Cheung’s work includes an examination of sharecropping—in which a landowner grants rights to a tenant farmer to work the land in exchange for a share of the crop. Although often seen as an exploitative practice, Cheung argued that it was not necessarily so, and that the practice could lower the costs of monitoring wage contracts (that is, ensuring employees work hard) and increase the economic benefits over a rental contract by sharing the risk between landowner and tenant farmer.

Cheung has referred to his article ‘The Contractual Nature of The Firm’ published in 1983, as his most important work. Drawing on Coase’s influential 1937 article ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Cheung defines a firm as a kind of contractual arrangement: one that can be used to set prices, thereby replacing the market to some extent. Firms can also reduce transaction costs such as the costs resulting from price searching. The work proposes that a government can behave as a firm and can sometimes be more efficient than the market.

In early 1980s China, the benefits of a market economy were still disputed, and private enterprise and capital were seen as serious challenges to the planned economy and the fundamentals of socialism. Even those who accepted or implicitly supported market-oriented reforms still lacked theoretical justification to establishing a market economy. There was a general anxiety about the destructive effects of a market economy on state ownership. Cheung’s ideas provided a theoretical basis for market reforms without rejecting socialism while also offering practical economic guidelines for how such a hybrid system could work: While the government owned property rights of resources such as land, individual business units such as farmers had usage rights. In order words, without tackling the sensitive concept of ‘the socialist public ownership of land’, Cheung’s proposal helped China to adopt a de facto market mechanism to guide the efficient use of resources.

Since the 1990s, the sale or rental of land in China has been a key revenue source at various levels of government. But such practices did not start till the late 1980s. Cheung played a key role in starting this trend. In June 1986, he wrote an article titled ‘Land Sales: kill three birds with one stone’  出售土地一举三得. In the piece, Cheung encouraged the Chinese government to consider the sale or long-term rental of land as a transitional option to overcome fiscal difficulties. The article used plain language, free of economic theory and jargon, to argue that entrepreneurs owning land bought or leased from the government would use it most efficiently, which in turn would benefit society at large. Facing a major political objection that ‘Chinese land belongs to the nation and cannot be sold’, Cheung argued:

The idea that foreigners or foreign institutions should not own ‘national’ land is too ‘optimistic’. Because the problem is not selling land to foreigners, but getting them to be confident in investing in it. Every  government has the right to forbid foreigners from entering, or to kick them out. Every country has this right, what you really need to worry about is scaring the foreign investors away.

至于那些认为外籍人士或外国机构不应占有「国土」的言论，却是过于「乐观」了。因为困难不是卖地给外籍人士，而是要外籍人士有信心投资购买。任何政府都有权禁止非本国籍的人士入境，或驱逐外籍人士出境。国家有这个权，要担心的倒是，一不小心，把投资的外籍人士吓跑了。

Two years later, in 1988, Cheung wrote a follow-up article: ‘Another Milestone – Evaluating Chinese Land Auctions 又是一个里程碑——评中国土地拍卖. Cheung again encouraged the use of market techniques without the state giving up ultimate control:

Land auction in China is not freehold. This is not important. Without freehold, properties can continue to be owned by the state while being used as private land. While we are in the midst of systemic reform, we should not ask for too much nor should we insist on making Chinese property rights the same as those in  America.

中国大陆拍卖的土地，并非年期永久的。这不重要。没有永久年期，可以施行私产之实而又能保持土地国有的形象（正如租了房子，房子还是业主的）；在体制改革期中，我们难以苛求，不要坚持中国大陆的土地所有权要像美国那样的。

Ronald Coase wrote the foreword to a volume of Cheung’s essays Economic Explanation–Selected Papers Of Steven N.S Cheung and included the following remarks on China:

Included in this volume is a paper Steven Cheung wrote in 1981 (it was published in 1982) with the title, ‘Will China Go Capitalist ?’ His answer, which at the time was regarded as wildly improbable, was that it would. Subsequent events, however, have vindicated Cheung’s prediction. As Steven Cheung says, in a later paper, ‘Whatever the future holds, Deng Xiaoping’s Great Transformation must be regarded as one of the most remarkable chapters in economic history.’

Aside from his economics research, Cheung is a keen amateur photographer. He took the famous photograph of Milton Friedman on the cover of Milton’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. Known for his outspoken style, Cheung is sometimes called an ‘unrestrained scholar’ 狂生. In 2003, Cheung was indicted by a US federal grand jury on a variety of tax related charges pertaining to income from foreign countries. Cheung has not returned to the United States since then, and lives in China where he is a popular blogger and influential thinker.

Additional links
Cheung’s Sina blog: 张五常的博客
Cheung’s Ifeng column
Cosmos Books: Economic Explanation–Selected Papers Of Steven N.S Cheung
http://freakonomics.com/2009/03/23/not-as-authentic-as-it-seems/
The Guardian: Improbable research: the economist who theorised on corruption
Wikipedia: Steven N.S. Cheung

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Cui’s background is in literature and aesthetics, which she studied at Nanjing University before taking up a position at the Beijing Film Academy in 1984 where she also pursued her studies in avant garde poetry and literary theory.

In the mid-1990s, Cui began translating Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless (Moc bezmocných) and other essays, circulating them privately among friends and colleagues. They’re now available online, as well as in a print edition published in Taiwan, but they have not been printed in an officially-approved edition on the mainland.

In an interview with The Economic Observer’s literary supplement, Cui explained how she encountered Havel in the post-1989 period and what appealed to her about his political philosophy:

Getting into Eastern Europe was entirely due to a personal spiritual confusion that began in the late 1980s and lasted for several years. It was quite painful. That period of time was a huge crisis for me personally. My whole system of expression suddenly failed, and all of a sudden I could not find any words to express my experience. What I said on the surface was entirely divorced from what I was thinking on the inside during that time. That meant that on the one hand, the world before you is shaken and it loses shape and expression, while on the other, you lose your language and you can’t establish an internal order. Your whole person is stuck in a state of mute depression that is particularly uncomfortable.

[…]

And at that time, one day completely by chance, I pulled a book off the shelf – I’ve written about this before. It had a red cover. A Havel collection. It had been given to me by a friend in Canada who loved Chinese poetry and had come to China to study poetry. We’d often get together to drink and chat. He’d always leave a few books behind at my house, and this was one of them.

I flipped through it and one of the interviews had a fairly simple sentence in which Havel said that he had learned lots of things from Marxism, and perhaps considered himself a socialist, but he did not like the technique of exhausting all truth and the belief that they had grasped not only past and present truths but the truths of the future as well. To Havel, ‘This world is a thousand times more mysterious.’ The expression struck me immediately. I flipped through the book and came to a page where I read, ‘Maybe I believe in something. I believe in life… .’ At this point I really felt that no one had ever gotten so close to my own life experience.

She has also translated Ivan Klima’s essay collection The Spirit of Prague 布拉格的精神 (1998).

Outside of academia, Cui has become a prominent public intellectual who champions freedom of expression and political reform in media op-eds and on her blog and microblog. She was involved with the Charter 08 project, and after Liu Xiaobo was detained for his leading role in drafting it, she accepted the Homo Homini prize on 11 March 2009 along with Xu Youyu 徐友渔 and Mo Shaoping 莫少平 on behalf of the Charter’s signatories (see New York Review of Books for her remarks on the reward).

On 25 December 2009, after Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in gaol for inciting the subversion of state power, Cui began asking prominent Chinese intellectuals for comments by telephone and via Twitter. She eventually collected 160 short statements, ranging from ‘no comment’ brush-offs and vague appeals to the necessity of a free marketplace ideas to condemnations of literary inquisition and full-throated denunciations of the shameless hypocrisy of the so-called ‘harmonious society’, and in a subsequent blog post, defended herself against criticisms that her questions exerted unwanted pressure on the intellectuals she called or exposed them to undue risk. She described the approach as one that gave voice to opinions on a subject that could not be addressed in the mainstream mainland media.

Her activism has attracted government disapproval and, in March 2010, she was prevented from traveling to the United States to attend a conference.

More recently, Cui Weiping spoke out against the rising tide of anti-Japanese sentiment surrounding China’s territorial disputes with Japan. In October 2012, as a response to the violent anti-Japanese protests that had taken place in Chinese cities the previous month, she helped draft and circulate a ten-point call for a return to rational dialogue in the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands sovereignty issue (让中日关系回归理性——我们的呼吁).

Cui Weiping’s essays have been collected in Invisible Voices 看不见的声音 (2000), Prior to Justice 正义之前 (2005), Thoughts and Nostalgia 思想与乡愁 (2012) and The Narrative of Our Times 我们时代的叙事 (2008), a collection of film criticism.

Additional links

• Cui Weiping’s blog and microblog

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