Home Is Where The Heart Dwells

‘By force of thought’

Insider critic of Marxist economics discusses his autobiography

By Ken Gewertz

Harvard News Office

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János Kornai gave a speech today about his biography By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, which was recently published by MIT Press. In this book he wrote about his legendary life: from a communist journalist to a world-famous economist.

Kornai’s thought probably has the most transforming power in China. Ever since China’s economic reform in late 1970s, his books were introduced to Chinese economists and policy makers. And later many of his terms, such as “Soft Budget Constraint”, became popular–and in the meantime very meaningful–among thoughtful Chinese reformers.

After the speech, I approached him and asked him what he thought of current Chinese economic regime and what he thought of the future of Chinese political regime. His answer was concise and clear. For the first question, he said China’s system was more capitalism than socialism; for the second question, he told me that he did not know. “The future is always a mystery “, said him. However, he added that the current system was “not sustainable” at all. Shaking hands and saying good-bye to me, he told me his book Socialism System had just been published in China three days before.

In Mainland China, excellent students can not go to Universities simply because the educational resources are so scarce. The lack of education resources becomes a serious problem for the government, considering education’s traditional role of facilitating social democracy. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the government has strive to resolve the problem, but to no avail. In 2005, it turned to universities in Hongkong and Macao, hoping that they would contribute more resources. The new strategy succeeded–although partially. Seeing the success, the government now turns to Taiwan.

Taiwan has more educational resources than it needs. It will be a blessing for the  Taiwan universities to have extra students, for they will be able to open more courses and support the research. And it will equally benefit the government–the government of Taiwan complains for the heavy burden of supporting unnecessary educational institutes.

However, recent news shows that the DDP government has declined the Mainland China’s offer to send students to Taiwan.

DDP’s decision also messes up a good opportunity for Taiwan to compete with Mainland China in terms of political institutions. People in Taiwan have long waited for an opportunity to “educate” Mainland Chinese why the political institutions in Taiwan is desirable. Such an opportunity is hopelessly hard to find, for the only way for the Mainland Chinese to compare is to live under democracy and experience it. (As is said in an article by Long Yingtai, a famous Taiwan writer, “democracy is above all a style of life.”) Considering the dismal probability for the two governments to reach an agreement of free immigration,little can be done in terms of this “education”. Here comes this precious opportunity to exchange students. Taiwan now can show the younger generation, from which the future political and business leaders will grow, the style of life that people in Taiwan will defend at the cost of their lives–according to Long Yingtai. But the DDP government turns it down. After so many years of waiting for opportunities to compete with Mainland China , DDP withdraw from the battlefield like a coward.