Joe Ngai and Nick Leung, "The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era" (Scribner, 2026)

Well, thank you for having us here.

I think that the phrase really started, I would say, in 2023 when I was at Davos.

And I still remember that was a year where the conversation was all around China plus one, meaning where do we diversify away to, right? And one reporter, I still remember, he came to me and said that, where's the next China? Is the next China India? Is the next China Indonesia? Or is the next China Vietnam? Meaning that I don't want to miss out on the next growth miracle in the world.

And after a while, I responded back with a tweet saying that the next China is right here, still in China.

And the reason is very simple.

There is no other economy that has the size, the relevance, you know, and really the importance it carries than China.

So therefore, you know, that is what happened around the phrase.

And perhaps one of the more important And one of the interesting points is that if China grows at 2% for the next 10 years, just the growth of that GDP is the entire GDP of India today.

If China grows at 5%, that's the total GDP of ASEAN and India and Japan.

So in some ways, if you think about the scale of this, there's really no substitute for China.

I think it's also worth saying, sorry, this is Nick.

I just want to jump in.

I think it's also worth saying that, you know, why it became quite a kind of iconic phrase was because immediately after Joe tweeted it, it kind of went completely viral and hundreds of thousands of people looked at it.

And it was even quoted by, you know, various politicians and other business practitioners.

I think it was funny because it kind of, it struck a chord at the time, which was, you know, quite resonant across the business community in this part of the world.

And I think that's why when we came to write the book, and the book wasn't just about that particular phrase, of course, we'd been mulling over writing a book for a while.

But when we came to write the book, we said, well, obviously the book has to have that title.

That title is kind of, you know, core to a lot of the thinking that we have in it.

So, you know, both of you are at McKinsey and a lot of this book is kind of drawn upon kind of your experience working at McKinsey.

Could you tell us the story a little bit more about kind of how McKinsey got started in mainland China and what it was like kind of in those early days as you were setting up the business, setting up kind of the first kind of consulting style industry kind of in mainland China.

So McKinsey already had an office in Hong Kong at the time and actually had one in Taipei also.

This is the beginning of the 90s.

In the mid 90s, we opened an office in Shanghai and Beijing.

So we were really the first firm to open offices on the mainland.

At the time, neither Joe or I were in this part of the world at McKinsey.