About Ken Cao

And one question formed that would shape everything that followed:
Why did my own country hide all this from me?

This awakening deepened during his Juris Doctor at UC Berkeley School of Law, where open debate, free inquiry, and the rule of law were not slogans but living principles. After graduation, Ken returned to Beijing—not out of ideological loyalty, but out of intellectual curiosity. He wanted to test the theory the world had debated for decades:

Would China liberalize as it became richer?
Could real growth continue without structural political reform?

So he entered the system from within.

Ken taught law and economics at Renmin University of China, witnessing how even academic arguments were shaped by political red lines. He then joined CCB Trust, the wealth-management arm of China Construction Bank, serving first as in-house legal counsel and later as an investment manager.

This role gave him a rare front-row seat to the inner workings of China’s shadow banking system—the engine room behind China’s debt-fueled economy. From inside CCB Trust, he saw:

• how trust products funneled trillions into property developers
• how local governments buried liabilities inside opaque financing vehicles
• how land finance and political incentives inflated the housing bubble

He watched, in real time, as China’s debt-driven model accumulated fractures that the political system could not acknowledge—let alone fix.

Ken later became Chief Macro Strategist at Harvest Fund Management, China’s largest public mutual fund company with over US$1 trillion AUM, where he analyzed monetary policy, capital flows, and the long-term consequences of authoritarian economic management. One conclusion became impossible to ignore:

Authoritarian systems can grow quickly—
but they cannot self-correct.
And systems that cannot self-correct eventually break.

His insights culminated in the bestselling Chinese-language book The Apocalypse of the Fiat Currencies, and he became a frequent guest on CCTV, Xinhua News, and other major Chinese media outlets—experiences that further deepened his understanding of how narratives are manufactured and defended inside a controlled information ecosystem.