There will be many choices in life, some active, some passive, some inevitable, some accidental, but the value of all choices can ultimately be measured by time.
Oral / Wu Xiaobo (Wu Xiaobo Channel)
Over the years, when communicating with young students, they often ask the question: "Life will face one crossroads after another, how should we make choices?" ”
Whenever there is such a moment, I often think of the story of Zhang Wuchang.
<h1>01</h1>
Born in 1935, Stephen Zhang is a native of Hong Kong who was born with messy hair, like his wild and uninhibited personality.
In 1959, Zhang Wuchang went to the University of California in Los Angeles to study, and eight years later, his doctoral thesis "Tenant Farmer Theory" studied Taiwan's land reform from the perspective of land leases, and once published, it caused a sensation in the academic circles, and it was one of the most cited doctoral dissertations in economics in history, and he became the founder of contract economics.
In 1967, after graduating with Dr. Zhang Wuchang, he went to the University of Chicago to do postdoctoral research. During that time, Zhang Wuchang mingled with the masters such as Stigler, Friedman, North and Coase, and was the youngest and only Chinese face among them. In the eyes of many people, it is only a matter of time before Stephen Zhang won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
But in 1979, Coase said to Zhang Wuchang: "Stephen, your motherland is about to undergo a great change, you should not stay here." You should go back and witness it happening. ”
Coase's remarks completely changed Zhang Wuchang's academic and life trajectory.
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In the autumn of 1979, Zhang Wuchang set foot on the Chinese mainland for the first time.
He went to a construction site in Guangzhou to investigate and found an interesting scene: three workers were filling a hole, one was pointing to the hole, one was holding a cement plate, and one was filling the hole. In the case of contract failure, Zhang Wuchang witnessed the inefficiency of the state-owned economy.
In Dongguan County, which was still a rural area at the time, he saw a new scene: in a large house, more than a dozen officials of the county government sat in a row, and Hong Kong businessmen who came to invest lined up in a line, stamping all the official seals in one go. Zhang Wuchang also saw the possibility of new efficiency.
Therefore, in the big cities such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, he did not see any signs of reform at all, but in some small counties and towns, he saw the possibility of reform.
In early 1981, Zhang Wuchang published a long article entitled "Will China Go the Road to Capitalism?" At that time, the term "market economy" had not yet been invented in the Chinese dictionary, so if the ideological implications of "capitalism" were removed, Zhang Wuchang was the first economist to clearly predict that China would embark on the path of privatization and marketization of property rights.
Obviously, in 1981, almost all scholars who studied Western economics would not know that the breakthrough point of China's marketization did not appear in the cities but in the countryside, and that township enterprises would become the first stormtroopers of the industrialization revolution, which was the surprise and characteristic of China's reform.
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In 1982, Zhang Wuchang left the United States and returned to the University of Hong Kong as a professor, always as an observer of the direction of China's economic reform. For a long time, he wrote two columns a week commenting on current policy. Because of his special status, he often has free and unique opinions.
Unlike many scholars who simply look for arguments from various communiqués or news, Zhang Wuchang prefers to go deep into enterprises. In each place, the two data he likes to ask most are factory rents and the wages of production line workers, which in his view are the most difficult to falsify and the most sensitive index of industrial rise and fall.
In 2008, the two sessions in Beijing passed the amendment to the Employment Contract Law. Under the new law, all business owners must sign an employment contract and, in the event of dismissal, are required to give the employee a certain amount of compensation.
Unlike many scholars who regard this amendment as a "conscience bill", Zhang Wuchang raised a fierce objection, in his view: "Government legislation, left and right contracts, intentionally or unintentionally increase the hostility between labor and management, thereby increasing transaction costs, the lethality of the economy as a whole can be amazing." ”
Although Zhang Wuchang's views are often controversial, no one can deny his profound academic attainments and his love of China's economic reform.
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In 2008, the 30th anniversary of reform and opening up, Zhang Wuchang wrote a book called "China's Economic System."
In the preface to the book, he writes this passage —
My generation of people who have studied art in the West know that in international scholarship, China is not important, and there is no half-seat to speak of. Looking west today, I realized that the master there was not very good. Without understanding China, there is a big gap in the understanding of the economy, and it is not really understood that the economy is understood.
At the time he wrote this, nearly 30 years had passed since Coase persuaded him to return to China.
Although in the eyes of many people, if Zhang Wuchang had not chosen to return to China that year, he would probably have been a Nobel Laureate in Economics. But at the crossroads of his life, he made another choice and became an observer of China's economic reforms.
So, for a long time, Zhang Wuchang did not have the ability to devote himself to academic research, but spent more time observing China's economic policies and writing countless column comments. In the eyes of some pure economists, he is simply wasting his talents.
I once asked Zhang Wuchang, "Do you regret it?" ”
He replied that young people should find the greatest topics in their prime, so that their talents will not be wasted.
Between the two roles of Nobel laureate in economics and longtime observer of China's economic reforms, Zhang wuchang made his choice. Do you think such a choice is worth it?