Wen Tiejun

Wen Tiejun (; born May 1951) is a Chinese agricultural economist and a professor at the Renmin University of China, who is well-known for his studies in the Three Rural Issues in Mainland China.

Biography Wen was born in Beijing in May 1951, while his ancestral home in Changli County, Hebei. After graduating from the Journalism Department of the Renmin University of China in 1983, he was sent by the Chinese government to study in the Institute of Social Investigation of the University of Michigan and the World Bank, and then studied at the Columbia University, Cornell University and the University of Southern California. In 2000, he studied at the Duke University, and lectured at Johns Hopkins University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California, Berkeley and Carter Center.

After returning to China, Wen studied in both the School of Economics and Management and the Graduate School of China Agricultural University. He successively worked in the Research Office of the General Political Department of the Central Military Commission, the Central Rural Policy Research Office, the Liaison Office of the Rural Development Research Center of the State Council, the Office of the National Rural Reform Experimental Zone, the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the China Economic System Reform Research Association.

Views In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wen critiqued China's approach to rural marketization and nationwide urbanization policies. He criticized state-directed rural modernization and what he viewed as the fetishization of technocratic modernization models.

Wen often expresses his views of sustainable development with reference to the concept of ecological civilization. Wen's approach to ecological civilization emphasizes the need to maintain traditional rural ways of living while supporting income parity, small-scale production, and social justice. As of at least 2023, Wen's interpretations of the ecological civilization concept are a minority view within Chinese political and academic discourse on the subject.

Publications

Co-authored publications