Weijian Shan Keynote Speaker

Weijian Shan is an economist, businessman, and author based in Hong Kong. He is the Chairman and CEO of the investment firm, PAG, and author of “Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America“.

Weijian Shan grew up in mainland China during Mao’s revolution. He was raised in a one-room home in Beijing. He was pulled out of school as a young boy and put to hard labour in the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia. Six year later he returned to Beijing and his life changed dramatically as one of the first students to study in the USA amid an easing of US-China tensions. Weijian Shan completed a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying under future Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen. She later wrote a foreword in his 2019 book, “Out of the Gobi”.

After leaving Berkeley, Weijian Shan landed jobs at JP Morgan, the World Bank and TPG Capital. He joined PAG in 2010 to set up their private equity business. Since then, the company has become one of Asia’s largest investors with assets of over US$50bn.

Reviewing his book, “Out of the Gobi”, the Financial Times’ Global China Editor Editor James Kynge said, “This is no ordinary memoir. It is the engrossing, vivid personal story of someone buffeted by the tides of China’s tumultuous emergence from poverty to power in the space of a few decades. Weijian Shan’s journey from rural exile in the Gobi Desert to the heights of international finance is a metaphor for China itself.”

Weijian Shan also sits as a board member for Alibaba.