MacroPolo Turns Three
MacroPolo is celebrating three years of decoding China's economy, technology, and politics.
To mark the third anniversary of MacroPolo, we spoke with Damien Ma (Director), Annie Cantara (Associate Director), and Houze Song (Research Fellow) to glean their insights on the genesis of Paulson Institute’s think tank, its mission, and the role MacroPolo will play in future conversations regarding China.
From politics to economics to technology, MacroPolo focuses on diverse aspects of the US-China relationship. How did you decide to focus on these areas, and what impact have MacroPolo’s products and pieces achieved?
Ma: From the get-go, MacroPolo tried to zero in on a few core competencies. I didn’t think we could be “everything to everyone” on China, so began with a process of elimination. I figured once we settled on what we didn’t want to be, we would naturally arrive at the right place.
I thought if we could just focus on these core competencies and do as well as we could on those, then perhaps we will have achieved something good and useful. It wasn’t until the third year that I decided we ought to expand more into energy work.
There are a lot of great organizations doing terrific work in the China field, but those were the areas I thought we could actually do useful and relevant work. So the last three years have been very much focused on developing our capabilities and products centered on those core competencies.
In the three years since MP was founded, what have you learned? How has that changed your products?
Song: Every product I have participated in has been a learning experience. Through this process, I have learned to present complex and nuanced research findings in a simple and intuitive way.
Cantara: I’ve learned that user research is crucial in developing engaging reports and products that appeal to a wide range of users. Designing a digital platform for such varied and rich research has been a unique challenge, and user testing has helped us to understand where people may get stuck when navigating our products. This awareness allows us to approach our products with a focus on the end-user, which in turn dictates the way the research is gathered and ultimately presented.
What place does MacroPolo occupy in the conversations on China and US-China relations, and what do you hope it achieves?
Song: MacroPolo’s strength is its data-driven, fact-based research. And this has helped us to rapidly grow into a first-class research team in the China research space.
Ma: To add to Houze’s response, in this current period of polarizing and contentious debates on US-China, I hope MacroPolo offers balanced, empirical work to really understand both the context and trend of how we got here and where we might go. As I wrote in my Frankenstein essay in May, I believe that we need more “China” in US-China debates.
So we aim to do that every day with our analysis and various products, but whether we achieve that consistently, well, that’s really for our users and audience to decide. I hope we are doing something right.
Where do you see MacroPolo three years from now?
Cantara: I think we’ve built a unique platform that allows us to easily branch out into new topic areas and types of content. In three years, the hope is that we will be even more tuned into how users interact with our content and what sort of things they want to see going forward. We’ve focused on written content and digital projects for the most part, but we hope to make our content even more interactive and exciting in the future.
Ma: Three years is a long time, that’s 100% the lifespan of MacroPolo! I certainly hope we will be able to maintain the high quality of our products and continue to attract and diversify our audience. And I hope MacroPolo will continue to attract the next-generation of talent in our field.
But it’s a big world out there, and China’s impact isn’t exclusive to US-China—that’s what we implied with our tag line from day one: “Decoding China’s Economic Arrival.” That arrival isn’t confined to specific geographies, and we aim to continue to deliver that global perspective from the American heartland.