About National School of Development

National School of Development

The National School of Development (NSD; Chinese: 国家发展研究院) at Peking University in Beijing is one of China's leading think tanks and, at the same time, a comprehensive teaching college. Peking University describes it as a multidisciplinary home for teaching and research in economics, management science and public policy, and as China's leading institution combining teaching, research and policy advising. That triple identity — university school, research centre and policy adviser — is what has made the NSD unusual since its founding: the same faculty who train China's economists also publish the research and join the debates through which Chinese economic policy is argued out.

The school is based at Peking University, one of China's top universities, and is an integral part of the university's drive to become world-class. Its own history, however, is much shorter than its parent institution's. The NSD began not as a school at all, but as a small research centre founded in the mid-1990s by a group of scholars who had trained overseas and returned to China determined to teach and practise modern economics there.

Founded as the China Center for Economic Research in 1994

The NSD's predecessor, the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) — also rendered China Center for Economic Research — was established in 1994 by Professor Justin Yifu Lin and five other overseas-trained economists. The six founders were Justin Yifu Lin, Yi Gang, Hai Wen, Zhang Weiying, Zhang Fan and Yu Mingde. Accounts of the founding stress the context: the founders' understanding of Western economics and research methods differed from what was then taught in China's economics schools, and they saw the need for an academic centre devoted to teaching and researching modern economics and management, and to providing policy consultation.

Lin, the founding director, was one of the first Chinese scholars of his generation to receive a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, and he had returned to work and teach in China in 1987. He directed the CCER for fifteen years. The centre grew quickly beyond research: its first academic programme, a double major — described in one university account as a double master's-level programme — in economics, was launched in 1996, and doctoral admissions began in the same period. Following the expansion of its teaching and research, the CCER was renamed the National School of Development in 2008 — the same year Lin left to become chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, the first person from a developing country, and the first Chinese, to hold that post. He returned to Peking University teaching and research in 2012.

Faculty and leadership

The NSD's official profile lists a faculty of domestically and globally recognised scholars including Justin Yifu Lin, Qiren Zhou, Wen Hai, Weiying Zhang, Guoqing Song, Weifang Min, Yang Yao, Yiping Huang, Gordon Liu, Ling Li, Yaohui Zhao and Jun Fu. Peking University states that the school upholds the university's values of inclusiveness and academic freedom, promotes socially meaningful research in economics, management science and public policy, and is committed to contributing to China's economic and social progress.

Individual faculty careers show how closely the school is woven into China's policy institutions. Co-founder Yi Gang went on to serve as vice president of the People's Bank of China and director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Yang Yao — professor at the CCER and the NSD, director of the CCER from 2010 and dean of the NSD from 2012, in university and biographical accounts — researches economic development and institutional change in China, has published more than one hundred research papers, and serves as executive director of the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development. Huang Yiping, a deputy dean and professor of economics and finance at the school, previously worked at the State Council's rural development research centre, at Columbia University and the Australian National University, and in finance at Citigroup and Barclays, and served as an adviser on the Monetary Policy Committee of the People's Bank of China and on the International Monetary Fund's External Advisory Group on Surveillance. Lin himself, after the World Bank, became honorary dean of the NSD and founded the centre that developed his New Structural Economics approach, marked by a Peking University symposium in 2017 on his thirty years since returning to teach in China.

Teaching: academic programmes

The NSD offers teaching programmes in three areas: academia, business and public policy. Its academic programmes include an economics master's and PhD programme, a bachelor programme in national development, and a double-major economics programme. The double-major economics programme became one of the best-known parts of the early centre: a Peking University account of the school at twenty years noted that of roughly 3,000 undergraduates accepted into Peking University each year, approximately 700 pursued the double degree in economics — numbers no other double-degree programme at the university could command — and that the school by then counted more than 10,000 graduates.

That scale matters for understanding the NSD's influence. A think tank speaks through reports; a school speaks through alumni as well. University accounts of the NSD's twentieth anniversary in April 2014, opened by Dean Yao Yang and attended by founders, government figures and alumni, emphasised that its students had spread widely through research and business, and that its professors — Lin, Zhou Qiren and Zhang Weiying among them — had influenced the country's reform and development since the 1980s.

BiMBA and business education

Business education at the NSD is offered through BiMBA — the Beijing International MBA — which hosts MBA, EMBA and executive development (EDP) programmes. BiMBA offered Beijing's first Chinese-foreign cooperatively run MBA programme approved by the State Council, in 1998, and in 2000 was among the first in the country to launch EMBA and EDP programmes. It has been described as a business school in a think tank, drawing on both NSD faculty and those of partner schools in the United States and Europe, and it reports having educated more than 10,000 entrepreneurs and senior managers over twenty years.

The partnerships have changed over time. The original 1998 joint MBA was established with Fordham University, taught by professors from both institutions, and aimed mainly at mid- to senior-level managers. In 2016, Peking University and University College London signed a joint declaration for a joint MBA operated by the NSD and the UCL School of Management, with students able to take a module in London; BiMBA programmes have also been offered jointly with Belgium's Vlerick Business School. The EMBA, founded in 2000 and described by the school as one of the earliest EMBA programmes in China, is presented explicitly as an EMBA inside a national think tank — designed to help entrepreneurs read the trends and laws of China's economic development rather than only company-level management technique.

Public policy teaching and South-South cooperation

In 2016 the NSD added public policy as one of its teaching programmes through a newly established institute, the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development (ISSCAD), whose mandate is to offer doctoral and master's degrees to senior officials from developing countries. Yang Yao serves as the institute's executive director. The ISSCAD extended the school's original logic — applying the study of China's development experience to policy — to an international classroom of officials from the developing world.

A related institution followed a similar path at Peking University: Justin Lin founded the Center for New Structural Economics in December 2015 — later the Institute of New Structural Economics — to develop and promote his theoretical framework, with Lin as its dean and the NSD's honorary dean. Together, the ISSCAD and the new structural economics institute show the NSD acting not only as a consumer of economic theory developed elsewhere, but as an exporter of a China-centred development framework, taught to students and officials from other developing countries.

Think-tank role and national designation

The NSD is one of the leading think tanks in China. Peking University says it brings together research resources within the university and regularly participates in China's policy debates, and that over the years it has produced influential policy advice on important issues concerning industrial policy, rural reconstruction and state-owned-enterprise reform, some of which has been adopted by the government. Its reports have also provided guidance on subjects ranging from urbanisation and healthcare reform to government streamlining and delegation of powers.

In 2016, the NSD was designated by the government as one of the 25 national think tanks — in full, one of the first group of national high-end think tanks. Earlier recognition pointed the same way: a 2014 Chinese Think-Tank Influence Report ranked the NSD fourth in economic development and political development and fifth in overall deepening reform, and a Peking University account that year called it China's number one university-based think tank. In April 2014, Premier Li Keqiang visited the National School of Development, where Dean Yao Yang introduced the establishment and history of the think tank — a visit the school records as part of its think-tank history.

Research centres and academic exchange

The school's research is organised through research centres attached to the school. Accounts of the NSD describe seven research centres alongside BiMBA, and the China Center for Economic Research itself continues as the school's research and networking core: Peking University calls the CCER an internationally recognised networking centre for academic exchanges, and its faculty publish numerous academic papers in domestic and international journals. Yang Yao, for example, is an editor of China Economic Quarterly, the centre's house journal.

The school's campus setting reflects that centre-based structure. The NSD is associated with Langrun Garden and Chengze Garden on the Peking University campus — historic garden compounds that house its teaching and research — and its twentieth-anniversary and forum events have been held in the university's exchange and garden venues. The school's research reputation is also visible in bibliometric rankings of Chinese economics, where NSD and CCER economists such as Huang Yiping and Yang Yao appear among the country's most-cited registered researchers.

Forums, dialogues and public debate

The NSD hosts three highly recognised think-tank events: China Economic Observer, NSD Policy Talk and the China Development Forum. It is also the organiser of two second-track dialogues between China and the United States — the US-China Economic Dialogue and the US-China Health Dialogue — informal channels that run alongside official relations. In December 2017 the school's second China Development Forum launched a series reviewing China's development and reform process for the fortieth anniversary of reform and opening up, releasing the first report in its series, The Direction of Reform, with speakers including co-founder Yi Gang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences vice dean Cai Fang and Development Research Center deputy director Long Guoqiang.

That convening role is central to how the NSD works. Rather than only submitting advice internally, it stages recurring public and semi-public occasions — observer briefings, policy talks, anniversary forums — at which its faculty argue reform questions in front of officials, business leaders and foreign counterparts. For readers of this directory, the National School of Development should therefore be understood as both a publisher of economic research and a standing forum for China's development debate: a Peking University school, founded as the CCER in 1994 by six returning economists, renamed in 2008, designated a national think tank in 2016, and still combining degree teaching, BiMBA business education, South-South policy training and policy advising under one roof.