Organizations and Markets

8 Comments Add your own

• 1. Bo  |  13 July 2006 at 4:10 am

  Very interesting – the recent AIB meeting in Beijing held its gala dinner at the Great Hall of the People…I wonder if they actually paid this amount? The Great Hall of the People is quite impressive (even though some of the monuments etc have been “removed” or stolen during the revolution…) – the size of the building and rooms combined with a very very high ceiling must have intimidated even the largest of foreign envoys..only thing missing was the traditional red flag on the back wall (I seem to remember this from the movies)..I tested one of the exceptionally large Ming Vases and can report that it is a replica made of some kind of plast material…

• 2. JC  |  13 July 2006 at 7:32 am

  The Forbidden City was completed emptied as the Nationalist forces headed off to Taiwan. You can see all that stuff at the massive National Museum, built into the side of a hill outside Taipei. It is simply amazing, and warmly recommended.

• 3. cliff  |  13 July 2006 at 5:01 pm

  Are there any better ways than free market to develop economy?Please tell Chinese.
  Maybe the government paid for them, They used to do it and show their generous behavior!!
  The Vases could not be made of plastic material.it May not a Ming one ,but it must be true!
  Forbidden City still kept numberless treasures even it was emptied by Nationalist forces .

• 4. JC  |  13 July 2006 at 9:09 pm

  Hmm .. I wonder where these numberless treasures are today.

  I also visited Beijing’s Military museum. They keep old tanks in the basement while the free market rages on the floors above. On show is an astonishing collection of stuff brought by foreign dignatiaries, including a pair of gold-plated Colt .45 pistols from some American.

• 5. Organizations and Markets » Vacation Reading  |  14 July 2006 at 5:01 am

  […] As of tomorrow, I will be on vacation for two weeks in Antibes in the sourthern part of the perhaps most commie country in the World. This is what I will bring with me:  1. Douglass C North. 2005. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. North’s attempt to seriously integrate the “cognitive component” in his increasinly non-orthodox theorizing.  Seems to be a relatively light read, however. […]

• 6. cliff  |  14 July 2006 at 7:45 am

  commy can also be Austrian now.

• 7. Jung-Chin Shen  |  14 July 2006 at 2:36 pm

  JC is right about the Chinese treasures. Kai-shek Chiang brought many of the treasures to National Palace Museum, Taiwan (http://www.npm.gov.tw) after he was defeated by Zedong Mao. As JC said, most of them are stored in a mountain next to the Taipei’s National Palace Museum, and it takes more than 20 years to exhibit all of them, according to the Museum’s exhibition schedule. Many treasures that you see in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People are not original works.

  Chinese’s enthusiasm to capitalism is not a secret. It is partly due to their successful experience in economic reform of 1978. The widening gap between the rich and the poor cannot stop Chinese’s confidence about the capitalism. But the confidence is gradually accumulated over time. When Xiao-ping Deng announced his economic reform plan (market socialism) in 1978, one professor of Peking University committed to suicide to be against the new ideology. However, the high economic growth rate quickly swept the fear of institutional change, especially after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989.

• 8. JC  |  15 July 2006 at 6:39 am

  While as a Westerner visiting China one may be struck by the apparent conflict of Communist ideology and capitalist behavior I am not sure that one is seeing things in the way the actors themselves do.

  What exactly defines capitalist behavior anyway? Interest in property? Or money? Or belief in a ‘free market’? What are its empirical characteristics and where does one find such an exemplar of capitalism? Is capitalism about social institutions other than markets – as de Soto shows us?

  Markets, as locations and exchange practices, existed for millenia before any political system that might be called capitalism arose.

  Is the seeming conflict just in OUR heads as we observe anothers’ complex life without the knowledge that in-dwelling brings?

  Clearly the concept of property is key. Are there any markets is its absence?

  But I think it is also about culture and attention, what the people pay attention to. Rural communities are typically much more attentive to property than those in major cities. Hong Kong being an exception perhaps?

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