There is considerable speculation in Beijing that 61-YEAR OLD Guo Shuqing, current chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, is likely to replace Zhou Xiaochuan as Governor of the People's Bank of China (PBoC).  Guo Shuqing holds similar liberal views to the retiring governor Zhou Xiaochuan, and his appointment will ensure the presence of a well-known market believer in President Xi Jinping’s economic team. However, at a meeting of delegates in Beijing on October 19, Zhou Xiaochuan declined to give any clues of his successor . 

(Comment: Guo Shuqing, was born in Inner Mongolia and he studied philosophy at the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin and later studied socialism in the Marxism and Leninism Department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in the 1980s. He later joined a small team that was studying how to dismantle China’s command economic system in favour of a market-based one. The office was later disbanded but its key members continued to climb China’s bureaucratic ladder, becoming Beijing’s most capable hands on economic, financial and monetary matters, and were able to weave their early views into state policies that fundamentally shaped the economic landscape. 

Guo Shuqing, who spent a year at Oxford University as a visiting scholar from July 1986, is fluent in English and is one of a small group of senior cadres who can speak directly with their international peers.  He was a Deputy Governor of the PBoC and the chief of State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), the agency that runs China’s capital control and foreign exchange reserves, from 2001 to 2005. He became chairman of the China Construction Bank in 2005. In 2011, he became chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the stock market regulator, and launched many reform measures that dazzled market watchers.)