Austrian Economics in the Communist Party of China

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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.

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"Let's talk about China. China has an interest that's very much like ours in one respect, and that is they want a stable world. They don't want war. They don't want to see protectionism. They don't want to see the -- the world break out into -- into various forms of chaos, because they have to -- they have to manufacture goods and put people to work. And they have about 20,000 -- 20 million, rather, people coming out of the farms every year, coming into the cities, needing jobs. So they want the economy to work and the world to be free and open. "