He arrived in China just at the dawn of its opening up under Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the liberalizations that have turned China into a global economic powerhouse.

He became a student at Peking University in Beijing, where he earned his master’s degree in Marxist political economy.

From there he became one of the earliest Chinese students to study in a US university, earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago, renowned for its free-market champion Milton Friedman.

He wrote his dissertation on “The Household Responsibility System in China’s Agricultural Reform: A Study of the Causes and Effects of an Institutional Change.”

From 1986 to 1987, he was a research fellow at Yale University, before returning to China to teach at Peking University. He was named a full professor there in 1993.

“The main reason I returned to China was because I wanted to make a contribution to the economic development and economic transition of China,” he said last year when delivering the prestigious Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University.

He also became a senior member of the important Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Institute of Rural Development Research in Beijing.

Since then he has been named an economics professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and lectured at universities around the world, including Australian National University and Duke University and University of California-Los Angeles in the United States.

Lin has won China’s top economics honor, the Sun Yefang award, twice, for his research and writings.

His books include “Institution, Technology and Agricultural Development in China;” “China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform,” and “How Did China Feed Itself in the Past? How Will China Feed Itself in the Future?”

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