Experts

Syaru Shirley Lin

Fast Facts

  • ​​​​​​Chair, Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation
  • Nonresident senior fellow, Brookings Institution
  • Adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong 
  • Former partner at Goldman Sachs
  • Founding board member of Alibaba Group and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation
  • Expertise on China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, East Asia, international political economy, international finance and banking, innovation and entrepreneurship, privatization

 

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • Asia
  • Economic Issues
  • Finance and Banking
  • Trade

Syaru Shirley Lin, Miller Center research professor, is a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lin chairs the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI), a new policy think tank conducting interdisciplinary, comparative research on innovative policies that can strengthen resilience and improve governance in the Asia Pacific. CAPRI currently acts as the Asia-Pacific Hub of the Reform for Resilience Commission and the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience, two global initiatives that are reviewing the response to the COVID pandemic and developing proposals for better responses in the future.

Lin's research and teaching focus on cross-Strait relations, international and comparative political economy, and the challenges facing high-income societies in East Asia. She is the author of Taiwan’s China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Economic Policy (Stanford University Press, 2016) which was also published in Chinese in 2019. Her book highlights the linkage between Taiwan’s national identity and its foreign economic policy and analyzes the implications for Taiwan’s future relationship with China. She is now writing a book on six economies in the Asia Pacific region caught in the high-income trap, all of which are facing problems such as inequality, demographic decline, financialization, outdated education systems, increasingly polarized societies, inadequate policy and technological innovation, and climate change. Her analysis and commentary frequently appear in English and Chinese media.

Lin was the youngest woman partner as well as one of the first Asian partners of Goldman Sachs, where she led the firm’s investment efforts in Asia, managing private equity and venture capital investments in 12 countries and setting up its Tokyo operation. She spearheaded the firm’s investments in technology start-ups in Asia, making it one of the earliest and most successful investors in China. In that capacity, she led the first round of institutional investments in Alibaba and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Prior to her work in private equity and venture capital, she specialized in the privatization of state-owned enterprises in China and Singapore.

Lin has served on the boards of numerous private and public companies and currently serves as a director of Langham Hospitality Investments, Goldman Sachs Asia Bank, TE Connectivity, and MediaTek. She is also a director of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, which supports the development and adoption of new therapeutic medical technologies, and an advisor to the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism and Structural Discrimination and Global Health.

A native of Taipei, Lin has been a resident of Hong Kong for three decades. Lin graduated, cum laude, from Harvard College and has also studied and worked in Tokyo and Madrid. After retiring from Goldman Sachs, she earned her masters and doctorate from the University of Hong Kong and launched a new career as a scholar, policy analyst, and corporate and non-profit director.

Syaru Shirley Lin News Feed

The case of Alibaba is instructive. Its first outside investors were two Taiwanese-born products of the Ivy League: Joe Tsai, a Wall Street lawyer turned investor, and Syaru Shirley Lin, a Goldman Sachs banker. Along with US capital, the two brought US lawyers, who created an ingenious corporate structure featuring a Cayman Islands parent company. This proved to be a game-changer, because it endowed Alibaba with the power to issue employee stock options.
Syaru Shirley Lin Financial Times
As the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic draws to a close, resilience—the ways in which health, economic, and environmental systems face changes and shocks by adapting, evolving, and innovating—has emerged as a crucial attribute of societies working toward a “new normal” of post-pandemic life.
Foreword by Syaru Shirley Lin, Malcolm Turnbull, and Chang-Chuan Chan Asia Pacific Hub of Reform for Resilience Commission
As the COVID-19 pandemic nears the end of its second year, health systems worldwide continue to experience unprecedented strain, highlighting the need for solutions that make health care more effective, accessible, and affordable. Especially in the Asia Pacific, countries that experienced early success in pandemic management in 2020 now face new conditions that confound their exit strategies to a post-pandemic world.
Syaru Shirley Lin Miller Center Presents
Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister of Australia from 2015-2018 and is a co-chair of the Reform for Resilience Commission. Syaru Shirley Lin is the Compton Visiting Professor at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia and Chair of the Asia-Pacific Hub of the Reform for Resilience Commission.

Syaru Shirley Lin Nikkei Asia
President Biden’s trip is an opportunity for the U.S. and G-7 to develop a new mechanism that unites democratic governments with research institutions and the private sector to end this pandemic. This is a wake-up call for the G-7 to create more robust healthcare systems, resilient economies, and sustainable environments, all of which will prepare us better for the next pandemic, whose arrival is only a matter of time.
Syaru Shirley Lin Brookings
Syaru Shirley Lin suggests the U.S. help Taiwan by increasing exchanges of students, faculty, and professionals and bilateral trade agreements, among other policies.
Syaru Shirley Lin China Leadership Monitor