The year 2024 has been book-ended by public lectures on China’s economy featuring speakers who are not only well-regarded experts, they are also Badgers returning to Madison to speak to their alma mater:
- In April, Yao Yang, the director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, spoke at the Wisconsin School of Business on the topic, “China’s Slowdown: Structural or Cyclical?” Yao received his PhD in development economics from the UW-Madison’s Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics in 1996.
- Thursday, Oct 24, Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, will offer a lecture titled, “China’s Rise and Economic Conflict with the United States.” Lardy was a member of the Class of 1968, majoring in Economics.
The two were also both speakers in the Wisconsin China Resource’s “Red Cap Lecture Series on China & Global Economics,” which was sponsored by the late Wade Fetzer, and focused on bringing expertise on Chinese economics to campus for high profile public discussions. Lardy offered a Red Cap in 2014, “The Rise of Private Business in China,” and Yao followed the next year, with a talk on the political economy of China.
At Thursday’s lecture, which will be held at the Law School’s Godfrey & Kahn Hall (Room 2260), starting at 4:30 pm, Lardy will be discussing tensions between the U.S. and China. According to his talk notes: “While US officials now like to characterize the goal of economic policy toward China as ‘de-risking,’ the proliferation of tariffs on Chinese goods and an ever-widening net of export controls suggests the mix is evolving toward decoupling. The costs and risks of this strategy for the United States are likely to be substantial. China is a large market for many leading US technology firms. If sales of these firms are increasingly curtailed by export controls, how will these firms sustain the R&D expenditures required to sustain their technological lead? More generally what are the implications if the United States curtails economic exchange with what remains the world’s fastest growing large economy?”
In contrast, Yao Yang argued in April that the U.S. and China are not decoupling.
“The U.S.-China relationship, in the end, I think will be stabilized to a more rational interaction stage: China and the United States have competition, but both strive to prevent it from turning into a cold war,” Yao said. “To enter this stage, I’m afraid it will take a long time, not five years, not ten years, but maybe a generation or two.”
The student news platform MadNews interviewed Yao in Chinese after his April 12 talk, and offered a transcription of their wide-ranging discussion, which covered student employment in China, China and the U.S., Chinese history and modernization, and elitism in China’s educational system.
A podcast with Lardy in discussion with David Fields should be available soon on the East Asia Now Podcast.
“We are fortunate to have such prominent economists as alumni — economists who are an active part of the dialogue on the key US-China relationship,” said David Fields, associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies. “We are even more fortunate that they are able to return to campus often to offer thought-provoking lectures for our students and campus community.”