Keyu Jin

That's how it works.

The metrics shouldn't be geared just towards growth alone, GDP growth alone.

It was just singular GDP growth and you can borrow heavily and just spend on infrastructure.

That's not a productive way to drive the economy.

That's what the local governments were doing for a long period of time.

In the last few years, innovation, unicorns have kind of been an implicit yardstick for local governments.

That's kind of how we've seen these great EV companies, 80 cities doing EVs.

I mean, do we really need 80 cities to do their own EVs, right?

Solar panels, now DeepSeek has become a star.

Semiconductor companies, each local government wants to have their own national champion EVs.

So implicitly, technology was part of the yardstick competition as well.

But if you can more accurately have a metric for consumption measures, really focus on making sure that it's coming from consumption, this GDP growth, rather than from investment or infrastructure, then I think that it might focus the government's objective a bit more on

thinking about how to make people feel more secure so that they want to save more.

For instance, creating more jobs.

For instance, more on social security spending, on health care, on elderly care.

Because for the longest period of time, this political economy model was brilliant at scaling up supply, but it was extremely weak at raising personal consumption because the incentive does not lie in consumption, it lies in production.

So you shift the objectives a little bit and maybe the local government will do more.

I think it depends on the timing.

If you're starting something, starting a new emerging strategic sector like EVs or batteries or solar panels, you need the local governments to be involved, to mobilize, the big push to coordinate the supply chains.

If you wait for the markets to develop over time, it's going to take a long time.