Mao Jie: Aim high and achieve great success
Exclusive interview with the director, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of Finance and Taxation, w88 casino of International Business and Economics, w88 casino
(Source: "China Talents" May Issue Reporter: Zhang Yujun Gao Lanlan)
Mao Jie is an outstanding professor and doctoral supervisor at the w88 casino (hereinafter referred to as "w88 casino"). He is also the director of the Department of Finance and Taxation at the w88 casino of International Business and Economics of this famous university. Although he is over 40 years old, Mao Jie still looks young and handsome, and he has made great achievements in academics and teaching. This can be seen from the many honors he has received such as academic paper awards, outstanding teachers, teaching pacesetters, outstanding master's thesis instructors, and outstanding department heads. Before the formal interview, the reporter sent him an interview outline. Unexpectedly, he quickly responded to the interview questions in detailed text, which made the reporter truly feel his seriousness, writing skills and efficiency. When actually interviewing him and talking about his own personality characteristics, he said that he considers himself to be a person with a balanced personality, a person who coexists rationality and sensibility, and is very suitable for studying economics. "Economics studies the optimal allocation of limited resources under the constraints of limited resources. I have a perceptual face and a rational foundation, which is very consistent with my personality." Mao Jie said.
Rational choice: from studying finance to focusing on finance
Mao Jie was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang in 1979. His parents worked in the naval force factory. He has been relatively self-disciplined since he was a child. When he was five and a half years old, he left his parents and lived with his grandfather in Ningbo City. His maternal grandfather was a judicial worker and told Mao Jie many stories. It was also from that period that Mao Jie longed to become a teacher when he grew up.
In primary w88 casino and junior high w88 casino, Mao Jie was always a top student, with excellent grades in all courses, until later he was admitted to Ningbo Xiaoshi Middle w88 casino, a first-level key middle w88 casino in Zhejiang Province, and became an alumnus of Tu Youyou. Xiaoshi Middle w88 casino was established in 1912 and has a long history with numerous celebrities. There was no high-intensity teaching and competition-style review, and Mao Jie's personality was fully developed and released.
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During his master’s and doctoral studies, Mao Jie became very interested in finance under the careful guidance and training of Jin Xuejun, a well-known professor of finance. During this period, he was obsessed with various mathematical models and did not hesitate to spend a year auditing in the mathematics department. In choosing the direction of his doctoral thesis, Mao Jie continued to do research on interest rates along the track of his mentor, mainly analyzing the risk structure of interest rates theoretically. Theoretical research is very hard. Sometimes I can’t figure out the practical meaning of a basic assumption even after sitting for three days. Sometimes it takes several months to derive the optimal solution of the theoretical model that does not conform to economic intuition. Despite the difficult process, Mao Jie persisted and published relevant results in first-class domestic academic journals such as "Economics (Quarterly)" and "Financial Research".
But just when he was graduating with his Ph.D., Mao Jie always felt that finance’s pursuit of individual utility and emphasis on risk were in conflict with a certain factor in his personality. On April 14, 2008, Mao Jie got on the train to Beijing, and his destination was Tsinghua University w88 casino of Economics and Management. He will start a new journey in his life, which also means a more challenging and uncertain road. Professor Bai Chongen, the current dean of the w88 casino of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, is also Mao Jie’s postdoctoral co-supervisor, giving him a valuable opportunity to “adventure”. At that time, the Ministry of Finance and Tsinghua University w88 casino of Economics and Management jointly established the China Institute of Finance and Taxation, which undertook a large number of cutting-edge research projects. Mao Jie faced a huge difficulty. He had to put down the finance he was familiar with and pick up the finance he was not so familiar with. His friends laughed and called him "abandoning the bright and turning to the dark" when he gave up his popular finance major. However, Mao Jie felt that this was his inner calling.
During his postdoctoral period, Mao Jie’s research direction was China’s tax expenditure management system. The so-called tax expenditure refers to tax incentives that meet certain conditions. At that time, there was a lack of academic research on this issue in China, and the policy practice was also relatively backward. From August 2008 to December 2013, Mao Jie basically devoted more than five years to this research. Starting from scratch, he went through all the tax preferential policies introduced since the reform and opening up, sorted out the core content of each preferential policy, determined the amount of tax incentives generated by each policy, listed the tax expenditure calculation equation for each policy, and marked the data requirements corresponding to each variable in the calculation equation. In 2009, the more than 1,500-page "Guidelines for Calculation Methods of China's Tax Expenditures" were completed in less than a year.
The Tax Source Investigation and Analysis Office of the Taxation Department of the Ministry of Finance was only established in 2007. It is responsible for the main task of promoting China’s tax expenditure management. In 2010, it began to organize nationwide training. As a tax expenditure training expert, Mao Jie has to face 300 to 400 finance and taxation cadres from all provinces and regions across the country. He must teach the calculation principles and analysis methods to front-line business backbones in simple and easy-to-understand terms. For others, it may be shunned, but for Mao Jie, it is a stage where dreams come true. Before each training, he would spend several times the time preparing lessons. Every detail in the PPT has been engraved in Mao Jie's mind, and every calculation example and relevant background information can be delivered without script. He enjoys the process of being a teacher very much. The tax expenditure training work in the past two years from 2010 to 2011 laid a solid foundation for Mao Jie to enter the university forum in the future.
Starting from 2012, the calculation and management of tax expenditures has become a routine task of the Ministry of Finance. Their mentors, Professor Bai Chongen and Mao Jie, were very excited to see the management system they had personally built become a powerful tool that could provide important basic data. In 2013, three research reports related to tax expenditure management written by Mao Jie were adopted by the Tax Affairs Department of the Ministry of Finance. In December 2013, as the teaching and scientific research tasks at the w88 casino became increasingly heavy, he had to give up the work related to tax expenditure management.
The postdoctoral research experience at Tsinghua University w88 casino of Economics and Management not only allowed Mao Jie to complete the professional transition from finance to finance, but also established his future research direction - starting from reality, looking for major real problems, making full use of scientific analysis methods and tools, and drawing research conclusions and policy basis that are helpful for better practice. From November 2015 to November 2016, at the recommendation of Professor Bai Chongen, Mao Jie went to the University of California, San Diego, to engage in related research as a visiting scholar, which further broadened his horizons.
Passionate investment: the intersection of challenge and struggle
2011On May 30, 2019, Mao Jie joined the w88 casino of International Business and Economics of the w88 casino, and has successively undertaken the teaching work of undergraduate, master and doctoral courses such as "Finance", "Tax Economics", "Taxation", "International Finance", "Local Finance" and "Advanced Public Finance". Among them, Mao Jie paid the most for the basic course "Finance".
When he first stepped onto the podium, Mao Jie spent a lot of effort in giving lectures, but the students' response did not achieve the expected effect. By searching for the reasons, he quickly discovered the crux: First, the textbook used was "Finance" by the well-known American professor Harvey Rosen. Although the knowledge system of this textbook was relatively sound, the cases, social backgrounds and institutional changes in it were all from the United States, which students did not understand and had no strong interest in. Second, there was a big difference between undergraduate teaching and graduate teaching. Undergraduates did not have much knowledge reserves, and overly professional teaching methods often stifled their enthusiasm for learning.
So, Mao Jie decisively changed the teaching materials and used "Public Economics" compiled by two well-known domestic scholars, Yang Zhiyong and Zhang Xin. On the other hand, he changed the teaching methods and told more valuable "stories". Through stories full of realistic elements, students can realize the importance of professional knowledge. At this time, the experience accumulated in tax expenditure training comes in handy. Case teaching and "story telling" can well mobilize the enthusiasm of front-line cadres to learn, so why can't they be used to mobilize undergraduates? From then on, Mao Jie's "Finance" bid farewell to the traditional teaching method from textbook to textbook, and added a large number of practical cases in each chapter. For example, when talking about the reform process of the tax-sharing system in 1994, we will start from the National Financial Work Conference at the end of 1991, talk about the helplessness of Comrade Wang Bingqian, Minister of Finance at the time, and then talk about how Comrade Zhu Rongji led the team to overcome various difficulties and finally successfully implemented the tax-sharing system. Students welcome this teaching method very much. Mao Jie's teaching evaluation has ranked among the top 10% of the w88 casino more than 20 times, and he has won honorary titles such as w88 casino-level teaching pacesetter and outstanding teacher.
Mao Jie attaches great importance to the cultivation of undergraduate research abilities. Since his second semester at the University of International w88 and Economics, he has selected undergraduates with scientific research interests to form a "scientific research group." "I still remember the first time I carried out scientific research group activities. I interviewed more than 40 students and selected 20 from them. I used my weekend time to open a 'small stove' for these 20 students and taught them step by step how to do research and write papers. Although there were not many students who persisted in the end, they also found good seeds." One of the girls, who is now studying for a doctorate in economics in the United States, persisted in the "scientific research group".
Mao Jie has won the honor of outstanding master's thesis instructor at the w88 casino level three times. In 2019, the master's degree thesis in taxation supervised by Mao Jie won the second prize for outstanding thesis selected by the National Taxation Master's Teaching Steering Committee. The graduation thesis of the finance graduate students he supervised has been published in the top domestic economics journal "Chinese Social Sciences", as well as "Financial Research", "Finance and w88 Economics" and other first-class publications. From the beginning to the present, whether they are undergraduates or graduate students, whenever they receive a research paper, Mao Jie will give them a shocking feedback. He would immediately revise it word for word, sentence by sentence, and usually return a review draft full of revisions and comments to the students the next day, even down to the punctuation changes. The ability to develop such a piercing gaze is supported by Mao Jie's own strong academic skills.
Full of responsibility: Cultivate yourself with a sense of responsibility
Since 1997, Mao Jie has been engaged in academic research in the field of finance and 11 years in the field of finance and taxation. He has published nearly 80 papers/parts, and his research results in the field of finance and taxation are particularly outstanding. The paper "How do tax incentives affect investment and productivity?" co-authored with Professor Liu Yongzheng of Renmin University of China. Evidence from Chinese Enterprises" was published in the world-class academic journal "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy". The study found that my country's value-added tax transformation reform implemented from 2004 to 2009 had a significant positive impact on enterprises' expansion of investment and technological progress, providing empirical evidence from China for international research on the economic effects of tax reform. This paper won the first prize of the 2018 Zou Zhizhuang Best Economics Paper Award. The paper "The Institutional Basis for the Growth of Local Public Debt - A Fiscal and Financial Perspective" co-authored with Professor Lu Bingyang and doctoral student Liu Pan of Renmin University of China was published in the top domestic academic journal "Chinese Social Sciences" and was reprinted in full by "Xinhua Digest". This paper overcomes the shortcomings of existing studies that use finance to discuss finance, takes into account the dual perspectives of finance and finance, and proves theoretically and empirically that the fiscal system and the financial system jointly promote the continued growth of local public debt in my country.
In the past decade or so, local government debt has played an increasingly important role in my country's economic and social development. Since 2013, Mao Jie has continued to pay attention to the local government debt problem. Because the public debt issue happens to be the connection point between the two majors of finance and finance, it contains both a large amount of fiscal theory and cutting-edge issues in the financial field, allowing his professional skills to be brought into full play. In 2019, Mao Jie undertook a major project of the National Social Science Fund, specializing in studying the new characteristics and regulatory countermeasures of local government debt risks in the new era, and has achieved key phased results.
Mao Jie’s scientific research path has not been smooth and has been full of setbacks and even failures, but his interest and sense of responsibility have driven him to continue exploring. Modern economic research is inseparable from reliable basic data. As soon as he started studying local government debt, Mao Jie encountered the problem of lack of basic data. What to do if there is no reliable data? In 2018, he recruited a doctoral student with long-term work experience in a financing platform company. This "boss student" was very familiar with the front-line business of local government debt, but lacked confidence in how to convert real-life problems into academic research. After two years of hard work, Mao Jie fully mobilized the academic enthusiasm of this "boss student" and jointly constructed a set of basic data for studying China's local government debt problems. This set of data has been cited by a large number of studies and has had widespread social influence.
In addition to a large number of teaching and scientific research tasks, Mao Jie also undertakes a lot of trivial administrative work. Serving as a class teacher for freshmen undergraduates and guiding them through four years of college is a very challenging job. When students encounter difficulties in life or study, or are confused about future development, he will use his own experience to talk face-to-face with students, telling students that difficulties and confusion are inevitable, and the important thing is how to overcome these difficulties and confusion. Mao Jie, with his frankness and sincerity, spared no effort in giving, became the "irrefutable counselor" in the minds of students, and won the honor of outstanding class teacher.
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Mao Jie has wanted to be a teacher since he was a child. He has been pursuing his ideal with unswerving determination. From a student to a young leader, a scholar and a famous teacher, he has relied not only on his talent and intelligence, but also on his diligence, self-discipline, seriousness, responsibility, and courage to take on responsibilities. We have reason to believe that he will achieve greater academic achievements in the future and cultivate more professional talents for the country.
Attachment: Layout of the May issue of "Chinese Talents"
