Economics standing in for politics: China

I’ve often thought that mainstream economic study (neoliberalism) has a problematic relationship with ethics; this couldn’t have been put clearer than by a recent Nation article,
“In China, economics stands in for politics as the substance of public debate and conversation. You cannot call for elections or for a free Tibet, but you can publish heated polemics about the government’s decisions to continue to purchase US treasury bonds.”

I believe that there are historical contingencies for why neoliberalism is so divorced from discussion of ethics (these are now ontological features of neoliberalism, but at one point they were open questions). It’s interesting to hear a practical example of how seemingly innocuous study can shape other discourse and thus soiety.