Thomas Piketty and Wang Jianling

There is an amusing contrast between Thomas Piketty and Wang Jianling.  Piketty is a famous French economist and highly respected member of the Establishment, who is dedicated to the destruction of the capitalist system.  Wang is a member of the communist party in China who has done more than anyone else to create wealth and capital through free enterprise in China.  When I met him during my time in Oxford he was the richest man in Asia.  The occasion of our meeting was a lecture given by him at the Said Business School  to promote his book, The Wanda Way.  The lecture hall was packed with Chinese students, who listened with rapt attention to his story of how he rose from being a soldier in the Red Army to creating a property empire, based on malls and cinema chains.  Question time revealed the eagerness of the audience to learn the secrets of becoming rich.  As I was, literally, the only non-Asian in the audience I was interviewed by the attendant press and TV and told them how impressed I was by what I had seen and heard.  There was no doubting the keenness of the young Chinese to learn the lessons of Free Enterprise and profit by them.

The contrast with a lecture given by Thomas Piketty could not have been more striking. His talk, to an audience of more than 500, was vastly oversubscribed.  Piketty’s main thesis is that capitalist society is becoming more and more unequal and that the remedy is more government intervention and higher taxes. The audience loved him and it was obvious from the questions which were asked that they subscribed to his thesis. When I collared him at the reception afterwards he doubled down on his call for higher taxes, telling me that he thought that a top rate of income tax of 75% would be sustainable. I wonder if I was the only dissenting voice that evening?  It certainly felt like it.  The fact that his crazy  and destructive theories (which now include a ban on private jets) are treated with respect rather than derision will go some way to explain why today Europe is faring so badly , in contrast to the continued growth of the economy in China, fettered though it is now, by the increasing authoritarianism of President Xi.

It’s a depressing thought indeed that Oxford students live in a bubble of unreality, unaware that with the loss of their economic freedoms go the loss of other freedoms as well, such as freedom of speech, as well as a remorseless decline in their prosperity. ​It seemed to me that the Chinese students were hungry for success whereas the Oxford students were complacent and, for the most part, heading for failure.