Background
Fan Gang was born in 1953 Beijing, China.
刚 樊
Fan Gang was born in 1953 Beijing, China.
Fan went to Northeast China in 1969 to work as a farmer in the Heilongjiang Production and Constructions Group. After the conclusion of the Chinese Cultural Revolution he passed the national college entrance examination in 1978 and graduated from Hebei University four years later with a major in political economics. From 1982 to 1985 Fan studied Western economics at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. After graduation he first became a researcher in the National Economy Research Bureau and then studied at Harvard University from 1985 to 1987, receiving his PhD in economics in 1988.
Returning to China in 1988, Fan began his career at the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, an elite government think-tank. He was later promoted to deputy director of the institute before becoming secretary-general of the China Reform Foundation, where he directed researchers conducting studies on issues related to Chinese economic growth. As an economic adviser, Fan devoted considerable energy not only to the Chinese government, but also to a number of international organizations. In 2003, he became a non-executive director of the Pingan Insurance Group of China.
Fan has been a proponent of tight monetary policy coupled with an expansionary macroeconomic strategy to stimulate Chinese domestic demand. Although people were critical of massive public investment in infrastructure by the Chinese government, which resulted in increasing government debt, Fan pointed out that macroeconomic policies would take some time to show their effectiveness, and that without adequate private investment, the government was obliged to step in until the market economy became firmly established.