Ideas for China’s Future

This book attempts to convey that ideas matter and China needs right ideas to defeat wrong ideas and to guide its future reform. The successes that China has accomplished over the last 40 years of reform and opening were  the result of ideas defeating interests. After the end of the “Cultural Revolution,” Deng Xiaoping initiated market-oriented Reform and Opening because he had new ideas. While China has made great progress in both economic and social development since the beginning of reform and opening, there is still a long way to go to become a liberal society. Although the ideas of political leaders are crucial in the short term for social transformation to take place, the ideas of the common people play a more important role in the long term. The types of new ideas that China needs are proposed in this book. 

“Weiying Zhang's fascinating new book is full of ideas about economics that are applicable everywhere. The author has a wonderful way of gathering ideas from many sources, criticizing and synthesizing them, and then using them to say interesting things about possibilities for today.” (Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel laureate in Economics, the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University, and Professor, HSBC business school, Peking University, Shenzhen)

“Weiying Zhang is a top innovative and independent thinker in China. In this book, he addresses some fundamental issues about China’s future reforms, particularly whether a nondemocratic political system can be compatible with a free market economy? The ideas established in this book will benefit not only people in China, but also people all over the world.” (Yushi Mao, the 2012 winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, and the founder of the Beijing Unirule Institute)


"Weiying Zhang is one of China's leading reform economists. In Ideas for China's Future he combines granular analysis of China's current economic and political situation with a deep dive into classic political thought. He argues persuasively that, for a better future, China urgently needs a 'market of ideas'." (Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, Oxford University & Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)


“Weiying Zhang is market liberalism’s most brilliant intellectual advocate in China. His eloquent and persuasive book reveals the flaws in current policies and lays out an alternative path for future economic and political reformers.” (Susan L. Shirk, Research Professor and Chair 21st Century China Center School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC-San Diego)


“In the stimulating and very readable essays in this book, Weiying Zhang blends the insights of Coase, Friedman and Hayek with those of Chinese scholars thousands of years earlier. He pours both praise and criticism on his own discipline, economics. The praise is for the contribution of economists to the reforms that enabled China’s astonishing recent growth. The criticism is for the failure of many economists – and China’s current leaders – to recognise that ultimately a market economy can flourish and progress only in an institutional framework that constrains government and liberates thinkers.” (Adrian Wood, Emeritus Professor of International Development, Oxford University)

Weiying Zhang is Boya Chair Professor of Economics at National School of Development, Peking University, China, and the chief economist of the China Entrepreneurs Forum. He received bachelor and master degrees in economics from the Northwest University, China, and D. Phil in economics from Oxford University, UK. He has published a variety of academic books and papers. As a leading market liberal in China, his insightful and provocative opinions about China’s reforms and development have been widely reported both in Chinese and the international media. In 2011, he received the China Economic Theory Innovation Award for his pioneering contribution to the dual-track price reform.