Keyu Jin

Am I going to fire them?

Am I going to reward them?

Am I going to punish them?

They hold that crucial key.

And I think what was, you know, very surprising for most of the Western audience is that when I mentioned about the mayor economy, there's, you know, why don't our American mayors in each city do these very radical things and then push for GDP growth and technology and innovation?

It's quite different.

I think this is where China's very unique in the world is that political centralization, economic decentralization, and the yardstick to measure local mayors' competence.

through, in the first stage, it was GDP growth.

So I am a mayor of, you know, the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu province.

I'm going to like peek at my neighbor's mayor's city's GDP growth, and I'm going to be very, very competitive.

By the way, I forgot about that.

Competition is extremely competitive among the local government officials because you are competing with other mayor for a top job, right?

So you need to do better than them.

And whether that was efficient structure or not, I cannot comment, but it certainly just fueled this massive and rapid expansion, economic expansion.

First, it was industrialization.

Everybody wanted to do exports.

Then they discovered, oh, my gosh, we can have so much fiscal revenues coming from land, right?

Selling land and real estate.

Let's build real estate and let's urbanize.

And then the money kept coming in to these local governments and that they can spend it on nurturing more companies or supporting real estate or supporting investment.