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.
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.
‘‘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.
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?
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.