Gao Shanwen, Chinese economist who challenged GDP figures, dies at 55

Economist banned from speaking after GDP challenge draws tributes

Gao Shanwen, a prominent Chinese economist who spent three decades in the country’s financial sector, died July 7 of T-cell lymphoma at age 55, the Wall Street Journal reported. People close to him told the Journal the illness had lasted more than a year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Xi Jinping was furious in December 2024 when Gao spoke at a Washington forum hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. At the time, Gao was chief economist at SDIC Securities. He told the audience that China’s real GDP growth was probably running at less than half the official figure — around 2%, according to the Journal, not the nearly 5% Beijing was claiming. He also questioned whether the leadership had the will to deliver the stimulus it kept promising.

Xi ordered an investigation, the Journal reported, citing the account of Wei. The investigation was carried out by Xi’s chief of staff, Cai Qi. Gao was banned from speaking publicly, according to the Journal. A university lecture he was due to give was abruptly canceled, blamed on his “personal schedule.”

According to the Journal, symptoms of Gao’s illness emerged around the same weeks as the punishment. He surfaced publicly only once after that, in a subdued video address to a Peking University forum in September 2025. He stepped down from SDIC in November 2025. The formal diagnosis of stage IV cancer came in December.

The Journal noted that no direct medical line can be drawn from the Communist Party censure to the cancer diagnosis, but the coincidence of timing was not lost on those close to him.

Tributes appeared on Chinese social media despite censorship. On Xiaohongshu, the RedNote app, one widely echoed comment described Gao as “a rare economist who spoke the truth,” adding that “only the ‘optimist’ economists are left.” The Journal reported that censors had so far allowed much of the tribute to stand.

Some in China’s finance circles compared Gao to Zhuge Liang, the third-century strategist known for foresight, the Journal said. People trusted his economic analysis, the Journal reported, because he was “more interested in being right than in sounding reassuring.”

Gao’s career included stints at the People’s Bank of China, Everbright Securities, and SDIC Securities, where his research notes moved markets. In a 2019 conversation with the Journal’s Wei, Gao described state-owned enterprises as “the legs of the Communist Party,” adding, “You don’t amputate your own legs.” The Journal called that remark “one of the more prescient observations anyone made about this era of Chinese economic policy.”

The Journal reported that Beijing shows little sign of changing how it reports growth, and that the campaign to silence what authorities call “unprofessional” economists has accelerated since Gao’s punishment, with regulators warning brokerages to keep analysts “positive.”