The Jade Study

Most consequential family choices — where the children are educated, where the family lives, whom they marry, how a business is handed on — are made once, under incomplete information, on timescales too long to test. Quantitative methods work poorly here. So does intuition alone.

玉书房 — The Jade Study — treats every outcome as the product of three layers: the starting position a family is given, the vehicle through which it acts (a person, a company, a cross-border structure), and the rules it borrows to amplify that action (law, tax, education systems, residence). These compound rather than add. The first layer cannot be changed. The other two are where the work is.

The tradition this draws on is older than the field it resembles. For centuries the Chinese state maintained a bureau charged with timing its own irreversible decisions. What it lacked was structure. What Western practice supplies is structure without any account of the starting position. Neither half is sufficient.

Six domains

Education · Geography · Marriage · Career · Wealth · Succession

What they have in common: once made, they are hard to reverse.

About

The Jade Study is an independent body of research by James Liu (刘一卜), based in Luxembourg. More.

The main body of work is published in Chinese. 中文站