Absolute Advocate

Of the most well-known Chinese economists, few have advocated laissez-faire market economics so strongly, and so unstintingly, as Zhang Weiying. Zhang is one of an academic minority in China who subscribe to non-Keynesian principles, and has thus been labeled by the media as “spokesperson for vested interest groups,” and even, on more than one occasion, “an enemy of the people”… In the early 1990s, Zhang’s studies at Oxford University, from which he emerged with a PhD, further strengthened his belief in a self-regulated free market. He became an admirer of Ludwig Mises, a prominent proponent of the so-called Austrian School of economics emphasizing individual choice and price signals controlling the marketplace with minimal government intervention.