Yasheng Huang

Yasheng Huang (黄亚生) is Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. During 2023-4, he is serving as a visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. From 2013 to 2017, Huang served as an Associate Dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s Global Partnership programs and its Action Learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School. Huang is the author of 11 books in both English and Chinese. He is a Co-Principal Investigator in a large-scale multi-disciplinary research project on food safety in China. His most recent book is The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Might Lead to its Decline (Yale University Press).

Outside of his academic research, Huang has written for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and Project Syndicate, Caixin and Caijing. He is working on several policy projects related to U.S.-China relations. He was one of the coauthors of MIT’s report, “University Engagement with China: An MIT Approach,” and he is a co-chair of an implementation committee of that report. He is a member of a taskforce at Asia Society on U.S.-China policy and of Brookings-CSIS Advisory Council on Advancing U.S.-China collaboration.

Huang founded and runs China Lab, ASEAN Lab and India Lab, which have provided low-cost consulting services to hundreds of small and medium enterprises in these countries. From 2015 to 2018, he ran a program in Yunnan province to train women entrepreneurs (funded by Goldman Sachs Foundation). He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and OECD, and serves on advisory and corporate boards of non-profit and for-profit organizations. He is a founding member and is serving as the president of Asian American Scholar Forum, an NGO dedicated to open science, protection of rights and well-being of Asian American scholars. The National Asia Research Program named Huang one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States.