Zhang Weiying: China's Anti-Keynesian Insurgent

Zhang Weiying's warnings that stimulus spending would lead to malinvestment were once ignored. Now official ministries invite the follower of Hayek to speak.

Three years ago, Keynesianism was official policy. The 2008 financial crisis had Beijing gloating over the failure of the free-market "Washington Consensus" and touting the "China Model" of government intervention. Keynesianism fit the statist zeitgeist and Beijing then suffered an export slump, so the government allocated $3.5 trillion—or about 50% of gross domestic product—in bank loans and direct spending.
Mr. Zhang's academic colleagues were all praise for the "China Model," but in 2009 he was giving speeches entitled "Bury Keynesianism." Then a top administrator at Peking University, where he now teaches economics, he argued that since the financial crisis was caused by easy money, it couldn't be solved by the same. "The current economy is like a drug addict, and the prescription from the doctor is morphine, so the final result will be much worse," he said.

He invoked the ideas of the late Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics to argue that if the economy weren't allowed to adjust on its own, China's minor bust would be followed by a bigger one.