TIME IS ON HIS SIDE:

[T]he main schools of intellectual thought in China have one thing in common - their leading thinkers have often spent time in Western universities.

That means that for Westerners, who may struggle with China's very different language or food, Chinese policy debates are split along strikingly familiar lines.

Zhang counts himself on the classically liberal "right" wing. He supports free markets and political reform.

"I would love to see the country become more similar in its general system to that of the UK or United States," he says.

This camp - sometimes called China's New Right - have been most successful in economics. They influenced China's liberalisation in the 1980s and since.

"They often studied economics in places like Chicago or Oxford University," says Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations, author of What does China think?

"They came of age in the 1980s, a time when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and they became firm believers in the power of the market."

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