“Among our classmates, we all thought Pan was impressive because he didn’t have a great college degree,” remembers Liu Xin, a Renmin University professor who studied with China’s new central banker in the 1980s. “But he had English skills outstanding enough to translate a book. We all thought it wasn’t an easy feat.”
Pan has since made a career out of exceeding expectations. In the 21st century’s first decade, as a state bank executive he twice captained initial public offerings that set a world record, boosting global investor confidence in China and earning himself a reputation as a “financial rock star.”
He later managed the nation’s $3 trillion pile of foreign reserves and helped oversee efforts to rein in debt-laden property firms – designing the “three red lines” policy that fuelled a wave of financial distress at developers including China Evergrande Group.
Then his career seemed to near an end. At a leadership congress last year the technocrat was removed from the Communist Party’s elite Central Committee, an inner web that’s included every central bank governor since the 1990s. Analysts took that as a sign the bookish Pan, who has few known political connections, had been sidelined during President Xi Jinping‘s reshuffle.
This month, he proved them wrong. Pan, now 60, was appointed governor of the People’s Bank of China, uniting that role with the party chief title for the first time since Zhou Xiaochuan held both in 2018. He’s now firmly in charge of the institution tasked with steering the world’s second-largest economy through a growth slowdown and safeguarding the $60 trillion domestic financial system – although his lack of Central Committee membership could diminish his political sway.
Pan’s mission comes as China confronts fears its growth miracle is ending. The nation is teetering on the brink of deflation, its vast property market is shrinking and business confidence is waning. All that’s happening as the population shrinks and geopolitical tensions with top trade partners sizzle.
Six months ago Beijing’s rumour mill would tell you maybe he was not the frontrunner, said Fred Hu, founder of Chinese investment firm Primavera Capital, who worked with Pan during the IPOs. “But in the end, the leadership made the right decisio.”
Pan was born to farmers in a remote nook of Anhui province, in eastern China, according to Hu. After studying and teaching economics at a junior college in neighboring Zhejiang, in 1987 he enrolled at Renmin University. After graduating in 1993 with a PhD in economics, he landed a job in the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China’s real estate credit department.
In 1999, Pan signed up to the Communist Party, a prerequisite for any big career in the state sector, and began to climb the ladder. By 2006, he was playing a leading role in restructuring the state lender and taking it public in Hong Kong and Shanghai for nearly $22 billion – then a world record.
During that period, Pan was a “task master,” says Hu, a former Greater China head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., who worked with him at ICBC. The trained economist took daily logs of investment bankers’ office hours and pored over the ICBC deal prospectus picking out spelling errors, according to media reports.
His dedication paid off: Four years later, he helped the Agricultural Bank of China top ICBC’s offering, nudging it over the $22 billion mark – another world record for a public offering. The successful IPOs, and the structural reforms they required to reassure global investors, showcased Pan’s flair for navigating international markets.
More than that, the deals boosted global confidence in China’s banking sector, helping it stand up to global competition in the critical test years after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. In 2011, he spent a semester at the Harvard Kennedy School as a New World Fellow, a program to encourage collaboration between the US and Chinese leaders. And his return from America brought more success.