Henry Huiyao Wang’s Gaokao, study abroad, work in Chinese & Quebec govts and multinationals, etc.

Living History | August 27 , 2024

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The latest episode 8 is an interview with Henry Huiyao Wang, Founder and President of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG). One of the first MBA students in North America from the Chinese mainland, Wang sat down to receive an overseas education after the country’s opening up, and shared many details of his incredible personal journey.

Below is the full transcript of the interview.

Living History: Today, we’re speaking with Dr. Henry Huiyao Wang, the founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a top think tank in Beijing. Dr. Wang is a leading expert on topics such as China and globalization, global trade and investment, and international relations, with a focus on the U.S.-China relationship and global migration. That’s something he got early experience when, after pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Guangdong in 1982, he moved first to Canada and then to England for his MBA and PhD studies before becoming a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Back in China, he taught at Peking University and Tsinghua University, and he was a counselor to the State Council of China—China’s Cabinet. We’re very pleased to speak with him today.

Dr. Henry Huiyao Wang, welcome!

Henry Huiyao Wang: Thank you, I’m very pleased to talk to you.

Living History: I just learned something I didn’t know before: you started learning English reading books in a little shed with a bare light bulb in Sichuan. In there, you learned that there was a world outside of China. How did you imagine that world to be before you got to travel abroad?

Henry Huiyao Wang: When I was a student, we were thirsty for knowledge. There’s a saying in Chinese: you have to read 10,000 books and travel 10,000 miles. At that time, if you only read books, for example, you learn English and you read stories of famous people in China and the outside world, you still feel that you are not in touch with them. You really have to see the world.

That’s where, I think from very early on, my father went to foreign countries. He worked in Africa on the Tanzania-Zambia Railway. My mother’s family is very strong in terms of supporting the education. I remember my mom bought me a very expensive, at that time, Chinese-English dictionary when I was in elementary school. So it was great to see the world, not only from the books but you go out.

I think family education and reading the book have sown the seeds in my mind that someday we have to go to see the world. That affected my life. I have traveled to almost 100 countries and many regions, and I spent over a decade outside China, which is an enormous opportunity for me and opened the door for me to see the world. Also to bring the world closer to China and bring China closer to the world has become part of my mission and that’s why I founded a think tank, Center for China and Globalization.

Living History: All of that would have been impossible had Deng Xiaoping not reinstated the Gaokao (National College Entrance Examination).

Henry Huiyao Wang: That’s a very important part of my life, of course. Without Deng Xiaoping, we don’t know! That’s really…

Living History: Take me back to that day. Describe to me how it started. I believe there was something you heard on the radio.

Henry Huiyao Wang: Yeah, absolutely. After high school—I only finished my second year of high school—then we were sent down to the countryside. When I was only 17 or 18 and sent into the countryside, there was no future because the slogan at that time was “With one red heart, you settle down in the countryside for your life.” We became hopeless at that time because we didn’t know when would this be the end of this life.

In the countryside, we worked very hard and I had to work from 6 o’clock in the morning, when the production brigade leader called me to go out to the field, until 11 am before the sun got too hot. And you came back, cooked your own lunch, which normally is porridge and other very simple food and then continued at 3 o’clock until 10 o’clock in the evening because it was less heated in the day. Enormous hardship. After toiling in the fields for the whole day, we made about 20 cents a day in RMB in the mid-70s, and that was only 70% of what a normal farmer could get. They got 25 cents a day, and I got 20 cents a day.

So that was a very hard life but I never gave up. I mean, that’s something very important—I never gave up and continued to study. But it’s a very difficult life. In the countryside, first of all, you were always hungry because there was not enough food to eat. When you studied, they only gave you a quarter kilo of lamp oil that you could use for your lights, so if you read, you could not get the lights very large. You had to do it in a very small, dim light. That’s how we kept our studies.

So I never gave up. I listened to the radio, and that was already after Nixon visited China, so they resumed English teaching on the radio. And then I read the books I brought from the cities. I kept with my radio and I also subscribed to a newspaper which I had to walk about two or three miles every day to pick up to read.

That really got me into this studying habit because I believe, as I said, for the whole world, that the trend is to shrink the rural population, to be urbanized. I thought, “Why is China doing the opposite, making people from urban cities go to the countryside? It should be the other way around.” So I had a belief that this was not to be the trend, and I thought someday it would be changed. And actually, that day did come—1977 October. At that time we had no televisions. The only way of communication was a loudspeaker in your little farmhouse. I lived in a very shabby, old, and very cold, small cottage house on the farm and then the loudspeaker announced the news that China was going to restore the University Entrance Exams in December.

Well, they made an announcement in October, saying they were going to restore the Entrance Exams in December. That was really a big surprise to me and yet I was also very happy about it because I knew all the studies I had been keeping practicing probably will be useful. Initially, I wanted to be a science student, an engineering student, but I found my mathematics was all gone because too long I haven’t touched it. So I turned into more of a social sciences student. I brushed up on my Chinese language, history, culture, and, of course, English, too. And I applied for the English exam and studied.

So that was the first year [of resumed college entrance exams]. I think 5.6 million Chinese students accumulated during the decade-long Cultural Revolution when they had no chance to go to university; all universities were shut down during those 10 years. So 5.6 million of them were eligible to take the exam. They only recruited about 200,000, so it’s about 4%—only a very low percentage of people got into the university. I was one of them. It was the Class of 77. We actually got into the university in the spring of 1978. Because the exam happened in December, we got the notice in February and we got into the school in March. But that was totally changing your life. Without that experience, there would be no rest of my stories.

That was because Deng Xiaoping did that. There is a story about Deng Xiaoping. He came to be Vice Premier in 1977. He hasn’t become the top leader yet. The first two things he was doing were: the one is to restore the University Exam, and there was somebody against him at that time, saying “This is what Mao decided. You cannot change that.” Deng Xiaoping said, “Why not?” Then they said, “OK. But the time is too short, we already passed the spring season to send our notices. We will miss this year.” Deng Xiaoping said, “No, we’ll still do it, even if it’s in December or the end of the year, we still have to do it in 1977. We cannot postpone this any longer.” And then people said, “Okay, there’s no printing so many examination papers.” And Deng said, “Let’s use the paper to print Chairman Mao’s works to print examination papers.”

So he was very visionary and very decisive. So I think he saved one generation or even two generations of China. I think he paved the way for China’s opening up and reform because you see, that happened in 1977, 47 years ago. A whole generation has been trained continuously since then, and then that has changed China today. So that’s the first decision he’s made.

The second decision he made was to allow Chinese students to go abroad because it wasn’t allowed during the Cultural Revolution. Somebody even told him, look, if you send people overseas, people may not be coming back. But then Deng said, “Don’t worry, let’s send them, not just a few hundred, let’s send them in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Let’s send it. Even if a lot of them will not come back, we’re still gonna have some benefit of those coming back.”

So he was very bold in his vision. I think that is attributed to his five years in France. I went to the factory where he worked in France, very impressive. Deng spent five years actually outside China. He was studying and working. So he has a vision. He’s a designer of China’s reform and opening up. And that changed generations and generations.

Since then, China has expanded from a few hundred universities to 3,000 universities throughout China. The number of Chinese college students from my year getting into the university—less than a quarter million—has now become 12 million a year. So you can see how many times it exploded since then. Deng Xiaoping was so visionary, so decisive, and so reform-minded to push China even in 1977, just one year after Mao passed away. He was very liberated in mind and he has really changed China completely.

Living History: We’ve spoken with some international students who came to China to study around the same time. I wonder, how did you experience the foreign students? How did you think they adjusted? It must have also been completely new for you as well.

Henry Huiyao Wang: During the early 80s or even late 70s, China was still just getting out of the Cultural Revolution. I mean, people were living a very basic, simple life and things were not modern. At that time, I remember it took me three days to travel from Chengdu, my hometown, to Guangzhou. I had to change the train in Zhengzhou and it was a very long journey. And also, of course, at that time, in China, there were no skyscrapers. I remember the highest building in Guangzhou at that time was one of the hotels that was only 20-some stories. It was already the highest building in the whole city. And there was no taxi, you could only take buses and there was no subway and there was no supermarket. So the modern life that we are enjoying today was totally missing at that time.

When we went to the university, there was a competition among all the brightest people they recruited during the first two years. And I think at that time, there were not many foreigners who were able to come in. I mean, there were some but very few foreign students. So I think the challenge was that you had to change from the Cultural Revolution to the new reform thinking, and then at that time, liberate your mind, and liberalize your thoughts. It was the movement at that time. We also talked about philosophy and the meaning of life.

We witnessed the changing of China because, in 1979, they started the special economic zone in Shenzhen. So we were actually in Shenzhen to look at that. It was a village at that time. It later became a whole construction site. Then the Shenzhen International Trade Center was built in three days on one floor. That’s called the “Shenzhen speed.” That was very interesting. So a lot of changes, a lot of difficulties, and a lot of hope, I would describe, at that time. But China has embarked on the opening up and reform and a lot of people have been liberated from the Cultural Revolution. A lot of people have been corrected the so-called different crimes on them. There was a quite open society at that time. So I think that helped China to take off. Then the foreign investment started to come in. The special economic zones were established—14 coastal cities, later on to Pudong and the whole of China. I think that era was very memorable. I mean, it was a great change that took place, and we were the generation that witnessed all those happening during those times.

Living History: I noticed the first sentence in one of your recent books, and it said, “Everything is changing all the time. This is an unavoidable conclusion for anyone who observes the world around them for any length of time.” After Guangzhou, you got to go abroad and compare what you had imagined from books and understood from books the world to be to what it was actually like. Tell me what that was like for you, what your initial impressions were of those first days?

Henry Huiyao Wang: After Guangzhou, I was assigned to work in the Ministry in Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation for two and a half years. Before I applied to study overseas, there was a professor I met from NYU and he told me there was an MBA major in North America and internationally that could be very useful. You could learn management in marketing, accounting, and human resources. It was a very multi-discipline major. I was really intrigued by that and I applied for some scholarships with some support. So I ended up going to Canada as my first destination.

The impression when I got to Canada, as I remember, I had to travel from Beijing to Shanghai, Shanghai to Tokyo, Tokyo to San Francisco, and then to New York and then to Toronto. So there were four or five stops on my way in 1984. After two and a half years working in the Ministry, it was an absolute culture shock. You saw the traffic was big. You saw flying over New York. You saw the ocean of lights. And of course, you were on a highway and then the cars were just like bicycles in China, so many of them and high speed and all those that I never saw before. And then you got a supermarket with an abundant supply and food, all those at that time were not in China. So that was a really big culture shock in terms of the affluent society, how that could be, what gap there was between China and the outside world, particularly the Western world, and how there was still a lot of room to improve.

The culture shock was one thing, but also in Western society, you had to be more dependent on yourself. You had to open your bank account. You had to see the doctor by yourself. You had to go to the shops. There was no family or parents to rely on, and you also did not have much social network support.

Fortunately, when we got into university, we had very good faculty members and also different student clubs, which were very friendly to help. Also, the students from different countries were all very friendly, so that was surprising to see. It seemed that there were a lot of volunteers, there were a lot of people who wanted to help. I was quite impressed with that. We also went to church. We also listened to different speakers and attended many social events. Those were really good experiences.

The only thing we were not used to was that it took so long to get a letter from China. It was gonna travel probably 20 to 25 days. So you had to write a letter today and then you got a letter reply next month. So if you wanna get two replies, you had to write two letters in a month so that you could get one in two weeks. And then of course, making a phone call cost you dozens of U.S. dollars, which was with astronomical number at that time for a poor student.

There were many things we had to cope with. But in general, I was coping fine. As I mentioned, I used to stay in an apartment under a bridge, which was very noisy, but I felt it was a good experience to experience local life. The student life was very enriched and changed my life, and it also gave me full exposure to local thinking and the minds of different students from different countries. It was a very good experience.

Living History: How did you benefit from studying overseas? Specifically, how was going to a Western university at that time different for you?

Henry Huiyao Wang: I think one of the things I learned when I was studying in Canada and later the UK and also Harvard is I see a very open style of study. For example, I was in an MBA class and when we used to be in China, everything was about examination, basically a written examination. There was less chance of talking. There was no classroom participation, debate, or presentation. We had to get used to that. There was a lot of exercise like that in the Western universities. I think now China is starting to employ all those techniques, but at that time, in the 80s, coming from a Chinese university, basically we were just memorizing, taking notes, and doing assignments and examinations, whereas, in Western universities, they gave you an assignment that you had to hand in for 24 hours or 48 hours. You had to do a big paper on that. And then your classroom participation and speaking accounted for a quarter of your performance results. So all those were fairly new.

And of course, the critical thinking, I think I benefit a lot from that. There’s more individualism. You had to be encouraged to think loudly and analyze things in different manners. So there was no correctness. Basically, you had to prove to yourself that what you said or what you analyzed was correct and logically sound. And that was a good exercise I went through. I think from that I benefited a lot.

But also, going to different countries, seeing different cultures, different ideologies, and different thinking makes you see better what you originally come from and what your original thoughts and upbringing are and all those things. That makes you a really global mind. I find that studying abroad or working abroad can really reach you with a global mind, become more objective, not narrow-minded, not one-sided, and be very objective when things come to the point. So it’s a very useful experience. I think that really helped us to be a connector or adapter between China and the outside world because we lived overseas, and we know what’s going on, and then we also lived in China.

There are more and more people like that now, but in the early 1980s, not many people. I was one of the very few students who went both study MBA in the early 1980s and one of the very few Chinese students who got into a PhD program at that time. I also studied quite a lot of doctoral studies in management. So I’m both the first student from China to get into an MBA program and the first student from China to get into a PhD program. Actually, I was one of the first students to get into a multinational. I worked in a big multinational in Montreal in the late 80s. And then I was the first student from China who worked in the Quebec government through the open competition in the early 90s. So all those firsts that I made demonstrate that those kinds of cross-cultural communication and knowledge on both sides can be very useful. And I think I benefited a lot from my overseas study experience.

Living History: You previously mentioned that in the 1980s, you also worked for the Chinese government. What was that like?

Henry Huiyao Wang: It was a very memorable experience when I first joined the Chinese government. I was one of the few; they picked the brightest, I think, probably in the university. Two of us were assigned to the Ministry of Commerce and then called the Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. The other one later on became a Vice Minister of Commerce and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, which is my schoolmate and classmate. We were assigned to the Ministry at the same time.

What I found very interesting was that during the first year when I got into ministry, there were so many talents there. Everybody was a college graduate, everybody knew some foreign language and things like that. So we were, in the beginning, underutilized. People were saying, “You’re young, you’ve just come, you don’t have experience.” They were not giving us a lot of important work to do. But things can be an opportunity sometimes.

So I remember during the early 1980s, China joined the World Bank. World Bank sent out experts to come to China, to Beijing, and to give the World Bank seminars—what’s the international competitive bidding, international procurement guidelines, and all those jargon and terms? But I had already studied them during my spare time because I knew those were useful knowledge. So when they did the seminars, all those were new jargon, new terms, and new knowledge I already studied quite a bit during my evening time when I was in the Ministry—I was single and I had lots of time. I found it very useful.

Because it was a week-long seminar, after the senior interpreter did that on the first day, on the second day they said, “Okay, you can try.” So I tried it because I thought that was how communication could work: you had to have a lot of background knowledge, know a lot of history, all the technical jargon, and the latest terms. I could apply that to that interpretation process, and immediately, the instructor from the World Bank felt that there was a chemistry between him and the audience. And then there was a lot of audience who could ask the right question since I interpreted that.

So for the next 5 days, I became the one who did all the interpretation. So that gave me the experience and gave me the confidence. If you are really prepared, if you are willing to study the other side, you have enough knowledge, and if you understand their language and their culture, you can communicate. Understanding each other is not just understanding language itself, but there’s a lot of background knowledge and a lot of technical knowledge. So that helps.

What I found in the 80s was not only with the World Bank, we talked with many other visiting government officials, which was great. And I thought there was a lack of understanding of each other. The challenge was really that we would not put each other into each other’s shoes. We were just talking about our own position, and that sometimes could be difficult.

The good way is really to think from the other side and vice versa, and that probably helps a lot. And particularly, you have to have the people who have the knowledge of the other side or who have spent time in foreign countries or spent time in China and particularly, people who know the language and the technical background behind it. Otherwise, you’re gonna have very difficult communications. That’s my experience.

Living History: You wrote, “In 1984, to pursue an MBA when few at the time in China even knew what an MBA was…” What an extraordinary decision! What did your parents say?

Henry Huiyao Wang: It was really a big decision for me, but that was always what I wanted because I learned a foreign language, about foreign trade, and all those things. Also, after two and a half years of working in the Ministry, I found myself needing to have an upgrade. At that time, there were opportunities to be assigned to work in the different embassies of China, but I preferred to study. So I applied a few times and then finally took an exam and got a scholarship. I jumped on the opportunity because I thought some vision could help. I knew that my parents, my father actually, worked overseas and he told me it was important to see overseas.

Of course, at that time, China just opened up, and you had to learn everything from overseas. So even though overseas was unknown, it was important that you go and experience it. You know, you have to read 10,000 books and travel 10,000 miles. And that’s my motto.

When I studied all those historical figures, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, or the scientists or social scholars, a lot of them who made a great contribution to China were overseas students. That was a good example for me. That really encouraged me to go and I never hesitated. I applied, I knew I could miss the opportunity at that time to work in the Ministry, but I thought probably it was more important for me to get this more advanced knowledge and advanced preparation for my future work and jobs. That was why I made that decision and it also was the right decision.

I would still advise people to go and study. My think tank has been publishing Chinese students studying abroad, all kind of reports, for the last fifteen years. Since the 1980s, there have been about 10 million Chinese students studying abroad, including Hong Kong, Macau, and everybody. That’s a huge chunk of talent. Of course, a lot stayed overseas, but then the global talent circulation and the talent return greatly changed China. So I think this study abroad movement initiated by Deng Xiaoping has really made huge changes in China and also benefited millions of people who did that. Of course, I’m one of them.

Living History: And then you eventually decided to come back to China and start your own business. And I have heard from other people that it was a very challenging time, but that there was also this atmosphere of optimism. How do you remember these times?

Henry Huiyao Wang: After my stay in Hong Kong as a chief trade representative of the Quebec government for Hong Kong, China at that time, when I finished that job, Deng Xiaoping was inspecting Shenzhen, his famous 1992 tour. And he said, “If you want to make a greater contribution, it’s better to come back to the mainland.” So that was a great inspiration for me. After my duties in Hong Kong, I didn’t return to Quebec because I felt I was already in Hong Kong and I would like to come back to China.

So at the beginning of 1993, I started to come back. But what to do? That’s the thing. I didn’t have a second job that I already aimed at, but I thought maybe it was time to utilize my experience in business, academics, government, and the public; it was time to start my own company to be an entrepreneur. That was what got me into establishing my company at that time. Of course, there was no office tower in China, in Beijing, so we rented a hotel room where you could sleep and where you could work, but it was also a hard life. For example, because there was a time difference, during the daytime, you were busy. During the evening, there was a phone coming back from North America, from Europe, from different places because we were doing international business consulting.

I remember it took me half a year to register a foreign representative office in Beijing. I got all the approvals, and I got all the sponsors. You had to talk to different bureaucratic organizations. And finally, we got that. And then I remember it was very expensive to install a telephone. A fixed line cost you 5,000 RMB at that time. Even, to have a fax machine, you needed a Ministry of Post and Telecommunications approval. Also, I bought a computer when I finished my job in Hong Kong. That computer had been left in customs for several months before I could redeem it because you had to [determine] whether it was going to be tax-exempt or not, or how a computer was classified and what kind of tariffs should apply, all those things—they never had a good example. And then we had to wait all the final decision. Finally, I got it done.

So it was really challenging to establish a business in China in 1993. I remember at that time there was no taxi in China. There was only a very small minivan. You paid 10 yuan and you could travel across Beijing completely. Even that was very expensive. So it was a good experience. But then I think the most important part was really to get business.

Living History: China joining the WTO must have helped a lot.

Henry Huiyao Wang: China joining the WTO was a monumental landmark for the Chinese opening up. It took a long time. You know, China spent 15 or 16 years [to join the WTO]. Initially, it was the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], and then later on they changed the name to the WTO and China still wanted to apply for that.

But I would reclassify the Chinese movement of joining the WTO as a mini-revolution in China because you had to abolish so many outdated clauses, you had to change the minds of the people, you had to get people on top of that. I would say it was really a big battle. People were so used to the old style. For example, before China joined the WTO, foreign trade was only managed by a few dozen Chinese state-owned companies, monopolized. So everybody had to go through the foreign trade company to do foreign trade. There was a license required, there was a quota required. It was such a big headache and bureaucratic tape to go through. But then, since China joined the WTO, they liberalized all those areas, and I just read the news there are about 6 million companies that can do foreign trade. Basically, everybody is an individual. If you want to do it, you’re allowed to do it, all the companies. It was incredible. And that’s why China became the largest trading nation in the world. And then China’s GDP since joining the WTO has gone up twelve or thirteen times already, enormously.

So I think the challenge at that time was really to break through the psychological barrier because people were worried about joining the WTO. For example, people talked about joining WTF as if the wolf was coming. One of the arguments was that China’s automobiles were in the infant stage. If China joined the WTO, they would be wiped out by foreign companies. Foreign automobiles would flood China. China would no longer have a domestic industry of automobiles. And that turned out to be not true because even though more foreign companies were coming, you’ve got Volkswagen, you’ve got BMW, Mercedes, everybody, before joining the WTO, there was only one model of a Chinese foreign company, which was Santana. 20 years, one model, never changed. But since China joined the WTO, there has been competition. There were a lot of foreign companies coming and that’s also elevated the Chinese auto industry. And then you can see that after 20 years since China joined WTO, China has now become the largest automobile maker in the world. And last year, China became the largest exporter of automobiles in the world.

So joining the WTO has not only greatly benefited Chinese companies but also made China make more contributions to the world. I think the WTO has many advantages: it liberated people’s minds and made people more open. It also gave them more experience in testing the waters and being more competitive. Thirdly, it cultivated a lot of Chinese international companies, too.

Furthermore, it is really important that you have all the multinationals come to China, and for the Chinese to go to interact with them. There’s not much domestic interaction. China needs to improve as well, like the payment system. Travel assistance in China should be more convenient and maybe China should even open the internet band so you can access Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all those things. I think China should do that as well.

My thinking is that the people-to-people exchange is crucial. It’s very important to enhance understanding and it’s the bond between the two countries and also the rest of the world. That’s why I was encouraged by President Xi. He spoke at the San Francisco summit when he visited the U.S. and he was saying China would be interested in inviting 50,000 youth from the U.S. to come to China. So this means each year, 10,000. I hope that the target can be realized and then more people can come.