The Blavatnik School of Government was honoured to receive Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People’s Bank of China in early September. The Governor spoke with the School’s researchers and academics at the first of the School’s series of ‘Conversations with Global Policy-Makers’. The event was co-hosted with Christine Wong and the University’s China Centre.
Professor Ngaire Woods, Academic Director of the School was enthusiastic about the outcome: “These events offer students and academics first-hand insights into the highest levels of public policy. The Governor has been a leading reformer in China and has also led the way in recruiting brilliant Chinese students educated abroad. He brilliantly evoked how tempting it is for governments, whose banks are failing, to bail them out using their central banks’ resources instead of more openly using citizens’ taxes. He shared with us China’s own experience of transition, and how it reformed its own largest four banks. It was fascinating to listen to his exchange with Sir John Vickers just two days before the Vickers Independent Banking Commission Report was published.”
Governor Zhou concluded his visit with an inspection of the recently restored Selden Map, a seventeenth-century map of the trade routes across the Chinese empire of the time. The conservation team at the Bodleian Libraries have recently completed the map’s painstaking restoration using a blend of Western and Ancient Eastern techniques.
