IMF special adviser? He looks more like low-key China academic
With his wire-rim glasses and sombre suits, Mr Zhu Min looks more like a low key academic than a hot-shot banker who has just been admitted into the inner circle of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In fact, a common reaction from those who meet the private unassuming Mr Zhu for the first time is: “He doesn’t look like the deputy govenor of China’s central bank at all,” according to the Oriental Morning Post, a newspaper in Shanghai, where Mr Zhu was born in 1953.
Growing up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he had to forgo his studies for a few years to work as a truck driver and mover at a sugar factory. He enrolled in Fudan University in 1982 to study finance. He continued a brilliant academic career at Princeton University and later at John Hopkins University in the United States where he received a doctorate in macro-economy and international finance.
After working from 1990 to 1996 at the World Bank, he decided to return to China. “I needed my motherland,” he once told a Shanghai TV station in an interview.
He joined Bank of China in 1996 and has now capped his career with a new appointment as a “special adviser” to the IMF – a position some say may catapult him to the No.1 or No.2 post at the Fund next year.
Mr Zhu has been lauded as “a man worth listening to” by the Britsh paper the Guardian for being a lone voice of reason at the World Economic Conference in Davos, warning about the risks of massive asset bubbles in 2007, a year before the global credit crisis errupted.
While speaking on his pet topic of international finance at a major forum in 2007, he was reminded by the moderator that his time for speaking was up. His answer in Mandarin raised chuckles from the audience: “This is an important topic to me, please allow me to be romantic and wax lyrical for a while more!”
Mr Zhu is also a doting father, who reportedly exchanges e-mail or telephone calls at least once a day with his only daughter who is studying in Princeton University.
Sunday Times – Feb 28th