Diana is recognised as one of the foremost experts on the Chinese economy. As Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England from 2003-2013, said of her, “It is increasingly rare to find an economist who eschews the conventional wisdom and is prepared to think for herself. In today’s uncertain world it is a priceless quality. Diana Choyleva is such a person.”

In her words, Diana says: “To understand the Chinese economy you have to understand the communist mind, and I have the unlikely advantage of having grown up in Bulgaria before the Berlin Wall came down. But, having been trained by some of the greatest Western economists, I also understand how the market economy works. I am one of the few economists who really knows capitalism, communism and how the two have come together in China.”

Diana set up Enodo Economics, an independent macroeconomic forecasting company, in 2016 to untangle complexity, challenge the consensus and make sense of the future.

For 16 years prior she worked at Lombard Street Research, most recently as their chief economist and head of research. In that role, she set the agenda for the firm’s team of economists and strategists while conducting her own global analysis. She joined LSR after completing her master’s degree in economics in 2000, and over the years has covered a wide range of developing and developed economies. Diana became a director of LSR in 2005 and headed the firm’s UK service from then until 2009. Between 2010 and 2013 she was based in Hong Kong overseeing LSR’s expansion in Asia.

She is best known for her analysis of China, including the book she co-wrote in 2011, ‘The American Phoenix – and why China and Europe will struggle after the coming slump’. Diana writes regular opinion pieces for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, etc. She has extensive global experience engaging with all manner of audiences and has made frequent television appearances, including on BBC’s Newsnight on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Nigel has had a long career as a security and intelligence expert. Understanding China is not just about China in isolation. To understand China, you have to be able to read its long-term strategic intentions, especially at this time of tectonic political change. As James Mulvenon at SOS International LLC says, “Nigel Inkster fuses impressive academic learning with decades of experience as a senior intelligence professional.”

In his words, Nigel says: “I have followed China's development from the Cultural Revolution to the present day and have sought to analyse this within both the context of China's history and culture and the contemporary global strategic context. I regularly read, listen to and watch Chinese-language media and seek to combine what I learn from this with my own first-hand experience.”

He worked for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank, from 2007 to 2017. Prior to that he served for 31 years in the British Secret Intelligence Service, retiring at the end of 2006 as assistant chief and director of operations and intelligence.

His research has focused on transnational terrorism, insurgency, transnational organised crime, cyber security, intelligence and security and the evolving character of conflict. He has written and broadcast on all these topics and has also been engaged in a variety of para-diplomatic activities on behalf of the UK government, including leading a Sino-UK Track 1.5 Cyber Security Dialogue. In 2020, he authored “The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy”, a book published by Hurst and which Professor Rory Medcalf described as, “A timely, sane and compelling account of the techno-strategic contest that will shape the worlds of 2020s and beyond”. In 2016, he authored China’s Cyber Power, an IISS Adelphi book published by Routledge.

He graduated from St John’s College Oxford with a BA in oriental studies (Chinese). He is married with two children and one grandchild and lives in London.

Dinny spent a decade working as a financial journalist in Beijing and Shanghai. As the Wall Street Journal’s finance correspondent, he tracked closely the evolution of China’s shadow banking system and the rapid expansion in corporate debt that followed the Global Financial Crisis. Dinny is also the author of China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banking, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of Chinese Miracle, which The Economist said "comes closer than any previous writer to covering the Chinese economy as Michael Lewis, the hugely popular author of The Big Short, might do."

In his words, Dinny says, “China’s financial system needs to be understood from the bottom up. Top-down policy is invariably implemented by firms and lower level bureaucrats in ways shaped by their own interests, incentives, and priorities, and not the interest of the leaders in Beijing. When trying to understand changes in China’s financial system I start by asking myself the question, “what aren’t I seeing.”

Dinny spent two years in Beijing and Kunming learning Chinese before spending a year at the John Hopkins SAIS campus in Nanjing to study international relations. After that he wrote for Dow Jones Newswires in Shanghai, where he also contributed to the Far Eastern Economic Review, before moving to Beijing with WSJ. He wrote China’s Great Wall of Debt while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC, before moving to MacroPolo, the Paulson Institute’s think tank in Chicago, where he focused on China’s efforts to clean up its financial system.

Dr. Barbara Wang is a full-time professor of cross-cultural leadership, and she is the Associate Dean for China Initiatives. Barbara is an expert in Cross-cultural Leadership and Chinese Leadership. She has conducted leadership development programs bilingually in English and Chinese for multinational companies such as ABB, Volvo, Daimler, Continental, Brose, Sinopec, China Post and Bank of China. She teaches executive programmes at Ashridge and universities such as Churchill College of University of Cambridge and China Business Executive Academy, Dalian.

Prior to joining Ashridge, Barbara was a Vice President for the Western Management Institute of Beijing. Her commercial experience extends to working for multinational companies in China where she was the Retail Operations Director in China for Louis Vuitton group; and the Global Accounts Director in China for DHL.

Barbara has graduated with an MBA, and PhD, her current research is in cross-cultural leadership/management of Chinese enterprises in Europe. She is qualified in many leadership psychometric tools. Her book “Chinese Leadership” was published in the UK and well received by western managers, her new book “Guanxi in the West Context: Intra-firm Group Dynamics and Expatriate Adjustment” was published in July 2019 in the UK.