Mr Li Ruogu

President of the Export Import Bank of China

Date of Birth: 01/1951

Li Ruogu has been Chairman and President of the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim) since June 2005. With one Masters in Law from Beijing University and another in Public Administration from the United States’ Princeton University, he was briefly an assistant professor at Beijing University before joining the People’s Bank of China in 1985. In the 1990s, he spent a year as an International Monetary Fund economist and four years at the Asian Development Bank, as well as acting as liaison to the African Development Bank.

A fluent English speaker, Li was known for his defence of China’s exchange rate policy when he was Deputy Governor at the People’s Bank of China and a member of the Chinese Monetary Policy Committee. Now he is the jet-setting champion of Chinese investment in Africa, promoting the benefits of the infrastructure projects that Exim supports and downplaying the abuses of the regimes with which Exim’s deals are struck.

Li’s week-long trip through Africa at the end of September saw him spreading Chinese largesse: a US$208 million loan to the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia for the expansion of Mugher Cement; a $2 billion accord in Angola for projects including port and railway development; and a $292 mn. credit and loan package to Ghana for the Bui Hydro-Electric Power Project, to be built by China’s Sinohydro Corporation.

Most recently, Li announced at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China that Exim will restructure itself as a commercial bank in order to raise capital. He gave no indication as to when this might happen, but stressed that Exim would continue to provide concessional loans to foreign governments. The terms of such loans stipulate that Chinese contractors and exporters must be used, and over 50% of materials and services should come from China.