Weijian Shan

Weijian Shan is co-founder and executive chairman of the investment group PAG. In his early years he worked as a farm labourer in the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, then went to the United States to study, pursuing a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the Wharton School before moving into the investment world. While leading Newbridge Capital, he led the acquisitions of Korea First Bank and Shenzhen Development Bank, and his two books chronicling these two landmark deals, Money Games and Money Wars, remain bestsellers to this day. PAG, which he now leads, manages more than US$55 billion in assets, and in recent years it led a major strategic investment in Dalian Wanda Commercial Management Group Co., Ltd., once again attracting market attention.

Weijian Shan’s thinking is not limited to finance. On April 2, 2026, he was a guest at CEIBS’s Beijing campus, where he spoke on how China can emerge along “the road to modernity” and held a dialogue with CEIBS economics professor Lan Xiaohuan on topics including the macroeconomy, consumption and real estate, artificial intelligence and companies going overseas. He mentioned that he was revising a new book whose theme is precisely “the road to modernity”, and whose starting point is a phenomenon he calls a “paradox”: China’s per capita GDP in 2024 was about US$13,000, ranking 73rd in the world, in the same tier as countries such as Mexico and Malaysia, and it is still a middle-income developing country that is still catching up in fields such as semiconductors, lithography machines and commercial aircraft engines; yet at the same time China has the world’s best high-speed rail, automated ports, enormous airports, bridges and super-factories, its electric vehicle output has ranked first in the world for many consecutive years, and its biotechnology sector is also developing rapidly.

To explain this phenomenon, Weijian Shan recalled his thinking during his doctoral studies at Berkeley. He concluded that a country must meet five conditions to become a global technology centre: a concentration of talent; a concentration of top universities and research institutions; ample venture capital; deep processing and manufacturing capability; and a huge single market with one currency, one language, one culture and one legal system. He believes that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States was the only country in the world that met all five conditions at once, which made Silicon Valley a unique “American phenomenon”, while China at the time met almost none of them. He judges that China today has become a country that meets all five conditions at once: it produces more than 5 million STEM graduates a year and ranks first in the world in total science and technology human resources and total R&D personnel; it has research institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in the 2025 global university rankings published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Zhejiang University ranked first, with eight Chinese universities in the top ten; its share of global manufacturing value added has risen from less than 5% to about 30%; and its total retail sales of consumer goods already exceeded those of the United States in 2018. On this basis he believes that China and the United States have become the world’s only two centres of technological innovation, and that future growth must rely on improvements in productivity and on technology.

On the macroeconomy, Weijian Shan cited data showing that China’s GDP growth was 5.2% in 2023, 5% in 2024 and 5% in 2025. He argued that in 2023, 82.5% of the 5.2% growth was contributed by consumption and net exports contributed -11.4%, so the quality of growth was relatively high; whereas in 2025 the contribution of consumption fell to 52% and net exports contributed 32.7%, with a goods surplus of more than US$1 trillion, meaning growth relied excessively on exports and its quality was somewhat poorer. He pointed out that the bulk of Chinese household assets is real estate, and that a 20% to 30% fall in housing prices has shrunk household balance sheets and depressed willingness to consume; over the past five years per capita disposable income grew at an average annual rate of 5.4%, while household renminbi deposits grew at an average annual rate of about 13% over the same period, with total household deposits exceeding 160 trillion yuan by the end of 2025, compared with GDP of 140 trillion yuan that year. He believes China must shift from reliance on exports and investment to reliance on consumption, and said he had held this view ten years earlier.

Weijian Shan further explained that as early as 2009 he had published an article titled “Learning to Spend Money” to draw attention to the problem of excessively low consumption, but he believes that urging ordinary people to spend makes no sense from an academic standpoint, and that solving the problem of low consumption requires action on macro policy. He noted that China’s central government debt is only a little over 20% of GDP, that the government debt ratio is 68.7% when local governments’ statutory and hidden debt is included, and that under the International Monetary Fund’s definition, which includes the debt of local government financing vehicles, it is about 120% of GDP, compared with about 250% for Japan and about 130% for the United States. He stressed that among the world’s major powers, China is the only one whose government sector has positive net assets, that foreign currency accounts for less than 1.1% of central government debt, that yields on offshore renminbi bonds are generally below 2%, and that its sovereign debt structure is sound with no repayment risk, but that its borrowing capacity has not yet been fully used. He therefore believes that the 5% growth target set by the central authorities can certainly be met, and that it should be set higher, as China fully has the potential to grow faster.

On investment strategy, Weijian Shan said he does not invest in manufacturing, because competition is too intense and margins too thin, nor in export companies, whose growth he considers unsustainable; he invests in leading consumer-facing companies, on the grounds that leading companies have moats such as market share, brand, scale and technology. On the Wanda deal, he explained that what PAG had invested in was not real estate but the asset-light operation and management business, the “small commercial management” entity, while the “large commercial management” entity that owns Wanda’s malls and properties belongs elsewhere. According to him, the two sides signed a restructuring framework agreement in December 2023 under which PAG and Dalian Wanda Commercial Management Group jointly set up Dalian Xindameng, with Zhuhai Wanda Commercial Management, which is responsible for asset-light operation and management, placed under it; in 2024 PAG led several investors in injecting a further 60 billion yuan, the parties together holding 60%, giving PAG principal control. PAG manages about 530 malls nationwide, the largest such portfolio in the world, but does not own them; it collects only part of the rent and cares most about the occupancy rate, which currently exceeds 97%, and after-tax net profit in the previous year was about 8 billion yuan. He explained that 20 to 30 new malls join the portfolio each year; a single new mall normally takes one to two years or even longer to fill with tenants, but the scale advantage of managing more than 500 malls means new malls are fully let even before they open.

On the property market, Weijian Shan believes real estate remains crucial: weak consumption growth stems largely from shrinking household balance sheets, and stabilising property prices would greatly help consumption growth. He judges that the property market has essentially bottomed out, on the basis that the national rental yield on property is about 2.8% (varying by city, with first-tier cities averaging about 2.0%), while government bond yields are about 1.8%, making property a better investment than government bonds. He also argues that purchase restrictions were introduced to cool an overheated market, and keeping them now that the market has turned cold only deepens the difficulties; since localities have already eased them to varying degrees, it is now time to abolish purchase restrictions entirely. He advocates distinguishing home purchases intended for long-term holding from short-term “speculation”, which he considers not difficult to do; a workable approach is to levy additional taxes on short-term transactions to raise their cost, so that speculation does not pay. In addition, he regards the “price-cut ban” on new homes as another obstacle to market stability: artificially keeping prices above market value results in prices without transactions; rather than dragging things out, it is better to scrap the ban promptly, allowing price-cut promotions and faster destocking, so that the market’s decline can be reversed as quickly as possible.

On institutional evolution, Weijian Shan believes that China’s system and governance model was not a blueprint designed in advance, but was gradually built and improved in the course of responding to and solving specific crises and problems. He gave the example that in 1991, when Zhu Rongji was vice premier of the State Council, he first cleared up “triangular debt”, which at the time amounted to 300 billion yuan nationwide, while GDP in the previous year was only 1.8 trillion yuan; by focusing on clearing arrears on fixed-asset investment projects, in the two years from 1991 to 1992 the government injected 55.5 billion yuan in debt-clearing funds, mainly through bank loans, and cleared 219 billion yuan in arrears, removing obstacles for subsequent reforms. After that, state-owned enterprise reform required stripping away enterprises’ social functions, and by the end of the 1990s the social security system had taken shape; the tax-sharing system, the financial market system and even the environmental protection system were also established in the course of solving major problems. He also mentioned that after the Yangtze River floods of 1998 the state promoted the return of farmland to forest and grassland, and that intellectual property protection has been continuously strengthened in practice; in 2013 PAG invested in a music copyright company, and it was precisely because China’s judicial system enforced intellectual property protection more and more effectively that the company developed its core competitiveness and successfully went public.

On the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, Weijian Shan said there is as yet no definitive conclusion about its effects, and that it is difficult to constrain in advance through regulation. He revealed that a month earlier PAG had been preparing to invest in an Indian IT services company, but given that the cost of AI might be lower than that of Indian labour, it asked experts to assess the situation and ultimately did not invest. He believes that technology raising productivity is on the whole a good thing, and that a country like China has the superiority of socialism, so there is no need to worry about excessive inequality between rich and poor, and solutions can always be found when problems arise. On companies going overseas, he has serious reservations, believing that going overseas is not necessarily a good thing for most companies and that over the past ten years there have been many examples of Chinese companies failing in overseas acquisitions of foreign companies; at the same time geopolitical risks cannot be ignored, as official data show China’s net international investment position ranks second in the world, and if the net positions of Hong Kong and the mainland are combined, at least US$5.5 trillion, it is the world’s largest net creditor, which carries huge risks under the current geopolitical landscape.