Speaker: Barry Naughton, University of California San Diego

Xi Jinping is consolidating power just as China has embarked on an unprecedented push to become a global and technological power.  Xi’s followers are fashioning an economic and administrative system that they hope can achieve these ambitious goals.  Some parts of this multi-stranded program will succeed and some will fail.  The global economy—and global power relations—will depend on the balance between success and failure, and the ways in which Chinese manages the success and failure of individual initiatives.

Barry Naughton is the Sokwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at UCSD. He is one of the world’s most highly respected economists working on China. He is an authority on the Chinese economy with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance and China’s transition to a market economy.

Recent research focuses on regional economic growth in China and its relationship to foreign trade and investment. He has addressed economic reform in Chinese cities, trade and trade disputes between China and the United States and economic interactions among China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Naughton has written the authoritative textbook “The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth,” which has now been translated into Chinese. His groundbreaking book “Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993” received the Ohira Memorial Prize, and he most recently translated, edited and annotated a collection of articles by the well-known Chinese economist Wu Jinglian. Naughton writes a quarterly analysis of the Chinese economy for China Leadership Monitor.

Part of the China Economy Lecture Series

Listen to an interview with Barry Naughton on our podcast:

Read and download the transcript for this podcast here.