Economics was not a subject on my high-school timetable. I grew up in Ningxia and attend a Chinese public school that follows the national curriculum, where we study nine subjects but have no AP, A-Level, IB, or dedicated economics courses. I first learned economics by working through the Pearson Edexcel International A-Level syllabus myself, and later studied AP Macroeconomics and Microeconomics alongside my regular schoolwork and piano training. I earned a 5 in AP Macroeconomics, a 4 in AP Microeconomics, and an A in AS Economics. What kept me interested was not simply learning another subject outside school. Economics gave me a way to ask questions that were difficult to answer from mathematics alone: why individually reasonable decisions can produce collectively undesirable outcomes, how costs and benefits are distributed, why information changes behavior, and why the same economic shock can be manageable for one family but devastating for another.
My study of microeconomics led me to market structure, barriers to entry, game theory, and the network effects that can make an already successful firm or location even more attractive. Macroeconomics raised a different set of questions about unemployment, inflation, aggregate demand, exchange rates, government spending, and the limits imposed by public budgets. I began to see how the two levels are connected. A technological improvement can increase productivity, but the distribution of that gain depends on who can afford to adopt the technology, who controls market access, and how firms, workers, and governments respond. Greater efficiency does not automatically imply greater equality or greater resilience. These questions eventually became the focus of a team case study on port automation.
Port Automation, Concentration, and Resilience
In a four-person economics case-study team, I worked on the relationship between port automation, shipping-network concentration, and economic resilience, using Shanghai Port as a focal case. Our approach drew on process tracing: rather than treating automation as an isolated technological improvement, we tried to follow the sequence of decisions and incentives through which it might alter a wider transport network. Automated terminals require substantial fixed investment, technical capacity, and organizational coordination. Ports with sufficient capital can potentially reduce delays and improve reliability, while ports with fewer resources may struggle to adopt comparable systems. Shipping companies and alliances then have incentives to direct traffic toward ports that offer more predictable and efficient service. Once traffic begins to concentrate, network effects and further investment may reinforce that advantage. The result can be a system in which many individual decisions are rational, yet the network as a whole becomes increasingly dependent on a smaller number of nodes.
What interested me was the difference between efficiency under ordinary conditions and resilience under disruption. A port that handles enormous volumes efficiently is valuable to the firms using it. But if an entire network increasingly depends on the same hub, a disruption there may affect far more than the port itself. Automation can also change labor demand, bargaining relationships, and the ability of smaller ports to compete. Our project examined this proposed mechanism—capital-intensive adoption, shifts in routing incentives, concentration, and potential systemic exposure—rather than assuming that all automation necessarily produces the same outcome. I was particularly interested in how to separate genuine causal mechanisms from correlations that happen to appear together. The case-study project received a Gold Award and advanced to the next stage of its competition. Its broader questions remain important to me: when does an efficiency gain become a source of dependence, and how should public policy weigh the benefits of scale against the costs of fragility?
Information, Public Trust, and Short-Video Platforms
A different question emerged from watching the growing influence of short-video platforms on public discussion. In China, short videos have become an important way for people to encounter news, health claims, consumer warnings, and explanations of government policy. The speed of distribution is remarkable, but so is the difficulty of establishing what is reliable. I became especially interested in situations where merchants or content producers have a commercial incentive to exaggerate food-safety risks, where an alarming claim spreads more easily than a careful correction, and where people with limited time or access to reliable explanations must make decisions based on incomplete information. I wanted to understand this not simply as a problem of incorrect content, but as a problem of information asymmetry, incentives, and social trust.
I began outlining a project on Information Asymmetry, Social Trust, and Public Communication in the Era of Short Video, using signaling theory, public-choice reasoning, cost-benefit analysis, and game theory. One question was why official institutions sometimes delay a response or communicate ambiguously when a controversy is complicated or politically sensitive. A detailed explanation may be expensive, difficult to deliver, or likely to invite further disagreement. Silence may appear cheaper in the short run, but it can allow uncertainty and distrust to accumulate. I considered a model involving public institutions, audiences, and producers of misleading or strategically framed information, with different incentives and unequal access to facts. I also explored whether independent scholars and subject specialists could help explain complicated policies or evaluate disputed claims in language ordinary viewers could use.
I have not completed an empirical test of this framework, and I would not claim that every delayed response is evidence of a deliberate strategy or that every widely shared claim is misinformation. Those distinctions matter. A future study could compare how audiences respond to silence, brief official denials, evidence-based explanations, and explanations delivered by independent specialists. It would also need to consider whether attempts to tailor explanations to different audiences genuinely improve comprehension or instead risk manipulating what people are allowed to understand. I am interested in the former: explanations that vary in depth and clarity while remaining faithful to the same underlying facts. The larger economic question is how trust, once damaged, changes consumer choices and the cost of governing.
Public Finance and Access to Opportunity
My interest in public finance is more personal. Growing up in northwestern China, I have seen how distance and limited access to specialized services can change the cost of an opportunity. A family may be able to pay a school fee but not the travel and accommodation needed to reach the school. Medical insurance may cover part of a treatment while leaving families to pay for transportation, time away from work, and expenses that are difficult to anticipate. A rural household may work through an entire growing season only to lose much of its crop to hail. The economic effect of a shock cannot be understood solely by looking at its average cost. It matters how much financial room a household had before the shock, whether it can borrow or insure against the loss, and which opportunities disappear when the money has to be spent elsewhere.
I want to study how public budgets can expand meaningful access to education and medical care, particularly for rural families and residents of less-developed regions. In education, I am interested in the fiscal feasibility of extending stronger public support through upper-secondary schooling and improving assistance for vocational and higher education. In health care, I am interested in catastrophic medical expenses, reimbursement for treatment outside one's home region, and the relationship between funding, regulation, and patient protection. Questions of medical accountability, informed consent, adverse-event reporting, and compensation also matter to me because a policy should be judged not only by the number of people formally covered, but by what happens to them when something goes wrong.
I am also interested in a cost that rarely fits neatly into a household budget: time with one's family. Migrant work, long-distance employment, and shift schedules can force people to choose between earning an income and caring for a parent, raising a child, or returning home during an emergency. Policies concerning paid caregiving leave, portable social protection, and access to services across regions therefore have economic consequences extending beyond wage statistics. These questions cannot be resolved simply by demanding greater public spending. Every policy has a funding source, opportunity costs, administrative constraints, and possible unintended consequences. I want to understand how those trade-offs can be evaluated rigorously, and how a policy that appears equitable in the aggregate may affect households with very different resources.
Learning Economics Beyond the Classroom
Alongside independent study, I founded a business society at my school, which grew from two students to more than forty. I also competed in economics with students from other parts of China and abroad. In the National Economics Challenge China Selection, I earned an Individual Gold Award with 440 out of 480 points and led a team to a National Team Silver Award. Our team subsequently received the SUPER ECON! Regional Overall Team Honor at the NEC China Finals. In the International Economics Olympiad China Selection, I received an individual certificate of distinction, while our team earned Silver, placing in the top 15%. These experiences gave me opportunities to argue through economic models with teammates who approached problems differently, but they also made me more aware of how much lies beyond the classroom version of a model.
I am still at an early stage of research. I have studied macroeconomics and microeconomics independently, explored economic mechanisms through case studies, and begun developing questions about public finance, institutional communication, and policy design. I do not yet have a solution to the inequalities I see. I want to learn how to test an argument, measure effects, distinguish causation from coincidence, and confront the costs of policies I might otherwise support too easily. Mathematics has taught me to search for the structure behind a problem. Economics has taught me that when the problem involves people, understanding the structure is only the beginning.