A U.S. Economist's Book Turns Into a Hit in China

Lots of people inside and outside China have heard Premier Li Keqiang promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation in speeches. Far fewer know where he got the idea. It comes at least in part from the Upper West Side of Manhattan—specifically from the mind of Edmund Phelps, a Nobel prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor who wrote a 2013 book called Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. The book has sold 100,000 copies in China, about 10 times as many as in the U.S., Phelps says.

Li isn’t hiding his intellectual debt to Phelps. Last year he presented Phelps with a Friendship Award, China’s highest honor for foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress. Although 100 people from 25 countries got the award, Phelps was selected to speak on behalf of all the recipients and to present a signed copy of Mass Flourishing to Li, who had already read it in Chinese translation. Says Phelps: “Li made a fuss over me.”