Zhang Weiyin is a prominent Chinese economist and was head of the Guanghua School of Management

Guanghua School of Management

The Guanghua School of Management of the Peking University is a business school in China. The School is staffed with about 100 full-time teaching faculty members. About half of the faculty earned their Ph.D degrees from prestigious universities overseas...

 at Beijing University. He is known for his advocacy of free markets and his ideas have been influenced by the Austrian School

Austrian School

The Austrian School of economics is a heterodox school of economic thought. It advocates methodological individualism in interpreting economic developments , the theory that money is non-neutral, the theory that the capital structure of economies consists of heterogeneous goods that have...

.

Biography

Professor Weiying Zhang graduated with a bachelor degree in 1982, and a master degree in 1984, from Northwestern University at Xi’an. He received his M. Phil. in economics in 1992 and D. Phil. in economics from Oxford University

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

. His D. Phil. supervisors were James Mirrlees

James Mirrlees

Sir James Alexander Mirrlees is a Scottish economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in 1998....

 (1996 Nobel Laureate) and Donald Hay. Between 1984 and 1990, he was a research fellow of the Economic System Reform Institute of China under the State Commission of Restructuring Economic System. During this period, he was heavily involved in economic reform policy making in China. He was the first Chinese economist who proposed the “dual-track price system

Price system

In economics, a price system is any economic system that affects its distribution of goods and services with prices and employing any form of money. Except for possible remote and primitive communities, all modern societies use price systems to allocate resources...

 reform” (in 1984). He was also known for his contributions to macro-control

Macro-control

Macroeconomic regulation and control often abbrevicated Macro-control refers to the use of direct government intervention by the central government of the People's Republic of China to cool down the overheated economy. The policy was first introduced in 1993 by Zhu Rongji, Premier of the People's...

 policy debating, ownership reform debating, and entrepreneurship studies. After he graduated from Oxford, he co-founded China Center for Economic Research

China Center for Economic Research

The China Center for Economic Research is an economics think tank in Peking University, China. It was opened in August 1994, and is directed by Justin Yifu Lin....

 (CCER), Peking University in 1994, and worked with the Center first as an associate professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

and then as a professor until August, 1997. He then moved to Guanghua School of Management in September, 1997.