I was born in Qinhuangdao, a small coastal city in Hebei Province near Beijing, in November 1995.
I grew up in an ordinary Chinese family at a time when China itself was growing at extraordinary speed. My childhood was shaped by a familiar middle-class script of the 2000s: endless extracurricular classes, rising expectations, and the quiet belief that education could change one’s fate.
Before I turned 12, my parents spent a remarkable share of the family’s income on classes for me: Go, table tennis, bamboo flute, calligraphy, painting, swimming, and more. Only Go ever really won my heart. The rest were part of the discipline of growing up.
Then came middle school, and with it, the sharper edge of competition. Hobbies gradually disappeared, replaced by tutoring, exams, and long hours of study. By the time I left home at 18, I was a textbook small-town overachiever: serious, hardworking, and eager to see a world much larger than the one I came from.
I moved to Beijing in 2014 to attend the Central University of Finance and Economics.
I did not begin as an economics student. I started in Social Work, where I was exposed to sociology and psychology, and those early encounters left a lasting mark on how I think. A year later, I transferred into economics, drawn in by the possibility of using it to understand not just markets, but social transformation.
The transition was difficult, and I had to catch up quickly. But I survived it, did well academically, and eventually continued on to a PhD in Economics at the National School of Development at Peking University.
Although I was formally trained as an economist, I have never been interested in economics as a purely technical exercise. What draws me most is the real world: firms, industries, governments, and the long, uneven process of development.
I began my career in the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation practice, where I worked on issues related to private sector development, industrial policy, and structural transformation. The role gave me a policy-oriented entry point into development work and helped me think more concretely about how states, firms, and industries interact in the process of economic change.
I later joined the International Finance Corporation in Johannesburg as part of my Young Professional rotation, working with the Agribusiness team for Africa. There, I moved closer to the private sector itself: evaluating companies, supporting investment processes, and working on transactions in agribusiness and industrial sectors.
Mandarin — Native
English — Working language
Spanish — Intermediate B1
Hopefully French will appear here next.