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 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 Chinas 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

Intro -- Preface -- Contents -- Part I: The Market and Cooperation -- Chapter 1: Interests and Ideas in Economics -- Chapter 2: The Institutional Foundation of Human Cooperation -- All of Humanity's Progress Has Come From Cooperation -- The Prisoner's Dilemma: A Contradiction Between Individual Rationality and Collective Rationality -- Social Cooperation Requires Rules of the Game -- Human Cooperation Requires a Limited Government -- Chapter 3: The Market as the Most Effective System of Cooperation -- The Market Economy as Cooperation Between Strangers

Liberty, Private Property, and Entrepreneurship as the Foundation of the Market -- The Planned Economy Entrapped Chinese into the Prisoner's Dilemma -- The Reason for China's Social Morals Crisis -- Chapter 4: The Logic of the Market and the Way of Virtue -- Chapter 5: What Is a Good Market Theory? -- Advancing Human Cooperation -- Reputation and Behavioral Constraints -- Development and Change -- The Entrepreneur -- Economic Cycles and Fluctuations -- Rights Versus Utilitarianism -- Chapter 6: The Fallacy of Market Failure Theory -- The Fallacy of Externalities

Traditional Anti-Monopoly Theories Oppose True Competition -- Without…