Chenggang Xu

Chenggang Xu
Born	(1950-12-31) December 31, 1950 China Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province
Education
Alma mater	Tsinghua University Harvard University (PhD)
Thesis	Innovation, productivity, and labor mobility in socialist economies (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Janos Kornai
Other advisors	Eric Maskin, Andreu Mas-Colell, Dwight Perkins
Philosophical work
School	New Institutional Economics
Website	https://sites.google.com/view/cgxu/chenggang-xu

Chenggang Xu (born December 31, 1950) is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economic and Institutions, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at the department of finance, Imperial College London, and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Life

Xu was Born in Hangzhou in 1950, and grew up in Beijing. He studied at Study at Beijing Xiangshan Mercy Children's Hospital and Tsinghua High School. His father, Xu Liangying, was labeled a rightist in 1957, and his “crimes” were published in major media such as People's Daily and Guangming Daily, and he was forced to leave his job and work as a farmer in the countryside; his mother was expelled from the Party and demoted from her post as a result of the incident. Before the Cultural Revolution, he was the deputy of the junior team of Tsinghua Middle School and junior squadron, and was influenced by family and believed in communism.

At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Xu Chenggang read the second year in Tsinghua Middle School. He witnessed the great contrast between communist ideals and reality, which shocked and confused him. In particular, socialism has been described as the transitional phase of a classless communist society, but he wonders why this transition is full of class struggle. How can class struggle destroy classes? This series of questions stimulated his interest in the in-depth study of communist systems and theories. At the end of 1967, in order to better understand China's class relations and rural reality, Xu Chenggang applied to go to the state-run farm in Heilongjiang. From the end of 1967 to 1969, he spent two years in the countryside, during which time he studied Das Kapital in depth, wrote a number of papers, and developed the idea of writing a book analyzing the socialist system and the Cultural Revolution. Because of his frequent discussions with the village and his classmates in Tsinghua through letters, he was beaten as a counter-revolutionary in early 1970 and detained for more than a year for “organizing an inter-provincial counter-revolutionary group” and then forced to work for more than five years. During this time, he was forced to suspend the study and exploration of political economy until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

In 1982 Xu received a masters degree in mechanical engineering from Tsinghua University. In 1991 he received his PhD in economics with the dissertation title Innovation, productivity, and labor mobility in socialist economies. He has taught at the University of Hong Kong as Chung Hon-Dak Professor of Economics, at Tsinghua University as Special-term Professor of Economics, at Seoul National University as World-Class University Professor of Economics, and at London School of Economics (LSE) as Reader of Economics. He was the President of the Asian Law and Economics Association. He was a first recipient of China Economics Prize (2016) and a recipient of the Sun Yefang Economics Prize (2013).

Research

Xu's research interests mainly are political economics, institutional economics, law and economics, development economics, transition economics in general and more specifically the political economy of China.

He introduced the concept of "regionally decentralized authoritarianism" (RDA) to explain a key institutional foundation of China's economic success over the past three decades. RDA enables regional experimentation and competition, effectively addressing bureaucratic incentive problems by decentralizing implementation while maintaining centralized control. Crucially, he emphasizes that while top leadership may pursue reform, its realization depends on local bureaucracies. His theory also suggests that regional competition is only a temporary solution, and that sustainable progress requires structural reform of the RDA system itself.

Selected publications

• "The Fundamental Institutions of China's Reforms and Development". Journal of Economic Literature. 49 (4): 1076–1151. 2011. doi:10.1257/jel.49.4.1076. hdl:10722/153452.