Syaru Shirley Lin

Few people understand Asia’s economic and political future with the depth, experience and authority of Syaru Shirley Lin.

Lin began her career at Goldman Sachs, where she became one of the firm’s youngest female partners and one of its first Asian partners. Leading the firm’s investment efforts across twelve countries in Asia, she made calls that would shape the region’s economic landscape for decades. She led the first round of institutional investment in Alibaba and was a founding board member of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s top chipmaker.

A cum laude Harvard graduate, Lin left Goldman for academia. Earning her masters and doctorate from the University of Hong Kong, she launched an entirely new career as a scholar, policy analyst and public intellectual.

Today, Syaru Shirley Lin is a nonresident faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She chairs the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank whose collaborators include the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution, the London School of Economics and the World Health Organisation Foundation.

Lin is the author of Taiwan’s China Dilemma, a landmark examination of Taiwan’s national identity and its foreign economic policy. Her current work examines six Asia-Pacific economies navigating the high-income trap, grappling with inequality, demographic decline, polarisation and the urgent need for policy reinvention.

Syaru Shirley Lin continues to serve on the boards of Goldman Sachs Asia Bank, MediaTek and TE Connectivity, among others. She is highly sought after for her views on geopolitics, US-China relations, economic resilience, innovation and the forces reshaping the Asia-Pacific.