天
空没有被烟雾所遮蔽，中国最知名的经济学家之一张维迎心情乐观，同时具备这两点的下午在中国首都北京并不多见。在中国共产党即将进行10年一次的领导层换届、并将对其曾经前途大好的人物薄熙来提出刑事指控之际，中国经济正在遭遇麻烦。心存忧虑的投资者希望看到北京依然致力于"保增长"的迹象，而他们最乐于见到的迹象是一场凯恩斯主义的大规模经济刺激。张维迎认为，根本不必惊慌。他边喝茶边平静地说，中国经济增速放缓实际上是好消息，这会让政府认识到中国需要改变，即放弃靠政府注资来促进经济发展的老路，走上改革之路。他坚称，中国人并不都是凯恩斯主义者。
三年前，凯恩斯理论是中国的官方政策。2008年那场金融危机曾让中国幸灾乐祸于信奉自由市场的"华盛顿共识"遭遇失败，并使得中国得以对外吹嘘其以政府干预为特色的"中国模式"。凯恩斯理论颇对计划经济追捧者的胃口，而中国当时正好遭遇了出口大幅滑坡，所以政府将折合3.5万亿美元(大约相当于国内生产总值50%)的银行贷款和政府直接支出投入了经济体系。
张维迎在学术界的同行们当时都对"中国模式"赞誉有加，但他却在2009年发表了题为《彻底埋葬凯恩斯主义》的演讲。张维迎当时任北京大学光华管理学院的院长，他目前仍然在这所学院教授经济学。张维迎在演讲中称，由于2008年这场金融危机是由低成本资金引发的，所以不可能用可以廉价得到的资金来解决。他说，现在的经济就像一个吸毒病人，医生却给吸毒病人开的药方是吗啡，最后的结果可能会使问题更严重。
他引用诺贝尔经济学奖得主哈耶克(Friedrich Hayek)和奥地利学派的观点提出，如果不允许中国经济按其自身规律进行调整，那么中国经济中小的泡沫破裂之后就会发生大泡沫的破裂。他还建议废除各种导致经济发生扭曲的现行做法，比如国有企业在许多产业中享有的垄断地位。
Zina Saunders
最终，北京的经济刺激措施对一场人为的投资热潮起了推波助澜的作用，这股投资热使资产泡沫更加严重，此后由于政府收紧经济政策，吗啡产生的刺激作用逐渐消失。官员们称，中国经济今年第二季度较上年同期增长了7.6%。但对这一数字持怀疑态度的人认为，实际的经济增长率更接近4%。(伦敦一家研究机构认为经济增幅是1%。)与此同时，钢铁和太阳能发电等国家主导或鼓励发展的产业则因产能过剩而举步维艰。有报道说，有数不清的铜板被堆放在库房里，这些多得把仓库大门都堵上了的库存产品生动体现了哈耶克所说"不正当投资"造成的恶果。
换句话说，中国的经济刺激措施反证了张维迎所推崇的奥地利学派的正确。这些措施的巨大失败忽然之间引发了世人对奥地利学派理论的关注。张维迎说，凯恩斯式的政策并没有产生它所许诺的结果，因此越来越多的人意识到，当政府向那些无用的项目投入资金时，经济衰退就会到来。
如今，中国官员已不再像对待被放逐者一样对待张维迎。他说农业部官员告诉他，他们喜欢看他写的文章。其他部委以及包括河南和辽宁省在内的地方政府则邀请他发表演讲。他说最近写了一篇赞扬已故奥地利学派经济学家罗斯巴德(Murray Rothbard)的文章后，上海市委书记告诉他自己喜欢这篇文章。
对奥地利学派的同情是否能感染中国政府高层官员？上个月，中国国务院总理温家宝称刺激措施是对经济危机的合理反应，并试图驳斥中国为此付出过高代价的指控。温家宝的话听来像是面对那些读过哈耶克或张维迎著作的内部挑战人士时不得不进行的辩护。
张维迎直到2008年才开始认同奥地利学派的主张。当年他在芝加哥的一场经济学会议上发表了一篇论文，有人对他说他的观点听来就像是哈耶克的信徒。张维迎说他的观点一直如此。
52岁的张维迎出生在中国陕西省的农村。在一个中共官员和"虎妈"争相给年轻人"洗脑"的国家，张维迎有幸躲过了这样的双重打击。
张维迎说，农村地区在很大程度上没有受到中共意识形态的"污染"。他说我的父母没有文化，我开始上学后他们并不理解我从学校带回家的那些"理念"，也就是说他们从来没有干预过我的想法。
从他在陕西念经济学研究生开始，张维迎就在规划自己的人生。1983年他在报纸上写了一篇文章，为赚钱正名。因为这项"罪名"，当时力量仍然非常强大的反资本主义阵营的批评人士对他进行了严厉抨击。那时他甚至存在毕业后无法拿到学位的危险。但"幸运的是，中国的政治气候在很短的时间内发生了转变"。
在20世纪80年代中期，在中共领导人邓小平的领导下，中国官员开始开放经济。但有时他们也会毫无头绪。张维迎说，经过几十年的计划经济，所有商品的价格都被扭曲。政府的解决办法是建立一个有大型计算机的价格研究中心，根据计算机的运算结果调整价格。当然，他们不会得到任何结果。
这给了张维迎首个脱颍而出的机会。在他的硕士论文中，张维迎提出了这样一种假设，即是否可能在政府管控的一套价格体系之外保留另一套由市场机制发挥调控作用的价格体系，这样各行业能逐渐从第一套价格体系过渡到第二套。在1984年的一次会议上，张维迎以这一"双轨制"理论给当时的决策者留下深刻印象。他们采纳了这一建议并让张维迎到当时的国家经济体制改革委员会去工作。但正是这份工作令他失去了对制定政策的兴趣。张维迎说，政府官员不爱"惹事"，决策是一个政治过程，是一种妥协。
为了找到一个不需妥协的世界，他去牛津大学(Oxford University)留学，并在那里获得了经济学博士学位。1994年回国之际，他与人合作创办了北京大学中国经济研究中心(China Center for Economic Research)。北京大学是中国资历最老的现代高等学府之一。
张维迎说，相比政策研究，他更喜欢学术性的观点的自由市场。但即使是在学术界，张维迎也显得卓尔不群。和中国那些改革派经济学家不同（这些人将自己视作削弱中央集权的技术官僚），张维迎的思想有着鲜明的道德烙印。在今年的一次讲话中，他援引亚里士多德(Aristotle)和阿奎那(Thomas Aquinas)的话指出，世间存在一种叫"自然法"的东西，且产权的重要性在主权之前。
这种追求成功的自由带来的另一面是要能够忍受失败，而这正是张维迎和哈耶克存在交集的地方。即使是中央银行试图操纵需求的做法也会引起奥地利学派的反感，因为就像张维迎所说的那样，当你犯错时，你必须承担责任。
张维迎说，如果你今天经受痛苦，那么这还只是小痛苦，但如果你今天不经受这种痛苦，将来你会有更大的痛苦；让公众知道这个真理是经济学家或学者应该做的事情。
中国领导人也应该做这件事。张维迎兴奋地谈起了上世纪90年代末发生的亚洲金融危机。这场危机促使中共开始了国有企业的私有化进程，虽然这导致2,000万国企员工下岗。张维迎说，这场危机击垮了印尼和其它一些国家，而中国领导人则在当时吸取了危机带来的教训，这就是必须抛弃裙带资本主义和臃肿的政府机构。
在当时，张维迎代表了知识界的潮流。张维迎是国有媒体中央电视台(CCTV)评选的2002年度经济人物，他记得当时在北京大学，整个校园的文化都是以改革为导向的。那一年他被任命为北京大学的校长助理，后来被任命为光华管理学院院长，在学院任职期间，他极力推动改革。
这些改革是成功的，但是改革者却受到了迫害。教师中的保守派提出抗议，网上到处都是质疑张维迎的忠诚、怀疑其学历的声音。2010年，他在光华管理学院被免职。
大多数的麻烦源于学校内的政治，但张维迎同时表示，当时的大环境变了。中国的大学是计划经济的产物，所以，"如果全国都在改革的良好进程中，像我这样的人不会受到这样的待遇。"
发生了什么？2002年上台的胡锦涛和温家宝领导团队逆转了改革进程。日益严重的的社会不公成为了公营部门受到偏爱的最初借口，有人认为，是高增长率让决策者很快决定继续走这条道路。北京新的流行说法是"国进民退"，国有经济向前发展，私营领域向后退却。
当金融危机来袭时，中国政府抓住这一机会将国有经济进一步做大。这一做法导致的糟糕经济后果现在已清清楚楚摆在那里，但是张维迎说，过去的10年也发生了引人注目的社会问题，这些问题促成了舆论环境的改变。中国人看到官员们把资源分配给国有企业和自己的朋友，公众对腐败和不公平的认知开始增长，他说，中国政府面对的绝不是市场危机，而是国家危机。
这就是张维迎希望推进改革的原因。他主张重启私有化进程，他说，现在实施私有化会更容易，因为一些公司已经在交易所上市。下一步是对金融系统进行全面改革，因为国有企业正在把银行当做自动取款机，让企业家们失去了从正规渠道获得融资的机会。
我们能否期待11月中旬中国新一届领导班子上台后，这样的自由化进程会立即发生？张维迎说，最高决策机构席位的竞争者之一、广东省委书记汪洋，是一个"真正的改革者"。但是在其他方面，他承认中国的政治完全是难以捉摸的。
北京有可能再次求助于刺激计划来提振GDP吗？张维迎说，毫无疑问情况有可能变得更糟，但也有可能出现良好机会。他可以确信的是，人们的思维方式已经改变。只是在中国的非民主体制下，"这种影响是含蓄而不是明确表现出来的。"
张维迎感到乐观，因为他认为30年的改革开放已经改变了人们的预期。他说，我们现在对市场充满信任，这就是为什么过去10年的反市场动向激怒了人们。清华大学(Tsinghua University)整理编纂的政府数据显示，反对政府征地和其他以强权侵害百姓利益行为的群体性事件每年有18万起。这些群体事件让中共难以回避，也为自由市场提供了道义上的依据。
张维迎说，人类永远在寻找幸福。现在有两种方式。你牺牲他人幸福来换取自己的幸福，我把这叫做强盗逻辑。另一种方式是，你通过使他人幸福来让自己得到幸福，这是市场逻辑。你更喜欢哪一种？
（Bhattacharya是《华尔街日报》亚洲版的评论版撰稿人）
（本文版权归道琼斯公司所有，未经许可不得翻译或转载。）
ABHEEK BHATTACHARYA
It's a rare afternoon in the Chinese capital when smog hasn't blocked the skies, and one of China's most famous economists is in a sanguine mood. The economy is in trouble as the Communist Party heads for a once-in-a-decade transfer of power while prosecuting its former golden boy, Bo Xilai, on criminal charges. Worried investors want signs that Beijing remains committed to growth-and the sign they'd most like to see is a big Keynesian stimulus.
Zhang Weiying would say that they're wrong to panic. The economic slowdown, he calmly says over tea, is actually good news that 'makes the government think we need to change'-toward reform and away from priming the pump. We aren't all Keynesians now in China, he insists.
Three years ago, Keynesianism was official policy. The 2008 financial crisis had Beijing gloating over the failure of the free-market 'Washington Consensus' and touting the 'China Model' of government intervention. Keynesianism fit the statist zeitgeist and Beijing then suffered an export slump, so the government allocated $3.5 trillion-or about 50% of gross domestic product-in bank loans and direct spending.
Mr. Zhang's academic colleagues were all praise for the 'China Model,' but in 2009 he was giving speeches entitled 'Bury Keynesianism.' Then a top administrator at Peking University, where he now teaches economics, he argued that since the financial crisis was caused by easy money, it couldn't be solved by the same. 'The current economy is like a drug addict, and the prescription from the doctor is morphine, so the final result will be much worse,' he said.
He invoked the ideas of the late Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics to argue that if the economy weren't allowed to adjust on its own, China's minor bust would be followed by a bigger one. He also advocated doing away with existing distortions such as the monopolies enjoyed in many industries by state-owned enterprises.
Those were the days when China was fast becoming the world's second-largest economy (growth in one 2010 quarter crossed 11% on an annual basis), so the establishment was in no mood to listen. 'When I criticized the central government's stimulus policy, many senior officials were not happy,' Mr. Zhang says. It might not have helped that at last year's World Economic Forum in China he called the government's powerful National Development and Reform Commission 'a bunch of smart people doing something really stupid.'
Ultimately, Beijing's stimulus fed a false investment boom that stoked asset bubbles-then the morphine wore off while the government tightened. Officials claim the economy grew at 7.6% year-on-year between April and June this year. Skeptics think the real number is closer to 4%. (One London research house says 1%.) Meanwhile, industries dominated or favored by the state, such as steel or solar power, are idling from overcapacity. Countless sheets of copper are reportedly stacked in warehouses, blocking doorways and exemplifying Hayek's notion of 'malinvestment.'
In other words, the stimulus was a poster child for Mr. Zhang's Austrian theories. And the sheer size of the failure suddenly has people paying attention. 'The Keynesian policy didn't deliver what it promised,' he says, so 'more and more people realize that . . . when the government makes investment [in] something that's useless, recession will come.'
Chinese officials no longer treat Mr. Zhang as a pariah. He reports that Ministry of Agriculture officials tell him they enjoy reading his articles. Other ministries and local governments, including in Henan and Liaoning provinces, invite him to speak. He says that when he recently wrote an article praising the late Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai-a fairly high-level apparatchik-told him he liked it.
Could Austrian sympathies be percolating right to the top of Chinese officialdom? Last month, Premier Wen Jiabao called the stimulus a 'scientific response' to the crisis and tried to refute the charge that the country 'paid an undue price' for it. He sounded like someone forced to defend against internal challengers who had been reading Hayek-or Zhang Weiying.
Mr. Zhang didn't identify with the Austrian school until 2008, when he presented a paper at an economics conference in Chicago and someone told him he sounded like a Hayek acolyte. He says he'd always thought this way.
The 52-year-old was born in rural Shaanxi province in north-central China. In a country where party officials and tiger mothers compete to brainwash youth, he escaped both.
'Rural areas were not so polluted by [party] ideology,' he says. 'My parents were illiterate,' he adds, and once he began his education, they couldn't understand the ideas he brought home from school. 'That means they never interfered.'
Mr. Zhang has been charting his own way since he was a graduate student in economics in Shaanxi. He wrote a newspaper article in 1983 arguing that money wasn't evil. For that crime, critics from the still-powerful anticapitalist camp tore into him. There was a danger he wouldn't be able to graduate with a degree, but 'thankfully, China's political climate changed in a very short time.'
In the mid-1980s, under party leader Deng Xiaoping, officials were moving to liberalize the economy. Yet they were sometimes clueless. After decades of a planned economy, says Mr. Zhang, 'the price [of everything] was distorted' and the government's solution was to 'set up a price research center with a big computer . . . and adjust prices according to this calculation.' Of course, 'they couldn't get any results.'
This gave Mr. Zhang his first break. In his graduate thesis, he considered the possibility of having one price system remain government-controlled and leaving another to the market, with industries moving slowly from the first track to the second. He impressed policy makers with the idea at a 1984 conference, and they adopted it, giving Mr. Zhang a job with the State Commission for Reforming the Economic System. The stint turned him off from policy-making. Bureaucrats rarely 'rock the boat,' he says. 'Making policy is a political process . . . a compromise.'
Looking for a world where he didn't have to compromise, he went to Oxford, where he studied for an economics doctorate. On returning to China in 1994, he co-founded the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, the country's oldest modern institution of higher learning.
Mr. Zhang says he prefers the academic marketplace of ideas rather than policies, but he stands out there too. Unlike the Chinese tribe of reformer-economists who see themselves as technocrats chipping away at statism, Mr. Zhang thinks in stark moral terms. In a speech this year, he invoked Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to argue that there is such a thing as natural law and that the right to property is 'passed prior to sovereignty.'
The flip side of this freedom to pursue success is being able to stomach failure, which is where Mr. Zhang's affinity for Hayek ties in. Austrians frown even on central banks trying to manipulate demand because, as Mr. Zhang tells it, 'when you make a mistake, you must take responsibility.'
'If you suffer today, it's a small suffering. But if you don't have that suffering today,' tomorrow 'you'll have a big suffering.' Letting people know that truth, he says, 'is what an economist or scholar should do.'
Leaders should do this too, and he talks excitedly about the late 1990s, when the Asian economic crisis spurred the party to privatize state companies, even if it left 20 million unemployed. The crisis had brought Indonesia and others to their knees, says Mr. Zhang, and China's leaders understood at the time that 'the lesson was not to have crony capitalism' and a bloated public sector.
Back then, the intellectual tide was going in Mr. Zhang's direction. State-controlled CCTV proclaimed him 'Economist of the Year' in 2002, and he remembers that at Peking University 'the whole culture was reform-oriented too.' He was appointed assistant president of the university that year and later dean of the Guanghua School of Management, where he pushed reform.
The reforms proved successful, but the reformer was crucified. The old guard in the faculty lounges revolted, while accusations impugning Mr. Zhang's loyalty and questioning his credentials swirled over the Internet. He was forced out of his Guanghua post in 2010.
Much of the trouble stemmed from internal campus politics, but he also says that the broader 'environment changed.' China's universities are a product of a planned economy, so 'if the whole country [was] in the good process of reform, people like me won't be treated like that.'
What happened? China's leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, in place since 2002, reversed reforms. Rising inequality was the original excuse for favoring the public sector and, one suspects, high growth soon convinced policy makers to continue on that path. The new mantra in Beijing was 'guo jin, min tui'-the state advances, the private sector retreats.
When the financial crisis struck Beijing jumped at the chance to advance the state even further. The poor economic result is now front and center, but Mr. Zhang says the past decade has also seen dramatic social problems that help alter the climate of opinion. The Chinese people have watched bureaucrats distribute resources to state companies and their friends, and popular perceptions of corruption and inequality have grown. Far from a crisis of markets, he says, Beijing is facing a crisis of state.
That is why Mr. Zhang is hopeful for reforms. He proposes restarting privatization, which he says is easier to do now because 'some of these companies are listed on exchanges.' Overhauling the financial system is next, since state companies use the banks as ATMs and deprive entrepreneurs of formal loans.
Can we expect such a liberalization right after the new crop of leaders is anointed in mid-November? He says that Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang, a contender for the top decision-making body, is a 'real reformer.' But otherwise he admits that Chinese politics is a black box.
Is there a possibility that Beijing will turn to another stimulus to goose GDP? 'Certainly things could go worse. But there could also be good opportunity,' he says. What he does know is that people's way of thinking has changed. It's just that the 'impact is implicit, not explicit' in China's nondemocracy.
Mr. Zhang is optimistic because he thinks 30 years of openness have altered expectations. 'We have a lot of trust in' markets today, which is why the last decade's anti-market turn has exasperated people. Mass protests against land grabs and other government bullying now number 180,000 a year, according to government data compiled at Beijing's Tsinghua University. These protests are hard for the party to ignore-and powerfully make the moral case for free markets.
'We human beings always seek happiness,' says Mr. Zhang. 'Now there are two ways. You make yourself happy by making other people unhappy-I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy-that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?'
It's a rare afternoon in the Chinese capital when smog hasn't blocked the skies, and one of China's most famous economists is in a sanguine mood. The economy is in trouble as the Communist Party heads for a once-in-a-decade transfer of power while prosecuting its former golden boy, Bo Xilai, on criminal charges. Worried investors want signs that Beijing remains committed to growth-and the sign they'd most like to see is a big Keynesian stimulus.
Zhang Weiying would say that they're wrong to panic. The economic slowdown, he calmly says over tea, is actually good news that 'makes the government think we need to change'-toward reform and away from priming the pump. We aren't all Keynesians now in China, he insists.
Three years ago, Keynesianism was official policy. The 2008 financial crisis had Beijing gloating over the failure of the free-market 'Washington Consensus' and touting the 'China Model' of government intervention. Keynesianism fit the statist zeitgeist and Beijing then suffered an export slump, so the government allocated $3.5 trillion-or about 50% of gross domestic product-in bank loans and direct spending.
Mr. Zhang's academic colleagues were all praise for the 'China Model,' but in 2009 he was giving speeches entitled 'Bury Keynesianism.' Then a top administrator at Peking University, where he now teaches economics, he argued that since the financial crisis was caused by easy money, it couldn't be solved by the same. 'The current economy is like a drug addict, and the prescription from the doctor is morphine, so the final result will be much worse,' he said.
He invoked the ideas of the late Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics to argue that if the economy weren't allowed to adjust on its own, China's minor bust would be followed by a bigger one. He also advocated doing away with existing distortions such as the monopolies enjoyed in many industries by state-owned enterprises.
Those were the days when China was fast becoming the world's second-largest economy (growth in one 2010 quarter crossed 11% on an annual basis), so the establishment was in no mood to listen. 'When I criticized the central government's stimulus policy, many senior officials were not happy,' Mr. Zhang says. It might not have helped that at last year's World Economic Forum in China he called the government's powerful National Development and Reform Commission 'a bunch of smart people doing something really stupid.'
Ultimately, Beijing's stimulus fed a false investment boom that stoked asset bubbles-then the morphine wore off while the government tightened. Officials claim the economy grew at 7.6% year-on-year between April and June this year. Skeptics think the real number is closer to 4%. (One London research house says 1%.) Meanwhile, industries dominated or favored by the state, such as steel or solar power, are idling from overcapacity. Countless sheets of copper are reportedly stacked in warehouses, blocking doorways and exemplifying Hayek's notion of 'malinvestment.'
In other words, the stimulus was a poster child for Mr. Zhang's Austrian theories. And the sheer size of the failure suddenly has people paying attention. 'The Keynesian policy didn't deliver what it promised,' he says, so 'more and more people realize that . . . when the government makes investment [in] something that's useless, recession will come.'
Chinese officials no longer treat Mr. Zhang as a pariah. He reports that Ministry of Agriculture officials tell him they enjoy reading his articles. Other ministries and local governments, including in Henan and Liaoning provinces, invite him to speak. He says that when he recently wrote an article praising the late Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai-a fairly high-level apparatchik-told him he liked it.
Could Austrian sympathies be percolating right to the top of Chinese officialdom? Last month, Premier Wen Jiabao called the stimulus a 'scientific response' to the crisis and tried to refute the charge that the country 'paid an undue price' for it. He sounded like someone forced to defend against internal challengers who had been reading Hayek-or Zhang Weiying.
Mr. Zhang didn't identify with the Austrian school until 2008, when he presented a paper at an economics conference in Chicago and someone told him he sounded like a Hayek acolyte. He says he'd always thought this way.
The 52-year-old was born in rural Shaanxi province in north-central China. In a country where party officials and tiger mothers compete to brainwash youth, he escaped both.
'Rural areas were not so polluted by [party] ideology,' he says. 'My parents were illiterate,' he adds, and once he began his education, they couldn't understand the ideas he brought home from school. 'That means they never interfered.'
Mr. Zhang has been charting his own way since he was a graduate student in economics in Shaanxi. He wrote a newspaper article in 1983 arguing that money wasn't evil. For that crime, critics from the still-powerful anticapitalist camp tore into him. There was a danger he wouldn't be able to graduate with a degree, but 'thankfully, China's political climate changed in a very short time.'
In the mid-1980s, under party leader Deng Xiaoping, officials were moving to liberalize the economy. Yet they were sometimes clueless. After decades of a planned economy, says Mr. Zhang, 'the price [of everything] was distorted' and the government's solution was to 'set up a price research center with a big computer . . . and adjust prices according to this calculation.' Of course, 'they couldn't get any results.'
This gave Mr. Zhang his first break. In his graduate thesis, he considered the possibility of having one price system remain government-controlled and leaving another to the market, with industries moving slowly from the first track to the second. He impressed policy makers with the idea at a 1984 conference, and they adopted it, giving Mr. Zhang a job with the State Commission for Reforming the Economic System. The stint turned him off from policy-making. Bureaucrats rarely 'rock the boat,' he says. 'Making policy is a political process . . . a compromise.'
Looking for a world where he didn't have to compromise, he went to Oxford, where he studied for an economics doctorate. On returning to China in 1994, he co-founded the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, the country's oldest modern institution of higher learning.
Mr. Zhang says he prefers the academic marketplace of ideas rather than policies, but he stands out there too. Unlike the Chinese tribe of reformer-economists who see themselves as technocrats chipping away at statism, Mr. Zhang thinks in stark moral terms. In a speech this year, he invoked Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to argue that there is such a thing as natural law and that the right to property is 'passed prior to sovereignty.'
The flip side of this freedom to pursue success is being able to stomach failure, which is where Mr. Zhang's affinity for Hayek ties in. Austrians frown even on central banks trying to manipulate demand because, as Mr. Zhang tells it, 'when you make a mistake, you must take responsibility.'
'If you suffer today, it's a small suffering. But if you don't have that suffering today,' tomorrow 'you'll have a big suffering.' Letting people know that truth, he says, 'is what an economist or scholar should do.'
Leaders should do this too, and he talks excitedly about the late 1990s, when the Asian economic crisis spurred the party to privatize state companies, even if it left 20 million unemployed. The crisis had brought Indonesia and others to their knees, says Mr. Zhang, and China's leaders understood at the time that 'the lesson was not to have crony capitalism' and a bloated public sector.
Back then, the intellectual tide was going in Mr. Zhang's direction. State-controlled CCTV proclaimed him 'Economist of the Year' in 2002, and he remembers that at Peking University 'the whole culture was reform-oriented too.' He was appointed assistant president of the university that year and later dean of the Guanghua School of Management, where he pushed reform.
The reforms proved successful, but the reformer was crucified. The old guard in the faculty lounges revolted, while accusations impugning Mr. Zhang's loyalty and questioning his credentials swirled over the Internet. He was forced out of his Guanghua post in 2010.
Much of the trouble stemmed from internal campus politics, but he also says that the broader 'environment changed.' China's universities are a product of a planned economy, so 'if the whole country [was] in the good process of reform, people like me won't be treated like that.'
What happened? China's leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, in place since 2002, reversed reforms. Rising inequality was the original excuse for favoring the public sector and, one suspects, high growth soon convinced policy makers to continue on that path. The new mantra in Beijing was 'guo jin, min tui'-the state advances, the private sector retreats.
When the financial crisis struck Beijing jumped at the chance to advance the state even further. The poor economic result is now front and center, but Mr. Zhang says the past decade has also seen dramatic social problems that help alter the climate of opinion. The Chinese people have watched bureaucrats distribute resources to state companies and their friends, and popular perceptions of corruption and inequality have grown. Far from a crisis of markets, he says, Beijing is facing a crisis of state.
That is why Mr. Zhang is hopeful for reforms. He proposes restarting privatization, which he says is easier to do now because 'some of these companies are listed on exchanges.' Overhauling the financial system is next, since state companies use the banks as ATMs and deprive entrepreneurs of formal loans.
Can we expect such a liberalization right after the new crop of leaders is anointed in mid-November? He says that Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang, a contender for the top decision-making body, is a 'real reformer.' But otherwise he admits that Chinese politics is a black box.
Is there a possibility that Beijing will turn to another stimulus to goose GDP? 'Certainly things could go worse. But there could also be good opportunity,' he says. What he does know is that people's way of thinking has changed. It's just that the 'impact is implicit, not explicit' in China's nondemocracy.
Mr. Zhang is optimistic because he thinks 30 years of openness have altered expectations. 'We have a lot of trust in' markets today, which is why the last decade's anti-market turn has exasperated people. Mass protests against land grabs and other government bullying now number 180,000 a year, according to government data compiled at Beijing's Tsinghua University. These protests are hard for the party to ignore-and powerfully make the moral case for free markets.
'We human beings always seek happiness,' says Mr. Zhang. 'Now there are two ways. You make yourself happy by making other people unhappy-I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy-that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?'
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