When Chinese professors come abroad to talk about the economy, they usually toe the party line. Justin Lin, a professor at Peking University, for example, said the following at a New York meeting in January.
“Debt is good. It depends on how you use the debt. If you use if for productive investment, if you have higher debt ... you generate return to pay back the debt.” His general message was that China didn’t really have any problems and growth would just continue as normal (6-7 percent).
This is why Gao Xiqing’s contribution to a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations on April 19 was all the more remarkable. The professor of law from Tsinghua university admitted he was being monitored by the regime and had to be careful what he said, but nonetheless slammed the country’s inability to implement the next five-year plan for economic reform, coming into effect this year.
