Financier Zhang Chun: Is there anything more important than experiencing china's financial giants?

On March 21, Wenhui Lecture Hall WeChat public account released an interview with Zhang Chun, professor of finance and executive dean of Shanghai Advanced School of Finance of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Recalling studying and teaching abroad, and then returning to China to teach and run a school, he said, "There is no more meaningful event than experiencing the construction of China's financial center." ”

Zhang Chun: Is there anything more important than experiencing China's financial giants?

In 1975, 19-year-old Zhang Chun graduated from a technical school and worked as a fitter in the Shanghai Electrical Plastics Factory, which had more than 400 people. Soon, he was elected as the secretary of the league branch by a high vote, just as he grew up, with good popularity and excellent learning. However, some people questioned that he was too stable and did not act pungently enough. Perhaps, the meek appearance belies the adventurous challenge spirit in his bones. In the next 30 years, he repeatedly took risks: after becoming a 77-level college student, he was the first to study abroad, becoming the first Ph.D. in China to study finance overseas after 1976, the first financial scholar to teach at a first-class school in the United States; more rarely, in 2004, he became the first financial returnee scholar to return to China; in 2009, he and his colleagues promoted the establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy of China, Shanghai Jiaotong University Shanghai Advanced Finance Institute (hereinafter referred to as "Gao Jin/SAIF"), Soon, it absorbed the "Dream Team" of returnee finance professors, and opened a beautiful opening for the ambition of "studying Chinese finance in the world and finding SAIF". Ten minutes before the reporter's interview on March 6, Gaojin Executive Dean Zhang Chun made a speech at the 2018 Faculty And Staff Conference on "Not Forgetting the Original Intention, Practicing the United Masses", which is the rallying call of the eight-year executive dean, and it is also a re-narrative of the individual - insisting on dreams, being willing to taste new, and having the courage to take risks, "Is there anything more meaningful than experiencing the construction of China's financial center?" ”

Pure interests: mathematical talent, financial ambition

"To realize our innate talents, whatever it is. When we leave this world, make it better than it was when we came. This is Kalai Michio's exposition of the meaning of life in the book Parallel Universe. If interest has the role of navigating life, then for Zhang Chun in his youth, using mathematical methods to study social science problems is the most interesting to him. At the age of 20, he determined his ideal of life - to do academics, especially to study the big problems involved in social development.

Young aspirations: the study of social science problems using mathematical methods

Zhang Chun's parents are both veteran party members, and his mother is a university teacher who graduated from the Department of Political Economy at Fudan University. Under the influence of the family atmosphere, Zhang Chun has a strong interest in mathematics, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology since he was a child, and "Reference News" is a must-see since literacy, Xie Haiguang, deputy secretary of the party committee of Wen Wei Po, recalled to reporters that when he was a child, he went to find his classmate Zhang Hang in jiaotong university, and he could always see his brother Zhang Chun sitting there reading. In the middle school years from 1969 to 1973, in the world of economics such as Capital, which was regarded as a book of heaven by his peers, Zhang Chun's thinking and vision were silently extended, and many confusions were accumulated in his mind, including the impact of his father and mother when he was in elementary school.

Zhang Chun's memories of that time are quite profound, and after graduating from Shanghai Hongkou District No. 52 Middle School in 1973, he was assigned to study at a technical school for two years. "There are basic courses such as mathematics, mechanics, and materials science in the technical school, as well as practical courses such as industrial drawing, and half-work and half-reading have truly combined theory with practice."

After graduating from the technical school, Zhang Chun was assigned to the Shanghai Electrical Plastic Factory as a fitter for two years, and the news of the resumption of the college entrance examination in 1977 was like a flat thunderclap, which made Zhang Chun, who had always loved to read, pick up the books again. With the knowledge reserve during the technical school and the hard work of self-study before the examination, Zhang Chun was first found by the Department of Mathematics of East China Normal University with excellent results. During his college years, Zhang Chun rarely participated in on-campus activities, and almost all of them spent day and night studying, and his mathematical talent was also fully displayed. "Maybe I wasted too much study time before, and then I thought about making up all my valuable knowledge." The teacher saw that we were so eager for knowledge, and he taught with all his might. I remember that even walking on campus was memorizing English words all the time, and the whole college period was busy and fulfilling. ”

On February 28, 1978, the memory of East China Normal University became the eternal freeze frame of this generation. Life has since begun a different prelude. In 1979, the state opened the door to study abroad, and with the encouragement of overseas relatives and friends, coupled with the enlightenment of Liu Fonian, then president of East China Normal University, Zhang Chun was able to graduate from college three and a half years early. In September 1981, Zhang Chun went to the United States as he wished. In January 1982, he began his master's degree in mathematics at the University of Oregon.

Chinese Ph.D., who used his mathematical talents to study corporate finance

Despite studying English hard before going abroad, Zhang Chun was still as good at "dumb" English as the outstanding students of that era. The first three months in the United States are to learn languages and take the TOEFL. "I basically couldn't understand the first semester of the class at the University of Oregon, but I guessed, but fortunately there was no problem in the math class." Zhang Chun showed a talent for mathematics, and his ambition became clearer - to study finance, "I like to use mathematical methods to study the problems of the social sciences, and finance perfectly combines the two disciplines."

From the beginning of 1982 to the fall of 1983, Zhang Chun spent a rare year and a half to get a master's degree in mathematics, and also completed most of the undergraduate economics courses in the United States. After graduating from graduate school, Chun Zhang was admitted to the prestigious Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he continued his Ph.D. in managerial economics and decision science at the top school that often surpassed the Chicago Business School. Here, leading figures in the fields of corporate finance, information economics, game theory and monetary theory are gathered, Zhang Chun is very successful, his mathematical talent also stands out, and the innovations in the paper impress the tutor. In 1987, Zhang Chun received his Ph.D., and diligently completed a minor in the doctoral program in the Department of Finance, and completed a doctoral thesis on the classic problem in corporate finance, capital structure theory. "Those four years were the most important years of my life — getting a Ph.D., meeting my wife, getting married and having children, and getting a job at an American university." Zhang Chun often lamented with his son and daughter the efficiency and fulfillment of his year.

Exotic Exploration: The Establishment and Farewell of the First

Before graduating with a doctorate, Zhang Chun made a decision to stay in the United States to teach. Although his father, who was once an underground party, has always hoped that Zhang Chuncheng will return to China, finance has no place in China. Soon, four universities in the United States extended an olive branch to Zhang Chun. Zhang Chun chose to go to the Finance Department of the University of Minnesota School of Management, becoming the first mainland scholar in New China to teach finance at an American business school. In the years since, economists such as He Hua, Chen Zhiwu, and Wang Jiang have also begun to teach finance at American universities, and Chinese have begun to occupy a place in the field of financial research and education that the United States is proud of.

In the United States colleges, the fusion of theory and practice

The University of Minnesota is an important base for Zhang Chun to move from theory to practice. He still vividly remembers an old professor telling him, "The one thing you really learned was when you were teaching that course." Indeed, with excellent theoretical study but a lack of full understanding of the U.S. state system and economic system, lack of practical experience, and a young Chinese teacher, Zhang Chun will inevitably be suspicious of American students. Read the Wall Street Journal every day, chat with students about U.S. financial news before class, and use more U.S. homegrown cases... The picky American students felt Zhang Chun with hard work, and prejudice was gradually released.

With his solid theoretical foundation and advantages in data model processing and analysis, Zhang Chun has achieved pioneering success in the fields of finance, and many theoretical research successes have been widely used in the actual management and operation of the industry. In the field of corporate finance, Zhang Chun has conducted long-term research on the theory of the capital structure of enterprises. In 1992, Zhang Chun published a paper in the authoritative journal Journal of Finance, "Capital Structure as an Optimal Contract between Employees and Investors", which first explained the impact of labor contracts on the structure of financial capital, and his research showed that labor can also have a certain degree of control over enterprises, demonstrating for the first time the status of human capital within the corporate governance structure. At the same time, he made careful theoretical arguments for mixed or sub-industries in the field of financial supervision. These hot issues that are still being explored, Zhang Chun began to "target" as early as the 1990s.

Testing the waters of domestic teaching, migratory birds returned to experience great changes in China's economy

The establishment of the Chinese Economic Association in the United States in 1985 gave Zhang Chun frequent connections with China, and after his work, he ran to become the president of the society in 1995. The Society holds an annual meeting of Chinese students once a year, inviting a professional from China to the United States to explain the domestic economic situation in order to promote economic exchanges between China and the world. Later, the annual meeting was held once a year in China and the United States. "The year I became president was held in Guangzhou, and I invited Professor Miller, a Nobel laureate in economics, to promote the development of Chinese economics." Many members of the Economic Association in the United States are now active in the domestic economic arena, such as Yi Gang, president of the Chinese Minmin Bank, Qian Yingyi, dean of the School of Management of Tsinghua University, Hai Wen, dean of the HSBC Business School of Peking University, and Fang Xinghai, vice chairman of the Securities Regulatory Commission.

After working, Zhang Chun ran to become the president of the Chinese Economic Association in the United States in 1995

Because of his participation, in the mid-1990s, Zhang Chun returned to China once a year. Around 2000, with the frequent return to China, Zhang Chun also witnessed china's rapid development more, and he lamented the rapid changes in China several times and was overjoyed by the rapid changes in China. "I found that finance has become a shortage of knowledge, and China needs the knowledge of us financial talents to help the country's economic development." In Zhang Chun's consciousness, life is important to experience, and not to experience the great changes in Chinese society is the greatest loss of life, not to mention that the idea of studying major social problems from childhood has always haunted his mind. "In the United States, I have seen the way forward in life, and academic research has focused more on some technical small issues, and it is not a pity to miss the most exciting Chinese change in the history of all mankind in the world?" The seeds of returning home were like this in Zhang Chun's heart.

In 2002, Tsinghua University introduced ten finance professors who had been awarded tenure in the United States, and Zhang Chun, as one of them, was invited to serve as a distinguished professor at the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University, which was Zhang Chun's "test of the waters" for the return trip. "I used the method of teaching doctors in the United States to teach Corporate Finance to Tsinghua's earliest EMBA, but because the students were relatively old and the basic level of economics at that time was relatively weak, the students' understanding of finance was still relatively difficult. Of course, this also strengthened my idea of returning to China. Zhang Chun strongly felt that China' rapidly developing economy, whether it is academic or industrial development, is in a stage of extreme thirst for "knowledge". In 2004, Zhang Chun founded another first, resigned from his tenured professorship in the United States and returned to China to teach full-time.

Polyphonic practice: SAIF first-class research and first-class management

Although Tsinghua University and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business also invited Zhang Chun to join, considering his father's physical condition, Zhang Chun chose the China Europe International Business School headquartered in Shanghai, and the couple let their son return to China to attend high school.

In the process of teaching, Zhang Chun has continuously adjusted the differentiated teaching mode between China and the United States from the beginning, to summarizing the teaching experience and writing financial books suitable for the Chinese people, to organizing members to conduct project research and obtain significant project results. After returning to China, Zhang Chun has been using his own strength and years of learning to promote the development of China's economy and the cultivation of financial talents. In 2006, Zhang Chun wrote and published the book "Corporate Finance for Chinese Entrepreneurs", which strives to simplify the complex and be simple, and is regarded as a primer on corporate finance, and in 2009, Zhang Chun published the book "Corporate Finance", which Chen Zhiwu, professor of finance at yale School of Management, once commented, "For students and professional colleagues who aspire to engage in or study the capital operation of companies, Professor Zhang's authoritative book, "Corporate Finance", is a rare gift. ”

Created Gao Jin: "Study Chinese finance in the world and find SAIF"

The rapidly growing Shanghai is striving to build a national strategy towards an international financial center, which requires not only the construction of think tanks, but also the cradle of talent training. Gao Jin was born under the tide of the times, and with the support of the Shanghai Municipal Government and relying on Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Gao Jin began to organize. Four returnee professors, including Wang Jiang, a finance professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zhang Chun, who is teaching in Central Europe, Zhou Lin, who is now the dean of the Antai School of Management at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Wang Tan of the University of British Columbia in Canada, have become the founders of this "China Finance Whampoa Military Academy". A series of complicated things such as writing college planning, finding venues, recruiting employees, and building systems emerged in front of the four "entrepreneurs". Recalling this "entrepreneurial" process, Zhang Chun still remembers it vividly, "The most difficult thing is to innovate an international finance college model suitable for China in accordance with the model of an international first-class business school, there was no precedent before, and everything had to be explored one by one." ”

Around the world, people who have earned tenure in finance are scarce resources, making it difficult to give up their existing lives and reintegrate into a new career. In the early days of the establishment of the institute, Wang Jiang, Zhang Chun and others exerted their personal influence, negotiated one by one, and absorbed a group of internationally influential financial scholars to join. Kung Fu pays off, and on April 19, 2009, Gao Jin was inaugurated. In 2010, Zhang Chun became the executive dean. With the increase of domestic business schools, how to retain teachers has become the biggest challenge at present. Zhang Chun's team innovates in institutional mechanisms, pays attention to the study of Chinese finance, and is inspired to build SAIF (Gao Jin) into a world authority on Chinese finance.

Compared with its peers, Gaojin focuses more on cultivating financial talents and financial research in parallel. Gao Jin proposed the "three reals": experimental teaching, real-time exercises on the basis of real-time observation of the New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and Chicago Exchange; practical teaching, which is opened by practical professors in asset management and risk management courses; practical teaching, inviting senior management of top international and domestic financial institutions to bring real case projects. In December 2013, under the leadership of Zhang Chun, saif macro finance research center was formally established to strengthen the lack of systematic research and related data model analysis, and in 2014, the center signed a five-year strategic cooperation agreement with the Institute of Finance of Chinese Min min bank, and the two sides carried out in-depth cooperation in the research of macro finance academic topics. In February 2016, Gao Jin successfully passed the international accreditation of the International Elite Business School Federation (AACSB), becoming one of the youngest business schools in the world to receive AACSB accreditation. Gao Jin innovates in institutional mechanisms, pays attention to the research results of professors, and enhances their sense of achievement in teaching and research. In 2017, in the world's most influential think tank report "Global Think Tank Report 2016" released by the University of Pennsylvania, SAIF was ranked 31st in the "World's Top 100 Most Noteworthy Think Tanks" for the third consecutive year, ranking first in the same kind of think tank in China; in the 2017 Global Master of Finance Program Ranking published by the Financial Times, the Gaojin Master of Finance Program ranked 14th in the world, ranking first in Asia.

The balance of scholars and administrators, the inspiration for Bach's music

In the face of the heavy responsibility of management, Zhang Chun still maintains his position as a scholar, and grasping the balance between scholars and management is his lasting task today. Zhang Chun, who loves classical music, often draws inspiration from different versions of Bach's music, known as the "father of modern music", Bach skillfully applies the twelve-tone rhythm to instrumental music and vocal music, and Zhang Chun, who is good at mathematical logic, can keenly perceive the paradoxical beauty and staggering of its polyphonic structure, and balance busy work with music.

On Gao Jin's website, you can see the intensity of Zhang Chun's interviews on domestic macroeconomic and financial reforms, which condense his views on China's financial reform and precautions, the special drawing rights of the renminbi, the degree of domestic market supervision, and so on. "China is developing rapidly in financial technology and Internet finance, which has both risks and opportunities, involving a lot of innovative issues about regulation and business models, and there are too many technical issues that need to be studied in depth by people who are familiar with financial theory and technology." The financial regulatory targets proposed at the ongoing two sessions also validate Zhang Chun's academic sensitivity.

"This year, one of the doctoral students I brought with me was hired by the University of Finance and University and enjoyed the same treatment as returnees, which shows that it is possible to cultivate good students with international standards in China." As Gao Jin entered his tenth year, Zhang Chun often remembered the experience of swimming 16,000 meters of the Yangtze River in the 6th grade of primary school to commemorate Mao Zedong's tour of the Yangtze River, and now the high-intensity work stimulates the fighting spirit and potential accumulated when he was young. The poems often ring in the ears. He often said that "China's economy in the past 40 years has been wonderful, and the next 40 years will be even more exciting." "Personally experienced and promoted the great changes in China's finances," once remembered, hit the water in the middle of the current, and the waves curbed the flying boat! Facing the challenges of the future, Zhang Chun is ready to try new adventures again.