The following is a summary of Fan Shide's comments during a rountable discussion at the Eighth Annual Conference of Government and Economics held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, on May 23, 2026. Fan Shide is Professor and Dean of Nanjing Audit University's School of Economics.
On May 27, 2026, the Eighth Annual Conference of Government and Economics, co-hosted by the Society for the Analysis of Government and Economics (SAGE) along with Tsinghua University's School of Social Sciences and the Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking (ACCEPT), was broadcasted online. Professor and Dean of Nanjing Audit University's School of Economics, Fan Shide, participated in a lively roundtable discussion where he highlighted some challenges associated with China's ongoing poverty alleviation drive.
Fan commented that research on government and economics closely aligns with the ultimate goal of the discipline of economics playing a role in serving China's major national strategies. At present, the movement of labor from rural areas to urban areas, moving from areas of underdevelopment to more developed areas, has been enormous, with this overall trend having become increasingly evident. Since the country's targeted poverty alleviation has focused on rural and underdeveloped areas, large-scale population movements at this current stage may lead to gaps in policies targeting poverty alleviation and regional divides. This is an issue area that government and economics must pay close attention to when taking government incentive mechanisms into consideration. At the same time, when promoting rural revitalization and accelerating urban-rural integration, it is also necessary to fully bring to bear the potential impacts of a lopsided population structure that has arisen as a result of labor outflows in rural areas.
Fan also expressed support for David Daokui Li's approach of fostering government and economics into a distinctive branch of learning, underscoring that this approach is beneficial for cultivating professional researchers and advancing in-depth research within this field. In addition, he suggested that if government and economics is to be considered a unique subdiscipline within economics, it is necessary to clearly define its inherent features, conceptions, subject matter, delimitations and connections with other disciplinary fields.