The Latecomer's Rise
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Dear Pekingology listeners, after an incredibly rewarding journey, I'm announcing that my time as host of Pekingology has come to an end. After five great years at CSIS, I'll be leaving to pursue new opportunities. It's been a true privilege to explore the complex dynamics of Chinese politics, society, and grand strategy with some of the most insightful voices in the field and to share these conversations with all of you. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your feedback. And thank you for your engagement.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to delve into these topics that are shaping our world. I'm excited to see where Pekingology goes next and will remain an avid listener myself. So thanks to all of you for listening, learning, and engaging with me. And with that, let's get to the final episode. China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system.

I'm Jude Blanchett, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. And this week, I'm joined by Muyong Chen, Assistant Professor of International Development at Peking University's School of International Studies. She is the author of The Late Comer's Rise, Policy Banks and the Globalization of China's Development Finance, which was recently published by Cornell University Press.

Muyong, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Jude, for inviting me. And first of all, congratulations on the publication of the book. I read it after you graciously gave me a copy a few months ago, and I just recommend it to listeners, even listeners who don't immediately think that they would be interested in

understanding China's development finance or policy banks. It is a really fascinating exploration of a key feature of a globalized, financialized economy, and China is a major player in that. So I would say to anyone who's thinking about US-China relations, but especially thinking about

the realm of global finance interactions between China and the global economy. This is just a really, really interesting angle to look at it. And it's backed by a lot of really interesting case studies and primary research. So again, just really congratulations. I wanted to start by asking a biographical question, Mu Yang. I'm curious how you developed an interest in global political economy, China's development finance. Where did this journey start? How did you get interested in this?

Thank you, Judah. This is actually a very important question. I wrote a little bit about it in the acknowledgement part of the book. So I got into this big conceptual question of what is the role of the state in development when I was in college, perhaps. So I grew up in China in the post-Codewa era. So that was an era when you hear the word marketization or, you know, in Chinese, market-oriented reforms very constantly in your everyday life.

So you hear marketization in TV programs, you read it on newspapers, textbooks. So I got the impression that since China was transitioning from essentially planned economy to a more market-oriented economy, I got the impression that having more market will get people rich. That's common knowledge. And then in my third college year, I went to Japan. I joined a dual bachelor's degree program.

between my home institution, which is Peking University, and also Waseda University, which is a private university in Japan. And there I took courses on Japan's economic development. And I still remember in one of the classes, we discussed this book called "Miti and the Japanese Miracle."

It was written by Charles Johnson, an American scholar, and it's a classic piece of the so-called developmental state literature. So in that book, the author describes and also conceptualizes a very important role of the state. MITI, in the title, it's a government ministry, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Now it's called MITI. The government ministry played an extremely important role in coordinating industrial development, which is also a very key factor leading to the post-war economic success of Japan.

I still remember that conceptual framework. It was mind-blowing. Because for me, a Chinese growing up in the post-Cold War era, I thought, if we want to develop, we need one market. And that argument is telling me the opposite. Like,

If you want development, you want to be as successful economically as Japan, you probably need some kind of state coordination as well. So that's like the conceptual puzzle that I had in mind. I decided to further explore this kind of question. So I pursued a graduate degree in the United States. And interestingly, the years I stayed in the U.S. was also the years China began to

be more visible in the field of global development finance. So my friends, my classmates, teachers, colleagues, they ask me questions about the AIIB, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, you know, the Belt and Road Initiative.

One thing that struck me was that despite that many years of market-oriented reforms, most people still think the Chinese economy is very much state-led. I mean, I agree because the Chinese economy is indeed state-led, but there is this level of marketness that doesn't seem to be very visible to most people. I do think that's a very important aspect of China's global development finance, and we need to better understand it not only empirically, but also conceptually.

So this book is about policy banks. They are policy oriented on the one hand and banks on the other hand. So they kind of lie exactly at the boundary between the state and market.

Muyang, a question I like to ask guests in lieu of a book recommendation, which the book will go unread and it will cost the listener $28 to buy the book, is to ask guests to recommend a mental tool, a framework, an analytic suggestion, something to help listeners improve their ability to think about, assess, analyze China more clearly. Is there some sort of heuristic or framework or suggestion, analytic suggestion that you would have for listeners?

Yeah, that's actually a very important question. You know, in Peking University, I have been teaching courses taught, you know, in English language for our international programs. And then I found it very important for our students who are interested in understanding the Chinese case to look at China's development approach from a comparative perspective.

Because in a lot of English written literature, I found that it's an okay thing to conceptualize China as a unique case, a single unique case. Or sometimes it's identified as an outlier of general theories of political economy or international relations.

But if we actually look at the Chinese case through a comparative lens, so for example, in my book, I kind of compare Chinese policy band with their Japanese and German counterpart and look at different types of political economic systems. You find that it's perhaps not that unique to some extent. So we need to understand both the general features as well as the sui generis features of the Chinese case. That I think will help students or anyone interested in understanding China more conceptually.

That's a great suggestion. I wanted to now ask about the book. Again, the name is The Late Comer's Rise, Policy Banks and the Globalization of China's Development Finance. It's a great title, mostly because I like titles where the thesis is clearly articulated in the title and I don't have to go searching to figure out what the book is about. And I think The Late Comer's Rise is a really good way of encapsulating the main thesis of the book.

I wanted to ask you about the origins of this. You talked a little bit in the biographical question about reading Chalmers Johnson and an interest in the role of the state in finance, but a very specific proximate question, which is literally how did this book come about? Was it a conversation with someone? Is it something you read? Is it an observation you made? How did you start on this journey?

Yeah, I guess it actually started with the empirical puzzle. The process that I just described was about the big conceptual question of the role of the state in development. But the reason I got into the details is when I look at policy banks with actually their Japanese cases. So I went to UC Berkeley to pursue a master's degree in Asian studies, and my focus was Japanese political economy. So when you compare the China Development Bank, for example,

or the China Export-Import Bank versus their Japanese counterpart. For example, that would be JICA, Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JBIC, Japan Bank for International Cooperation. And you look at their loans, the cost of lending, for example, the interest rate of loans, most people would believe that the Chinese policy bank would definitely carry lower interest rate. In other words, the loans are more preferential. They are cheaper loans.

Because China is state-led, and the Chinese government would definitely subsidize these loans. But very counterintuitively, when you compare these different cases, you find that actually the Chinese post-bank loan interest rates are sometimes higher than their Japanese counterparts. And that's extremely counterintuitive. I don't understand that. And I cannot find a theory, you know, the mental state law.

theory or late commerce theory that could possibly explain that. So that was the very beginning of that particular empirical puzzle. And I actually wrote a massive thesis comparing different national development of the Chinese case versus the Japanese case. And later at a PhD level at University of Washington, I expanded that into a dissertation and discussed that more theoretically.

Before we dive into the book's thesis or main arguments, just one final question, which is tell us a bit about how you did the legwork for this book. How was the research conducted? Over what time span and sort of any challenges you faced while conducting the research for this?

Yeah, for the research of this book, I did fieldwork in China, Japan, and Germany. So the main case was China, and then the two comparative cases are mostly Japanese development banks, public financial agencies, and also the German promotional bank. They have a particular term for that. They are also public financial agencies. So I did my field research mostly throughout my doctoral years, so around 2016.

up until very recently. And even during the pandemic, I did a couple of further interviews. Of all the three cases, the Chinese case was the most difficult, even though I'm from China. The reason is mostly because of the accessibility of data. You probably already know that the more accurate type of

dataset on Chinese overdevelopment finance actually did not come from the banks per se, because they only publish very kind of aggregated level data in their annual bank statement or annual yearbooks. But for example, there are the Boston University GDP Center and also ADATA. They collect large datasets that allow researchers to conduct quantitative level kind of study.

In the Japanese case and the German case, data are more accessible. That makes my field trip actually easier. And also talking to people in the Japanese and German case are actually not that challenging. In the Chinese case, I need to get someone, you know, to introduce me to the people that I want to speak to. That makes field research more challenging for the two policy bank cases. So I did both collect quantitative data as well as interview data.

This may be a question you can't answer on the spot, but can you think of a conclusion you might have arrived at about China's policy banks or just China's approach to international lending and development more broadly?

if you had been looking at China in a vacuum that you amended because you then had the comparative angle? I'm just trying to understand how your good exhortation to do comparative work actually impacts research. What is a conclusion one might reach about China in isolation that would be amended or evolve if you look at it in a triangular or in comparison to another case?

Yeah, definitely. That was actually kind of a similar question my PhD advisors also asked me. Like, why don't you just do a single case analysis of the Chinese case as opposed to doing it comparatively? So one obvious reason was that if you look at the Chinese policy banks,

globally, you find they are very young. Both of the banks were established in 1994. So when they were established, the Chinese policymaker, they didn't have much experience running these banks. So they looked globally and looked at what are the counterparts out there in other countries. For example, the Japanese Development Bank and their public financial agencies and the German ones were created in the immediate postwar years. So that's like...

more than 40, 50 years earlier than the Chinese case. So when the Chinese banks built up their operating models, they were actually trying to learn from and also adopting the international practices. So in that case, if you want to understand Chinese case, we have to understand what are the other options out there. And also there is this question of how do you conceptualize or characterize the Chinese character?

I found it impossible to characterize a single case if you don't look at the case comparatively. You know, sometimes people say, you know, Chinese people are very hardworking. So what does that really mean, right? We need to look at the level of diligence comparatively. So let's say on average, you know, people in this world work eight hours a day. And, you know, you find some Chinese people working 12 hours a day. Then we can make the statement that Chinese people are very hardworking. So I think it's the same kind of process. If you just look at the Chinese case, you don't know how to conceptualize it. Yeah.

And looking at it comparatively will be much more helpful. Yeah. A side note, but I always get deeply uncomfortable every time someone reaches for cultural characteristics of the Chinese people, partly because I think they're so unempirical, these claims.

Like the one of, you know, the Chinese people can eat bitterness. And I think, what does that mean? Let's now get right into the book. Let me just ask you to unpack the main argument. I mean, what do you mean by the late comers? Well, actually, let me take a step back because it might be helpful to define some terms here.

Let's just talk about what is the arena we're looking at. When we talk about developmental finance, what do we mean at a generic level? What sort of behaviors, what sort of actors engage in development finance and to what end? Are you asking like how do I define development finance? Sure, but just explain to the audience what do we mean when we're talking about development finance? Who are some of the main players in development finance, either generically or in the case of China? And to what end do states undertake development finance?

Yeah, that's actually an extremely important question because development finance means very different things. And I didn't notice that without doing the fieldwork in different countries. Broadly speaking, you know, in the English term, development finance, meaning financing for the development.

So when I went to, for example, do field work in Europe and I told them I'm doing some research on development finance and the bankers, they will start immediately talking to me how they do projects in Africa or Latin America or, you know, in the lower income regions. Right. But in China, when you talk to people and say, I'm doing research on development finance, it could mean that you're doing global development finance, but it also could mean that you're financing China's own project.

So in Chinese, I also wrote about this definition. There are two terms for development finance. One is 发展融资. It's like a little translation from English term, development finance. The other is called 开发性金融 or development-oriented finance. So the latter term was actually kind of created by the China Development Bank. What it really means is it's about how you develop China's own economy, how you actually employ different market instruments to

And not the opposite, but the term it's actually talking to is, for example, fiscal finance. So development finance is supposed to be different from simply using fiscal revenue. You allocate a budget to an industrial project or something like that. Or it's different from policy-oriented finance. So development finance is supposedly to evolve the concept of

having market playing more important role in financing infrastructure, urbanization, industrial development in China. So there is actually a distinction when you say this word in the Chinese context versus broadly.

And let's talk about just a quick history lesson. We'll skip over the history of other players in development finance. The United States has been doing this for a while. Obviously, massive case study examples are the Marshall Plan. But you mentioned Japan earlier. You've got a whole host of developed economies which created capabilities that

to be out engaged in various scales of development finance through various mechanisms, both at a multilateral as well as bilateral. Let's just talk about China. Obviously, for much of the 20th century, China was a relatively poor developing economy up until the beginning of reform and opening. When did it become a latecomer in the sense that it started to actively

create mechanisms and institutions to get into development finance? And as a second follow-on question, why then and to what end?

Yeah. As you said, the title of the book is The Latecomer's Rise. So when I define latecomer in this book, it mostly means that China is late in terms of offering overseas development finance. So not within China, but like to other parts of the world. So in that case, China was late in comparison, for example, to the Marshall Plan that you mentioned. So China become a quite, let's say, rising power in the first decades of the 21st century. So

Early 2000s, when you see a lot of Chinese companies, also Chinese banks, going out. So there is this going out strategy there. And then Chinese banks started to finance a project globally. So in that case, China is late because, for example, the Europeans did that hundreds of years ago. America had the Marshall Plan. Also, the Japanese counterparts actually started the immediate post-war.

So compared to all of these practices, China was a latecomer in providing global development finance. But China's own experience, if we talk about the development finance in a domestic context, then the process started much earlier than that. The domestic story is more about, for example, China's own industrial development.

how it actually raises funds to finance its own urbanization process and also industrialization process. And that could spend the entire... It's actually very long. The policy banks, as I said, was established in 1994. But before that, in the 80s, throughout the 80s, China has tried different types of financial agencies, but they didn't work out very well. This is the process of how you created the right kind of financial agencies to fight the right kind of projects and allocate...

capital in a most efficient way. Let's talk about the policy banks, which are just fascinating entities in their own right. We've got two policy banks. We've got China Development Bank and we've got the China Ex-Im Bank. If you don't mind, just give us a bit of context around these. So what is the distinction between these two entities? How are they structured? And then if you wouldn't mind just sketching out a bit of what their international portfolios look like.

Yeah. So both are policy banks. There are actually three policy banks in China. The other is the Agricultural Development Bank of China, but it doesn't do much overseas business. So the China Development Bank, its mandate is to support China's infrastructure industrial development. So originally it should be like a domestic oriented bank. And actually, if you look at their annual yearbook, the bank still does most of its business at home. So overseas lending is only like a minor portion of that.

The China Exim Bank, on the other hand, you know, it's export-import banks. Most countries have like one official, we call it ECA, Export Credit Agency. So it's very common. The U.S. has an export-import bank. And then, you know, most OECD countries have export-import banks or official insurers. The China Exim's mandate is to support Chinese companies overseas export and also overseas investment.

But around the early 21st century, the China Development Bank kind of expanded its business from financing infrastructure projects at home to infrastructure projects abroad.

So you see there is some kind of overlap between these two banks in the sense that they both finance a developing country, industrial project, infrastructure project. So sometimes when we just look at China's global development finance, oftentimes both of the banks were mentioned. But their original mandate was slightly different. Can you make sense for a lay audience like myself?

How do the jumble of sort of macro development, overseas development, blueprints like BRI, the state-owned commercial banks like ICBC, which is also in the international sort of lending business, state-owned enterprises, right, which are oftentimes building the infrastructure in third countries. How do these all fit together? Is there some sort of cohesive regulatory entity which coordinates amongst these companies?

Do these just have informal coordination mechanisms or do these have tacit understandings of spheres of influence or are they active collaborators? Yeah, definitely. So in terms of financial agencies, policy banks are the largest creditors to Chinese projects overseas. State-owned commercial banks like ICBC and also like, for example, Bank of China, they are emerging. But their total lending volume overseas is

on these development-related projects are still smaller than the lending portfolio of the two large policy banks out there. So one of the reasons is because the type of project they do are slightly different. Policy banks, they can do very large projects, long-term lending. But commercial banks, usually they just evaluate the project's profitability and lend if the project makes money. So that's a slight difference. And companies, you mentioned Chinese SOEs.

If they are very rich, they can obviously use their own funding to invest in a project overseas. But sometimes they need financial support. So they can apply for loans through any of the financial agencies they find available.

So they can apply to a commercial bank or a policy bank. They can actually also suggest that the host government apply for China's official aid loan, which is now coordinated by CITCA, China International Development Cooperation Agency. Previously, it was coordinated by Ministry of Commerce, but now there is an aid agency in charge of that. So this is basically the relationship between companies and governments.

the banks. Sometimes policy bank can form a syndicate. They collaborate with commercial banks and land as a group, but they also land by themselves. Talk about the evolution of how the policy banks, but also if you have any observations on how some of the commercial banks have evolved as well in terms of thinking about

risk in their overseas lending. And just as an anecdote, I remember a dinner I had, it was just a few weeks before I moved from Beijing to Washington, which is why I remember it in 2018, with someone who worked in the risk department of a major US commercial bank who had been flown into Beijing to do some training for one of the policy banks on risk assessment. And I asked what the degree of maturity was in understanding of risk at the policy bank. And he said, I

It's not very high. And so I'm curious what has been their journey to thinking about various types of risks they would face, right? These could be geopolitical risks. These could be debt defaults. What is your understanding of where they are now and how they've gotten there?

Yeah, actually, there are a lot of scholars working on the topic right now. So how do policy banks view risks? For example, one argument coming from George Washington University's Stephen Kaplan, he has a book of Chinese patient capital, where he argues that Chinese policy banks have like a long-term horizon. So their evaluation of risk is slightly different because commercial banks, usually they want to pursue profit maximization. They are not that patient, right?

So if we see a risk of defaulting or whatever, they may just exit or they just may decide not to invest. But policy banks, they look at project in the longer term. So their landings are usually longer. So let's say if the project is like five years, 20 years, and you feel like, well, you know, in the longer term, you're still making some level of profitability or like a financial viability, probably you'll still land.

So on that level, the banks are longer term in terms of their investment preferences. That's like one major distinctiveness of these public financial agencies versus commercial creditors in a broader sense. Did I answer your question? I understand longer term, but you'd still be having to make adjudications about prospects for default for potential domestic instability or geopolitical risks and lending recipients.

I understand how long versus short matters for commercial profitability distinctions, but even if you're long-term, you'd want to be thinking about the prospect for debt default or there being an uprising or a coup in the country you're lending to. Do you have any insight on how they think about those risks?

Yes, actually, at the moment, the issue of sovereign debt restructuring is harshly debated at the IMF World Bank because some government borrowers cannot repay these policy bank lending. And then all the creditors, the emerging creditors like China, also traditional creditors,

like the Paris Club creditors, they are negotiating on like how to restructure debt. But I think your question is, you know, hitting on the core question is like, do they have a different matrix for evaluating the risks when they actually made the lending decision? So there are some general features versus particular features of how the policy bank make those decisions. So the general feature is that as a public financial agency, when you lend to a, let's say, development-oriented project, oftentimes it cannot be

pass the land appraisal of a commercial bank, right? Otherwise, they would not approach a public financial agency, right? So there is difference at this level. So if the project per se still makes some kind of money, or if you see that as financially viable, for example, some

power plant project can be financially viable naturally because it generates electricity and you sell those electricities and the money you get can serve as revenue cash back to pay for your lending right but other infrastructure may not let's say if you want to finance a park let's say

Like the park that, you know, people just stroll or like have fun. You cannot get cash flow from that kind of project, right? Then what do you do with that? So oftentimes for public financial agents, they would, for example, you can request the borrower country's government to provide some kind of guarantee, right? That's a very regular way of doing financing project like that.

or you can ask for collaterals. That's for more commercially oriented projects, right? If a company borrows from you, you ask the company for a collateral. If they cannot repay or the project cannot repay, you take the collateral, right? These are all very regular practices. And for the Chinese banks, I think the most controversial practice is something called the commodity bank loans. I'm not sure if you have heard of that. The idea is that it's

backed by the export revenue of the borrowing country. For example, it can be the export revenue of oil or some other resources, right? And that kind of commodity-backed loans or like collateralized lending become controversial because China was accused of trying to get resources from the borrowing countries. And also it makes collective restructuring a little bit challenging. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that when the banks make their lending decisions and design the financial scheme

They tried very hard to make sure the repayment can be, to some extent, assured. If the project per se doesn't seem to be generating sufficient cash flow. Does that make sense? Yeah, sort of. It makes sense enough that I'll nod my head and say it makes sense. I wanted to sneak in a few final questions, Miong, if I can. I appreciate where I'm asking you to cover a lot of ground. And I would just again say to listeners, Miong goes into depth on all of this in the book, especially...

Sort of unpacking the structure and operations of China Development Bank and the Ex-Im Bank, as well as the relationships with regulators, with state-owned commercial banks. All of this is explored in great detail. So I'm sort of glossing over the surface.

I wanted to ask about what sense you have of how the policy banks are navigating trickier geopolitical waters. I had seen as I was prepping for this and I was just doing some reading on China Development Bank that the head of the African Development Bank recently criticized Chinese lending in Africa that was tied towards gaining access to critical minerals and resources and

and saying that these loans are not good for Africa in many ways because it's hard to accurately assess these assets, which are sort of strategic assets. And also some of the financing terms of these loans are a bit opaque. Of course, as you know, there's been a concern in the US, but other sort of developed economies about debt trap diplomacy, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not asking for you to adjudicate whether those are right or wrong. I'm asking if you have

picked up any indications that these are affecting the lending patterns or behavior of the development banks or related as BRI, Belt and Road Initiative, undergoes a sort of strategic recalculation and recalibration from where it was, you know, certainly by 2015, 2016, it's

It's different. It's not gone, but it is certainly adjusted and evolved. How either the shifting nature of BRI and or sort of geopolitical pushback from the US or from Africa, how that is affecting policy bank behavior?

Yeah, this is actually a really important question. I think it has raised a lot of policy concerns. It's about the future of the Belt and Road Initiative and also how does that affect policy banks' lending in the upcoming years. One major difference of this published book versus my dissertation is that I added an entire new chapter discussing the possible future changes of China's global development finance. So for the

Past two cases, the policy banks have been lending to large-scale, long-term projects along the Belt and Road Initiative. But in the recent year, we actually have seen the volume decline, according to data by Boston University and William & Mary's AidData. And how do we explain that?

On the policy level, of course, you're right. We see, for example, President Xi has highlighted the small and beautiful projects. And then actually in his speech at the conference, he also highlighted the importance of risk management.

On the policy level, you're probably going to see these banks being more cautious in terms of extending new lending. In the book, I try to kind of also highlight the structural factors behind those changes in the future, how the policy banks are going to lend. So if you look at the history of public financial agencies,

of cases other than China. So the industrial predecessors and their country's public financial agencies. You find that the public financial agencies of most countries, they all have gone through this critical time period. They have to struggle between prioritizing state priority, state incentives versus following commercial interests and served firms' interests. There is like state or market dilemma out there.

And all of these advanced industrial economies, public financial, they have gone through this kind of debate. So it's not that China alone is actually facing this major challenge. One of the major arguments that argue this book is that the unique Chinese pathway to development finance was created as a prescription to latecomer.

So, what happens if China becomes more advanced economically, industrially? Is it going to become more alike as their industrial predecessors? And part of the argument is that, well, chances are high that they have to make that kind of adjustment. You either choose to just serve states, whatever agenda, foreign policy goals or geopolitical goals.

Or you serve the market. You follow Chinese companies' commercial interest and target the more profitable project, which are likely to take place in the more mature market, more advanced market.

So I argue that the politicians actually, they are at the watershed. They actually have to make that decision. In order to move forward, we will be able to see a clear pathway of which side they pick in the future. I had a whole bunch of other questions I wanted to ask. I mean, at some point, Luoyang, I'd like to talk to you about how you assess some of the multilateral efforts that China has been involved in, AIIB, New Development Bank,

which are fascinating areas as well as this puzzle. Let me end by asking you to articulate a question, which is, you spent all this time thinking about the policy banks, thinking about China's development efforts and evolution. What is the question that you still have in your mind that you haven't answered about this? Either a big strategic question or a micro narrow question that's still nagging you after working on this for so long?

Yeah, actually, this is a good question because I'm in the process of thinking of a possible second book project since this one is out. So I guess there is sort of a big question still this book alone cannot answer. So as I said, China is a latecomer and China is not the first country that has largely lent to the developing world.

The US, the Europeans, Japan, they all did that in the past. But still, if we look at the developing world today, many of them still need capital for industrialization. And is this large-scale financing really going to facilitate

industrial development? And are other countries going to follow the path of the industrial processors? Or are they going to stay at the lower end of the industrial chain and then you just keep selling resources and not achieving industrial upgrade? So that's like the big conceptual question that I still have in mind. And perhaps I would like to further explore. Well, Mouyann, I want to thank you for your time today.

Thank you for your scholarship. I really enjoyed the book. It was well-written, well-researched. Again, aside from what I've read in your book, complete and total novice on this topic. And I thought you approached this in a really clear and compelling way. So appreciate all your work. And based on what you just said, I'm now very much looking forward to your future research. So I hope you...

Enjoyed your time here in the US and look forward to seeing you at some point in Beijing or back here in DC. Thank you, Jude, for this conversation. Yeah. And I also look forward to seeing you in person in the future.

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