Walter Hutchens’ Blog

This weekend I’m attending a meeting on financial reform in China. The event has the ambitious title Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for China and the United States. Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems and the China Development Research Foundation organized the meeting.

The idea of the meeting is to bring together corporate, government and business leaders to discuss financial sector reform and development in China. Big names from banking, insurance, securities, law and government are here (both from China and the US). I feel lucky to participate in the conversations.

The symposium is organized around three broad topics:

1. Financial Market Liberalization
2. Corporate Governance
3. New Thoughts on the Bretton Woods System

For each of these topics, today a keynote speaker or panel discussed the topic in a plenary session.

Then, for the first two topics, there were small-group discussion sessions.

Tomorrow, based on a synthesis of reports from these small group sessions, the plenary group will further discuss each topic. Afterward, a final report will be produced (I’ve been asked to draft that).

Obviously, these are complex issues, and a only a limited amount of discussion can be held in a single weekend. Cross-cultural communication can be challenging, even though a lot of the Chinese are bilingual and concurrent translation is available for all sessions. Sometimes, Chinese and foreign participants don’t seem to understand each other’s background assumptions and use the same words to talk about different things. But overall I think the model is a very fruitful one, and it’s great to see HLS organizing an event like this.