It had been reported months ago that Lou Jiwei was to be the new head of the fund that was to invest around $200 billion of that country’s now $1.3 trillion forex reserves. (It was only last November that these funds passed the $1 trillion mark.) Now the head of day to day operations has been appointed, Gao Xiqing. WSJ:

China’s new state investment company, closely watched as it is likely to become one of the world’s most important investors, is slowly taking shape with the appointment of Gao Xiqing to make day-to-day investment decisions…China’s state investment company has been given a mandate to take $200 billion of China’s $1.3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves and invest it in assets that can yield more than the U.S. Treasury securities into which governments with surpluses have traditionally poured funds.

Mr. Gao, who is in his early 50s, was part of the first generation to benefit from the postcultural revolution to study in the West and received a law degree from Duke University. Mr. Gao was closely associated with the birth of China’s stock exchanges, working on the laws that formed the basis of both the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. He then served first as general counsel and later as vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

Most recently, he served as vice chairman of the National Social Security Fund, a position he said he originally considered a backwater assignment. Instead, Mr. Gao found he was given one of the most challenging assignments in China, laying the groundwork for a national pension fund. The fund’s task is to invest the funds that will provide security to the Chinese people as the society comes under unprecedented strains from an aging population.

Mr. Gao was “a key architect of Chinese Securities Law,” according to biographical material at Duke. He also was a law professor at Duke, and Duke’s second student from China in the 1980’s, according to Paul D. Carrington, the former dean, who wrote:

From the first, Xi-min was ambitious to bring other students from China. He most urgently recommended his friend Gao Xiqing, who had been his fellow student at the University of International Business and Economics. Somehow, Xiqing had landed a tour as a paralegal at Graham & James in Los Angeles. The most striking fact about him was that his father had been on the Long March of 1933, when the Communist force led by Mao Tse-tung escaped the trap set by the Kuomintang army led by Chiang Kai-shek. His English was very good, and he struck me as rather a Chinese patriot. So I admitted him as a second student from China,

(In another web page, Gao Xiqing tells an amusing anecdote of his first day of classes.)

One of the notable elements of the story of Mr. Gao’s journey is the long shadow of Richard Nixon, who initiated the movement towards normalization of US-China relations in 1972 with his historic trip to that country. President Nixon was a 1937 graduate of Duke Law School. One of his classmates set up an endowment that enabled Shi Xi-min to become the first Nixon Scholar from China at the law school. (He even got a summer job at Nixon’s old law firm, Mudge Rose, Guthrie & Alexander.) It was Shi Xi-min who “most urgently” recommended Gao Xiqing to be admitted to the law school. Now Mr. Gao is deciding upon investments for one of the largest investment funds in the world — in China. Who could have conceived of such a thing thirty five years ago?

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