Yang Xiaokai died last year, but not before granting an interview to New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV).
Yang Xiaokai was born in China in 1948 to high-ranking officials of the Communist Party. His father, Yang Dipu, was at one time Secretary-General of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee and his mother, Chen Su, served as deputy head of the provincial trade union organization. At the age of just 19, he wrote a political tract entitled, “Whither China?” which, as well as advocating radical change in economic policy, openly denounced the powerful Communist Party elite. His book became famous but it landed him in prison for the next ten years of his life.
Once free, Yang studied at Hunan University and accepted a position at Wuhan University. He was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship and obtained his PhD in economics from Princeton University. He then took a postdoctoral position at Yale University before accepting the first of his appointments as a lecturer in economics at Monash University in Australia. He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia in 1993. He was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University (1998-1999), Yale University (1987-1988), and at many other universities. His research papers appeared in American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Organization and Economic Behavior, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Economics and in countless other publications. His own publications include Specialization and Economic Organization: A New Classical Microeconomic Framework, and Economics: New Classical Versus Neoclassical Frameworks.
The following interview with Yang Xiaokai took place shortly before his death in 2004.]