Yukon Huang

He is a co-signer of the public letter China is not an Enemy addressed to Donald Trump as published in The Washington Post on July 3, 2019.

Huang encourages trade agreements between China and the US to the mutual interest of both countries. In his view, the trade war from 2019 to 2021 has been more to the disadvantage of the USA due to multilateral trade and diversification, but both countries have damaged the world trading system.

In spring 2010, Huang moved to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he developed a perspective different from the institutions he had worked for previously.

Huang also believes that China's debt-to-GDP ratio, which has grown since 2009, is not detrimental. The sum of corporate debt, household debt and government debt is about 250 to 260 percent of GNP. This puts China higher than most developing countries, but lower than most developed countries. The speed of debt growth does not lead to economic crisis, he said, because from 2004 to 2014 the value of real estate increased by 600 percent, which was originally close to 0 because it was state-owned. Real estate trading and borrowing to purchase real estate has caused debt to grow, but not GDP, since land sales do not count toward GDP, only labor associated with construction.

At the World Bank, he was country director for Russia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia from 1992 to 1997, and country director for China from 1997 to 2004.

First misconception, in Huang's view, is that U.S. trade problems are driven by China's trade surpluses. The U.S. trade deficit emerged in the late 1990s, he said, while China's massive surpluses only emerged in 2004 and 2005, when it became the center of the global manufacturing network after WTO membership. In the case of the iPhone, for example, only about 5 percent of the phone's value is created in China by assembling parts made outside China, which account for 50 percent of the phone's value. The rest goes to Apple. The main reason for the U.S. deficit, he says, is the dollar as the world's perpetually overvalued reserve currency.

Huang attended Yale University where he earned a BA. This was followed by Master's and Doctoral studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1971. The topic of his dissertation was The economics of paddy production in Malaya: an economy in transition.

Yukon Huang was born in Chengdu/Sichuan and grew up with his grandfather in Changsha/Hunan. In 1949, his grandfather sent him to the United States, where his parents were studying. He did not see China again until he became the World Bank's country director for China and had his office in Beijing. He attended school in Washington, then the only Chinese among 600 students.

Yukon Huang (born 1944 in Chengdu) is a Chinese-American economist. He is a senior fellow and research associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C. His areas of research include China's economic and political development and its impact in Asia and globally.