Duke Kunshan has three majors with tracks in economics: Global China studies focuses on national, regional and cultural development in the context of globalization; institutions and governance examines formal and informal governance at local, national and global levels; and political economy explores international relations, and the relationships between politics and markets.
Student Media Center fellow Ru Jia ’22 asked four economics majors to share their learning and research experiences.
‘Learning without thinking is useless’
Chenling Qu ’22 says her fascination with economics started when she read an article by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom in her first year at Duke Kunshan. The topic was public resources and autonomous governance ‘ and it was an eye-opening experience, she says.
Before that article, she hadn’t considered there was such a close relationship between economics and institutional governance. She looked deeper and discovered that economics is not just about micro and macro concepts, as she’d believed ‘ it’s about a totally interdisciplinary way of thinking.
Qu realized that negative externality arises when one person’s actions harm another, which has profound implications for public policymaking. She also learned that people subconsciously behave in ways that counter economic concepts; for instance, consumers assign different values to items of the same price. A self-interested consumer with the shrewd mindset of an economist can avoid irrational consumer behaviors.
Understanding how to stay rational is one benefit of studying economics, she says, quoting Confucius by adding, ‘Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.’
Qu began working as a research assistant to Jingbo Cui, associate professor of applied economics, in summer 2020 to examine patent quality in China. In 2019, the country surpassed the United States to become No. 1 in the world for patent applications. Qu’s duties included literature reviews, processing data using the Stata software, and data visualization.
The project gave Qu the opportunity to apply what she’d studied in class to a real-world problem. She learned a lot about research methods, processing data in a more logical way, digging deeper into a problem, and dealing with fine details.
‘Qu’s ability to learn and use Stata to process millions of pieces of data within such a short time was outstanding,’ Cui said. ‘She’s one of my best research assistants.’
Sharpened tools for the working world
Leonardo Barb??ra ’23 already had extensive internship experience when he started college, having worked in Shanghai at the Italian Chamber of Commerce and law firm Studio Legale Picozzi Morigi, and in London at the Bank of Italy.
Moving between two international centers of finance, he became deeply interested in the open and liberal atmosphere that economic development can bring. He decided to major in economics in the hope of combining the subject with broader approaches to research.
Taking advantage of Duke Kunshan’s interdisciplinary curriculum, Barb??ra took a variety of courses in his first two years to understand the diverse perspectives that surround economic issues. He says he noticed differences in the teaching methods between Chinese professors and those from other countries, with the former focusing more on knowledge acquisition and practice, and the latter emphasizing in-class student engagement.
Regardless of the teaching method, he feels it’s important to develop learning capacity and critical thinking skills. ‘A workman must first sharpen his tools if he is to do his work well,’ he says, quoting an old Chinese saying.
Barb??ra says the economics curriculum at Duke Kunshan not only teaches undergraduate students about development, trade, and inequality in the context of globalization but also how to use tools such as statistics and programming, and how to analyze economic phenomena.
In 2020, he enrolled in an online summer program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He learned more about finance based on real-life issues and was able to improve significantly his analytical and problem-solving skills.
He also participated in the Business for Good contest led by the DKU Common Good Lab, which sees student teams help companies improve their social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. Barb??ra’s team won first place after helping Terran, a retail company, achieve its sustainability goals by devising a plan to ensure all its suppliers meet high standards.
Getting a head start on startup success
Evelyn Lim ’22 has long aspired to be an entrepreneur. Her role model is Lim Wee-Chai, founder of Top Glove, the world’s largest glove manufacturer, who went from cultivating rubber plantations in rural Malaysia to cultivating customers across the United States.
To achieve the same level of success, Lim felt she needed at least a basic grounding in economics, to understand how to analyze markets and competitors. However, she soon discovered at Duke Kunshan that there’s more to economics than that. In fact, she says, it’s helped her explore many dimensions that can affect a company’s performance.
In POLECON 201: International Political Economy, a course taught by lecturer David Landry, Lim learned about the international monetary system. In her final paper, she analyzed why the Malaysian currency, the ringgit, has been among the world’s worst performing currencies for several years. She identified that national politics was one reason, and realized that various factors can affect business performance such as exchange rates and local government policies. In her Ethics and Leadership class, Lim also started to consider the role corporate ethics plays in running a successful business.
Lim is not waiting until graduation to put her entrepreneurial skills into practice. After noticing that university students tend to get internships only during the summer and winter vacations, and that companies recruit through open applications and resume screening, she teamed up with three like-minded classmates to create a student talent pool.
The goal is to help students work as freelancers on corporate projects, providing opportunities to gain professional experience even during the fall and spring semesters.
In her sophomore year, Lim and her team secured seed capital from DKU’s Innovation Incubator. She then began early-stage research based on four key questions: Is there a ready market? How do I register my company? How do foreigners start a company in China? Can a Chinese company enter the U.S. market?
Her team has held multiple job-seeker workshops for students and contacted a range of companies to explore internship opportunities. She says DKU’s interdisciplinary approach to economics means she can always find something meaningful to discuss with various stakeholders, allowing her to build strong connections.
Finding the science in social change
For Jiasheng Zhu ’22, economics is to society what physics is to the natural world. Using economic concepts to analyze consumer behavior, corporate strategies and policymaking is equivalent, he says, to applying astrophysics to explain how the sun, moon and stars interact.
In the spirit of ‘knowledge in the service of society,’ he felt it was important to study economics to truly understand how the world works.
Zhu has performed well inside and outside the classroom. Sometimes he stays up all night to read hundreds of pages of course materials. However, gaining knowledge from a course is more important to him than a 4.0 GPA.
He cites POLECON 302: China’s Economic Transition as an example. Zhu says that, like many Chinese students, before taking the course he could share only general ideas about China’s politics and economy. By the end of the semester, he felt he’d learned about developments in all aspects of Chinese society, and was able to talk confidently on the country’s industrialization, its hukou housing registration system, and urban-rural inequality.
To apply what he’d learned in real-world settings and situations, Zhu interned at a securities company and became a research assistant in the Behavioral Economics Lab established by Luyao Zhang, assistant professor of economics.
Find out more about Duke Kunshan’s interdisciplinary majors.
