How China became capitalist

Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Awards

Atlas Network is pleased to announce the winner of the 2013 Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Award is the Ronald Coase Institute for the book, How China Became Capitalist, by the late Ronald Coase, and co-author Ning Wang. The authors argue that the decisions of China’s people, not its government, are to be credited with China’s economic success.
“Atlas is deeply honored to recognize this important book and also to honor the incredible life of Ronald Coase, whom we lost earlier this year,” said Brad Lips, Atlas Network CEO. “The past few weeks we’ve seen China’s government continue to make headlines for its intolerance towards ideas and opinions it doesn’t like. This book represents not only a work of serious economic history, but it is also makes a compelling call for a more open market for ideas in China.”
Published in 2012, the book makes new claims about the role of spontaneous private behavior in driving economic reforms, with the Communist Party moving slowly out of the way. The authors detail major, mostly unplanned shifts such as private farming, street-level exchange, and regional competition, the latter serving to transform China into “a gigantic laboratory where many different economic experiments were tried simultaneously.”
Tying China’s success to this liberalized market for goods, the authors warn China’s future success will depend on liberalizing the market for ideas, explaining, “As our modern economy becomes more and more knowledge-driven, the gains from free exchange of ideas are too great; the costs of suppressing it are too high.”