David Daokui Li is the Director of the Center for China in the World Economy at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing. He currently teaches courses on economic transition, corporate finance, international economics, and China’s economy.

Professor Li holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and is one of three academic members of the monetary policy committee of the central bank of China. Li is delegate to the Beijing People’s Congress and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee.

His childhood was spent in Sichuan province, as a result of his parents being displaced to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He is a member of the 1985 inaugural class of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, and received PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1992. His current research interests are China’s macroeconomy, economic development models, international comparisons of economic growth, and China’s need to pursue a development pattern fitting with its large economic status.

Li has also held the following position of Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Development of the Harvard Kennedy School (1986), Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Professor and Deputy Director of the Economic Development Research Center of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Li has also served as the editor for the Journal of Comparative Economics (2000–2003) and the Economics Bulletin, as well as being named an honorary professor at Sichuan University and Nankai University. He returned to China in 2004 to teach at his alma mater Tsinghua and serve as head of the Center for China in the World Economy research center.

He currently lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.

“China’s economic emergence is showcasing a new model of economic growth and interaction between China and the rest of the world.”