I had a lot of very fruitful meetings in Beijing, including a talk (see photo above) to graduate students of international relations at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, in which I made the case for property, free trade, and free markets as key elements in an international order of peace. (I drew from the work of Erik Gartzke, which deserves careful study.)
A key topic in my presentations to policy and academic audiences was also the need for deep legal reform to address such issues as reliability of the supply chain, protection of trademarks, and product liability law. The milk scandal was very much on the minds of many people, who understood that executing a few officials is not a long-term solution (or perhaps any solution at all) to a problem of an underdeveloped legal culture and system. What is needed is the infrastructure of a market economy, which means, a developed legal system. Among the topics of discussion was introduction of precedent-based legal decision processes to replace or supplement the civil code system used by the Chinese government.
(The trip was rather tiring, as I few from the US to Frankfurt to Kyiv to Simferopol in Ukraine, from Simferopol to Kyiv to Frankfurt to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Beijing, and yesterday from Beijing to Washington, D.C. Today I fly to South Carolina for a Cato event.)