Ｔｈｅ　Ｗｏｒｌｄ　Ｂａｎｋ’ｓ　Ｎｅｗ　Ｃｈｉｅｆ　Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｉｓｔ　Ｔａｋｅｓ　ｏｎ　Ｐｏｖｅ.docVIP

Ｔｈｅ　Ｗｏｒｌｄ　Ｂａｎｋ’ｓ　Ｎｅｗ　Ｃｈｉｅｆ　Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｉｓｔ　Ｔａｋｅｓ　ｏｎ　Ｐｏｖｅ 　　 　　PROFESSOR Justin Lin Yifu is nothing if not a patriot. “The main reason I returned to China was because I wanted to make a contribution to the economic development and economic transition of China,” the World Bank’s new chief economist once famously said while delivering a talk at the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University in 2007.Lin was trying to explain why he left Yale in the late 1980s after spending time there as a senior research fellow, and the implication was that he could well have chosen to stay on in the West, as so many of his fellow Chinese graduate students were then doing. 　　On the face of it, the declaration was straightforward and unprepossessing. But the tone was unmistakable, and it hinted at a moral and intellectual tenacity ?C a quality he will now arguably need in ample supply ?C that may begin to explain the storied origins of his career. 　　Retold any number of times, the legendary tale of Justin Lin’s dramatic departure from Taiwan in 1979, when he swam across two kilometers of open ocean to reach the mainland, has inevitably included its share of embellishments. In one notable version, he was even said to have used two basketballs as flotation devices, though his wife recently insisted the 55-year-old Lin, to this day an enthusiastic and powerful swimmer, would not have needed any help. 　　Regardless of the details, that he fled to the Chinese mainland in the wake of the 揷ultural revolution,?took a degree in Marxirest economics at Peking University, studied in Chicago under Milton Friedman and returned home to become China’s leading economist singles him out as a most atypical candidate for a leading role at the World Bank. 　　To hear the bank’s President Robert Zoellick explain it, however, the choice was a perfectly sensible one. “As our first chief economist from a developing country, and an expert on economic development and particularly agriculture, Justin Lin brings a uniq