A Lonely Passion: China’s Followers of Friedrich A. Hayek

OCTOBER 30, 2013, 5:55 PM

A Lonely Passion: China’s Followers of Friedrich A. Hayek

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

As quixotic causes go, working in China to spread the ideas of Friedrich A. Hayek, the Austrian-born liberal economist and philosopher of freedom, is up there. Hayek believed that economic planning by the state leads to a loss of individual liberty, and that a private economy run by people whose rights are protected and enlarged by good laws delivers the best life. ‘‘There is some distance between Hayek and the current realities’’ in China, Gao Quanxi, a prominent Chinese Hayekian and law professor at Beihang University in Beijing, said in an interview this week.Mr. Gao was probably choosing his words carefully. The gap is enormous, as he explained last Friday in a talk at the Unirule Institute of Economics, a think tank in Beijing.

Present were members of the Hayek Association, an informal group of dozens of Chinese scholars that is not registered — cannot register, several members said, probably because of government opposition that would make it too difficult or expensive, though they didn’t spell that out.

In his talk, titled ‘‘Reconsidering Hayek’s Theoretical Legacy,’’ Mr. Gao did not mince words: China is less free now than 10 years ago, at the end of the Jiang Zemin era. There is no ‘‘free market of ideas’’ in universities. Publishing on topics the authorities disapprove of has become more difficult. The state is on the march.

‘‘Today we’re in a new planned economy,’’ a ‘‘politically left, economically right’’ setup that does not guarantee individual protections and offers no sense of security, he said.

Yes, China had introduced some measure of a private economy. But, ‘‘we have all these state-owned companies. What do they represent?’’ he asked. ‘‘At the end of the day, what are they?’’

Capitalism, several participants said, functions in China according to the unwritten rules created by the power holders, not by good laws, as Hayek urged.

‘‘Communism has failed. Socialism has failed. What we have here is statism. And Hayek really opposed that. So how should we understand Hayek in the context of today’s China?’’ asked Mr. Gao.

In August, the association held its ninth annual meeting, in Tianjin, to consider that. Next year will mark its 10th anniversary, and members hope to meet overseas for the first time, in Taiwan or Hawaii. ‘‘We’ve met in lots of places in China and thought we’d meet overseas for a change,’’ said Mr. Gao.

The meeting did not advertise itself as a Hayek Association event, but topics included the core issues of economic and personal liberty.

‘‘We didn’t ask people to write anything down,’’ said Feng Xingyuan, deputy director of Unirule and an association member. ‘‘We asked them to talk. We’re just a group of scholars.’’

As always in China, there’s more intellectual and social ferment, including in the ranks of the ruling Communist Party, than the outside world realizes.

According to one participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, a district-level party secretary in a city he declined to name recently distributed copies of Hayek’s classic, ‘‘The Road to Serfdom,’’ to his colleagues to study. The book warns that with state economic control comes tyranny; the foundations of liberty are a free economy and individualism.

What is the government’s attitude to all this?

‘‘They maintain an attitude of silence. But they may use parts of it on a practical level,’’ said Mr. Gao. He cited the 1990s, when the government privatized many state-owned companies. But that agenda has run out of steam, he said, and must be reprised, though he was skeptical it would happen soon. Political change to enhance the personal liberties Hayek urged was especially unlikely, he said. ‘‘Perhaps in five or 10 years.’’

Many economists, scholars and politicians believe that China is facing deep challenges to its economic model, that it needs to shift from a fixed investment-fueled economy, where the hand of the state is heavy, to one with more private enterprise and market forces.

For the Hayekians, it’s all pretty obvious. What China needs is more of the medicine Hayek prescribed. ‘‘China is at a point where it needs to listen to Hayek,’’ said Mr. Gao.

‘‘People need to do things on their own again, with their individual energies,’’ Mr. Gao said. ‘‘We need a true people’s economy. We can’t do things through force anymore.’’