Hu Angang

Hu Angang is an economics professor at Tsinghua University. He is a proponent of China's state-owned enterprises and is sometimes described as part of China's New Left.

Biography Hu Angang was born on 27 April 1953. He is named for the state-owned enterprise Anshan Iron & Steel (Angang), where his father was an engineer.

Hu received his master's degree at Beijing University of Science and Technology in 1984. He received his PhD in Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1988.

Political and economic positions Hu position is that the Chinese socialist system is superior to other systems. In a July 2011 article for the People's Forum, Hu wrote that: "The CPC has always adhered to the mass line, rooting itself among the people in order to make democratic decisions. This is manifested in the superiority of the socialist policy-making system with Chinese characteristics. This policy-making system is based on the mass line of the Party, that is from the masses, to the masses and putting into practice what has been learned from practice."

Hu is also a proponent of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) writing that they are the backbone of national growth in China. His advocacy of China's SOEs has led HU to be described as part of the Chinese New Left. This puts him at odds with Chinese former Premier Li Keqiang who favors reducing State intervention in the economy and has said that the Government should reduce its role in the economy even if doing so feels "like cutting one's wrist."

In 2012 Hu co-wrote a paper calling for the forcible assimilation of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang in an effort to create a standardized Chinese "state-race." Although this hard line policy was initially criticized within China it later gained popularity as a policy proposal. This drew strong criticism within China from social media sites and Chinese academics such as Yu Jianrong.

In August 2018 he was criticised in an open letter written by Tsinghua University alumni calling for the university to fire Hu. The letter accused him of using "self-serving criteria" in his research so as to exaggerate claims of China's greatness. The letter states that Hu espoused an exaggerated sense of national superiority and overt nationalism that, according to the letter, harms China's foreign relations whilst also misleading the public.