Join us for a scintillating fireside conversation on China, its economic success model, and the influence of Chinese Godfathers on southeast Asia with Joe Studwell, the veteran Economist and Wall Street Journal Asia journalist is best-known as the “chief myth-buster for Asian business.”

In conversation with Teresa Kong of Matthews Asia, Joe – the author of the acclaimed How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region (2013) – will discuss:

• How China’s model of development is akin to that of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan –  yet different.
• How economic history tells us that the recent rumors of China’s economic demise are greatly exaggerated.
• Why China’s present development stage is far from posing an immediate threat to U.S. global economic leadership.

Joe’s first book, The China Dream (2002), examined the foreign business community’s dream of a market of 1.3 billion Chinese consumers. In the 1990s, most foreign firms lost money in China, but in the 2000s, the market came to fruition – today, China is a big top- and bottom-line issue for most multi-national firms. He’ll address how, in the northeast Asia model of rapid technological and economic accumulation, the interests of foreign direct and portfolio investors are NOT aligned with those of the developing country in the early stages. But as state manipulation of the market process begins to pay dividends, foreign investors reap far greater long-run returns than they otherwise would – a conundrum that needs to be ultimately accepted.

Joe will also share anecdotes from his second book, Asian Godfathers(2007), a myth-shattering study of SouthEast Asia’s relative economic development failure, using the prism of the ethnic-Chinese oligarchs such as Li Ka-Shing, Stanley Ho, and others, who dominate south-east Asian economies (in a manner akin to Latin America or Russia). He will briefly touch on southeast Asian efforts, namely Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar, to put economic development on a more China-like track in recent years.

Finally, Joe will close with an appeal for developing countries and development economists to focus on the last great ‘black box’ of their metier – the relationship between institutional development, on the one hand, and economic development on the other. Neo-classical economists are right to stress the importance of institutions. Yet, they have so far contributed little to our understanding of the processes and costs of building durable institutions, or of optimal sequencing in institutional build-out. Nowhere, of course, faces bigger institutional challenges today than China.
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Speaker:
Joe Studwell, author & journalist

Moderator:
Teresa Kong, Portfolio Manager, Matthews Asia

Event Co-Sponsor: 
Matthews Asia is an independent, privately owned firm and the largest dedicated Asia investment specialist in the United States. With US$26.2 billion in assets under management as of August 31, 2015, the firm employs a bottom-up, fundamental investment philosophy, with a focus on long-term investment performance.

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