Faculty
Yasheng Huang （黄亚生）
@YashengHuang
Yasheng Huang is a Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School and also holds the Epoch Foundation (时代基金会）Professorship of Global Economics and Management . From 2013 to 2017, he served as an Associate Dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s GlobalPartnership programs and its Action Learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.
Huang is the author of 11 books in both English and Chinese and of many academic papers (such as on regulatory transparency, historical autocracy, statistical falsifications, tax, financing, sectoral and regulatory biases, history of reforms and strategy, political economy of controls, etc.) His book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline, will be published in paperback by Yale University Press in 2025. The book was a 2023 Best Book of the Year by Foreign Affairs magazine. He is collaborating with other scholars on a book project, Reframing The Needham Question, based on a comprehensive database on Chinese historical inventions (under contract at Princeton University Press). His book, Statism with Chinese Characteristics (under contract at Cambridge University Press), examines economic reforms and economic performance of China since 1978. Huang was a co-principal investigator in a large-scale multi-disciplinary research project on food safety in China.
Outside of his academic research, Huang has written for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and Project Syndicate, Caixin and Caijing. He is working on several policy projects related to US-China relations. He was one of the coauthors of MIT’s report, “University Engagement with China: An MIT Approach” and he is a co-chair of an implementation committee of that report. He is a member of a taskforce at Asia Society on US-China policy and a member of Brookings-CSIS Advisory Council on Advancing US-China collaboration. During 2023-4, he is a visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.
Huang founded and runs China Lab, ASEAN Lab and India Lab, which have provided low-cost consulting services to hundreds of small and medium enterprises in these countries. From 2015 to 2018, he ran a program in Yunnan province to train women entrepreneurs (funded by Goldman Sachs Foundation). He has held or received prestigious fellowships such as the National Fellowship at Stanford University and the Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Fellowship. The National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States. He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and OECD, and serves on advisory and corporate boards of non-profit and for-profit organizations. He is a founding member and is serving as the president of Asian American Scholar Forum, an NGO dedicated to open science, protection of rights and well-being of Asian American scholars.
Qihua Gao, Yasheng Huang, El Ghali Zerhouni, and Y. Karen Zheng, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7044-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, September 2024.
Huang, Yasheng. Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Gao, Qihua, Yasheng Huang, Yuze Sui, and Y. Karen Zheng. PNAS Nexus Vol. 2, No. 3 (2023): pgad028.
Huang, Yasheng, and Clair Yang. Journal of Politics Vol. 84, No. 2 (2022): 1165-1175. SSRN Preprint.
Huang, Yasheng and Meicen Sun. In Harnessing Digitalization for Sustainable Economic Development: Insights for Asia, edited by David G. Fernandez and John Beirne, 139-156. Tokyo, Japan: Asian Development Bank Institute, 2021.
Huang, Yasheng. Project Syndicate, December 14, 2020.
Two ASEAN Lab teams from MIT Sloan traveled to Malaysia's Asia School of Business (ASB) to tackle two projects: educational synergies and branding. The on-the-ground international work experience, particularly in ASEAN, was an enormous draw for students eager to go beyond case studies.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. But it’s humble leadership that leads our list.
"The stakes are extremely high and the only issue remaining is who is going to blink first."
"In reality, China and the U.S. are like people who got married without knowing the religion of the other."
Yasheng Huang speaks with ThinkChina on a range of topics including global instability, the result of the US elections, and China's politics.
"It is incumbent on other countries, as the US goes in the direction of isolationism, to continue on this path of collaboration."
