Giles Chance is a professor at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. He is a leading expert on Chinese business, and on China’s new role in the world. He is an adept and experienced keynote speaker on subjects ranging from business and finance to emerging markets and economics. Background and career

Giles’s experience in China over the last 20 years has given him a unique perspective on the aspirations of the Chinese people and the difficulties that China faces, as China emerges fully into the world economy as a major economic and political player.

Giles’ book ‘China and the Credit Crisis: the emergence of a new world order’, published in 2009, describes how China’s emergence in the 1990’s played a key role in establishing the economic conditions which led to the global credit crisis of 2007-08. The book analyses China’s new global role after the crisis in relation to a number of key topics which include the future role of the US dollar, and the future of relations between China, America, the emerging world, and Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Giles was educated at Eton College, at St Andrews’ University in Scotland and at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. After military service, he spent 2 years working in the Horn of Africa prior to the famous and tragic famine of 1984 in Ethiopia, before working at the World Bank in Washington DC where he met his future wife, one of the first Chinese economists to leave China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1986 Giles returned to London, and worked as a fund manager in the City.

Prompted by his 1989 homeymoon in China, Giles started a company with offices in Beijing, Shanghai and London which advised Western multinationals on their business in China, and also assisted Chinese enterprises to acquire technology from Western, mainly European companies. Between 1989 and 1996, Giles advised many large Western companies in China, including Barclays Bank, Vodafone, Rolls-Royce, Littlewoods, Marks and Spencer, Boots and many others. He also completed over 70 sales of Western technology to Chinese companies, in fields as diverse as submarine communications, transfer lines for machining auto parts, submersible pumps and black box recording systems for civil aircraft.

By 1995 Giles decided to cut back on business to focus more on family. He sold the advisory business, and in 1997 moved to Beijing to educate his children at a Chinese primary school, while he advised investors in China and helped to raise capital for a Chinese internet start-up. In 2003 he originated and found backing for a successful China-focused investment bank based in London, Shanghai and Hong Kong, called Evolution Securities China. He was then based at Pudong, the famous high-rise development in Shanghai which is the site of the current Shanghai Expo.

In December 2010 he became a regular columnist for The Economic Observer, a weekly business journal published in Beijing.

Business Professor