer toward the next thing to sharpen, whether a definition, a citation, or a clearer line of argument.

Professor Du is a tenured professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, which he joined in 2005 after completing his PhD at the University of Arizona. An experimental economist, he works across applied microeconomics, industrial organization, and behavioral game theory, with a particular interest in trust, promises, and pro-social behavior in markets. His research has appeared in journals including Management Science, Games and Economic Behavior, and the European Economic Review, and he teaches advanced microeconomic theory and experimental economics.

Professor Du also reviewed the inflation research, reading independently and ranking the essays by his own lights. He gave precise and constructive feedback to writer after writer.

His questions pushed each author to test their evidence and to ask whether the policies they described would actually work, the habits that turn a school essay into something closer to research.