It Is Ideas That Shape History
Updated: Sep 30
1.
Ask a scholar of China's reform era which institution they would most like to visit, and the answer will very likely be the University of Chicago. More precisely, its Department of Economics.
Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, and the wider company of Chicago economists they stand for, were the intellectual idols of my generation of Chinese intellectuals. Their arguments and their books answered the practical confusions of an entire cohort of Chinese scholars. For three or four years running, Coase's The Firm, the Market, and the Law travelled in my suitcase on every reporting trip, and no matter how many times I read it, I was never quite done with it. Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom even more so.
There was also a personal thread that drew me to Chicago.
In 2008, Coase used his Nobel Prize money to convene a conference there marking the thirtieth anniversary of China's Reform and Opening. Alongside scholars from China and abroad, he invited Chinese entrepreneurs and officials as well. He wanted the facts about China first-hand.
According to Ning Wang, the economist who worked as Coase's assistant, I was the only Chinese journalist invited. I was then with the Nanfang Media Group. Work commitments kept me from going, a regret I still carry.
It was in the closing session of that conference that Coase, then ninety-eight, gave the speech that moved everyone in the room: "I Shall Soon Depart, and I Wish China Well." The audience rose and applauded for a long time.
Every Chinese person, myself among them, owes that old man a word of thanks delivered in person.
Coase was among the economists who shaped China's reform most profoundly. His attachment to the country ran deep, dating back to reading Marco Polo's Travels as a boy, and yet he never set foot there. Around 2012 friends were arranging a trip for him. He died in 2013.
So it was only natural that on August 30, 2025, the birthday present I wanted most was a visit to the Chicago economics department, a wish finally granted.
(Coase received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991 for founding new institutional economics and the field of law and economics. Strictly speaking, his formal faculty appointment was at the Law School, but he was one of the most important members of the Chicago school of economics broadly understood.)
2.
Early autumn in Chicago, and along the shore of Lake Michigan there was not yet a hint of cool. Walking the campus, moving among Gothic buildings covered in ivy, I felt a solemnity close to pilgrimage. Grey stone walls, soaring spires, silent quadrangles: the place has the air of a classical monastery sealed off from the noise of the world.
Then I pushed open the door of Saieh Hall for Economics, and the tension between the ivory tower and the world outside went taut at once. What I had not expected was that the world in question would be China's.
On a wall at a bend in the corridor was a progress report on China REACH, a research project led by the Nobel laureate James Heckman. He had turned his attention to the remotest villages of China, in Gansu Province and elsewhere, using empirical methods to test the proposition that investment in early childhood development yields the highest return of any investment in human capital. The clear light of economic reasoning had become a practical force changing the fate of poor children on the other side of the world.
On the ground floor, in the Chicago Economic Experience, the department's historical exhibition, I came upon a familiar Chinese name: Yifu Lin. After finishing his doctorate at Chicago he returned to China and founded the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University, later renamed the National School of Development (NSD). He was the first Chinese economist of the Reform and Opening era to earn a doctorate abroad, and he understood what economics could mean for a country in transition. The school gathered a remarkable faculty, and it is fair to say that no academic institution has responded more actively to China's realities or influenced its transition more deeply. I studied there myself, and owe it a great deal.
The first lesson of the visit, then, is that an institution built on ideas must engage the real and painful questions of its day, often and in depth.
The history of the Chicago School is the best gloss on that. Friedman's monetary theory reshaped Federal Reserve policy, while the law and economics tradition that Coase and others opened up changed American antitrust law and the practice of business regulation directly. The department never confined itself to the ivory tower.
This will be the methodological core of the Rocky Mountain Entrepreneurship Global Research Center.
3.
Anyone drawn to the half-century of China's reform is likely to ask what it is that actually shapes history. Great men? Politicians? Ordinary people? Accident, or luck? The long corridor on the ground floor of Saieh Hall may hold the answer.
The walls on both sides are hung with photographs of the discipline's great minds: Jacob Viner, W. Allen Wallis, Merton Miller, Aaron Director, and of course Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase. There is also a group portrait of sixteen Chicago Nobel laureates, undated, oddly enough. The number must be well past sixteen by now.
One photograph sits a little oddly among the rest, a snapshot of Milton and his wife Rose. Washington, D.C., 1938, the cherry blossom out, a shy and reticent Rose standing beside a strikingly self-possessed Milton. It brought to mind their joint memoir, Two Lucky People. Many of the captions along the corridor are drawn from Rose's words in that book.
Walking the length of it, I thought about the ideas they defended all their lives: free markets, clearly defined property rights, limited government, a wariness of state interference in the economy. For most of the twentieth century, against the tide of central planning and state interventionism, they were lonely figures walking the other way. In the end it was precisely these ideas that gave rise to the wave of marketization across the world, China included, and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
Paul Samuelson had it right, or roughly so: "I don't care who writes a nation's laws, or crafts its advanced treaties, if I can write its economics textbooks."
It is ideas that shape history.
Talking with students there, I felt keenly how proud they are of the department. When they read the classic papers of the discipline, history seems to be passing just below the windowsill beyond their desks. Perhaps history is the footnote to those texts.
At the end of the corridor the sunlight came in at an angle, breaking into patches of light and shadow.
America has had its own golden age of entrepreneurship: the founders' defense of private property and human liberty, the fearless push of the pioneers into the West, the geeks in Silicon Valley garages dreaming up things that changed the world. Yet the spirit is ebbing away.
The future is undetermined. The mission of the R.M.E., in a single sentence, is to remake the idea of entrepreneurship, and through it to drive a new technological revolution and a new commercial civilization.
On August 30, 2025, in that cathedral of economics, I spent an unusual birthday. No cake, no fuss, but a precious gift all the same: a kind of strength that reaches across time.
Farewell, Ronald Coase.
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