The Future of Finance China 2025 took place against a backdrop of deep transformation. The world economy is being reshaped by the resurgence of protectionist trade measures—most notably the United States’ reintroduction of reciprocal tariffs—and by the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence. These twin forces are challenging established frameworks of cooperation, disrupting supply chains, and redrawing the competitive map of industries, especially financial services.
Amidst these big themes of trade and technology, I chose to begin differently. Not with statistics or policy, but with a story from my own life.
Outside of work, my great passion has always been travel. Over the years, I have visited 141 countries. And wherever I go—whether Africa, South America, or Southeast Asia—I find Chinese people. Shops, restaurants, and businesses appear in even the most remote and poorest countries.
This always leaves me with questions. Why do people leave a country like China, which has enjoyed decades of rapid growth and still grows around 5% annually, to settle in such difficult places?
When I step into Chinese-run shops in Namibia or Rwanda, I begin to understand. I see ordinary families carrying three to five million dollars of inventory. I see them selling affordable, everyday goods that transform the lives of local communities. These are not state-backed projects or Belt and Road investments. These are grassroots entrepreneurs funding themselves, helping each other, and building futures in unlikely places.
One such conversation in Windhoek, Namibia, has stayed with me. A shopkeeper who had lived there for more than twenty years told me he never had a big ambition—just survival. “Everywhere is difficult,” he said. “Whether in China or abroad, you just find a way.” Over time, his small business provided a better livelihood than wages back home — a story of quiet determination, familiar to many Chinese abroad.
This is another side of the China story. At the official level, we know about Belt and Road and state-owned enterprises going global. But at the personal level, China is defined by the energy of its people—people who save, borrow, and support each other in order to venture abroad. It is this energy that makes China not only a successful economy, but also a global community that reaches into the farthest places on earth.
Some Western commentators misunderstand Chinese communities as insular. What I have witnessed is the opposite: natural, warm integration with locals, bringing affordable goods and shared prosperity.
That is the China I love. It is not only a story of financial strategies and government policy, but also of ordinary people with extraordinary resilience. And it is this story that should inform how we think about China’s future role in a reshaped world order—one where economic fragmentation and digital transformation will test the resilience of all nations.
