The ghosts of past Western economists shaped the economic trajectory of China after 1949 in ways that few recognize, and there is no better place to begin to understand this seemingly contrarian idea than in reading Paul Trescott's Jingji Xue. It is a huge, richly textured and painstakingly researched account of the introduction of Western economic ideas to China between 1850 and 1950, compressed into surprisingly few pages.
The book is a labour of many years that began when Trescott accepted a Fulbright professorship at Peking University in 1983–84, one of many such scholar-visitors during the early years of economic reform when China was eager to catch up with Western knowledge. He and others played an important part in rekindling the disciplines of accounting, economics, management, psychology and sociology that had been all but extinguished for three decades. Along the way Trescott became enthralled in a project to uncover what became of the Chinese who studied economics in the West before 1950 and who had returned to China. The book – and the database that underpins it – is a product of that endeavour.
About 1,600 Chinese studied economics in the United States (1,200 at graduate level) and another 400 in Europe. Among the 900 or so Chinese who taught economics at Chinese universities up to 1950, 544 had some foreign education; 27 per cent of the economics faculties in Chinese schools were educated in the USA and 16 per cent in Europe. Chinese universities were “in large measure outposts of American economics, using American texts and American course structuring” (p. 2), though there were also a significant representation of Japanese and German educated among the faculty.
The book comprises 15 chapters. Chapters one to three provide an overview of the book, discuss the contributions of missionaries in the late Qing Dynasty and such Western-educated Chinese as Yan Fu, and reassess the contribution of Sun Yat-sen to modern Chinese economic thought and policy. From the 1920s, increasing numbers of returned students had studied economics abroad. This is the focus of chapters four to six. More than half of those with US graduate training in economics studied at just four schools: Columbia, Harvard, Wisconsin and Michigan (chapter four), while among the European educated, the largest alumni were from the London School of Economics (chapter five). Chapter six is an analysis of their research and employment on return to China.
Chapters seven to eight examine economics at the Christian colleges, such as Nanjing, Yanjing, Lingnan, St. John's, among others, and chapters 10 to 13 look at economics in Chinese universities, including Peking, Fudan, Tsinghua and Nankai. Chapter 14 discusses the role of Western economics in researching the Chinese economy in the first half of the 20th century. Chapter 15 is an epilogue that takes stock of the contribution of Western-trained Chinese economists to modern China.
Space constrains detailed discussion, but readers will find interesting vignettes and analyses related to missionary economists John Lossing Buck (Nanjing) and John B. Tayler (Yanjing), and Chinese economists Chen Da, Chen Daisun, Fang Xianting (H.D. Fong), He Lian (Franklin Ho), Li Zhuomin, Liu Dajun (D.K. Lieu), Ma Yinyu, Wu Baosan (Ou Pao-san) and Zhang Peigang, to mention but a few of the better known.
Most interesting is the discussion of what these Chinese economists learned at graduate school, what they did on their return, and the type of economic knowledge they probably transmitted to the many who did not study abroad. Too often we forget that the economists of the first half of the 20th century were more eclectic than today's, who largely share a consensus view of the primacy of the market. Indeed, there were many who were critical of markets, including Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard, John Maurice Clark and Edwin Seligman at Columbia, Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons at Wisconsin, Friedrick Hayek and Arthur Lewis at LSE, and at Cambridge Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes. If anything, the focus was on the failure of markets rather than the efficiency market competition can often – but not always – deliver.
The consequence was a generation of China economists who focused on imperfect competition and market failure, embraced too readily naïve collectivist proposals for economic development, harboured popularist beliefs about the evils of middlemen, money-lenders and landlords, neglected monetary factors and underestimated the effects of inflation, and failed to address the problems of rural China.
We also learn that most Western-trained Chinese economists went into business and government rather than academia, and that those in economics faculties were primarily administrators rather than teachers and researchers. Surprisingly, the majority of the authors and translators of Western economics were not trained abroad – only 10–12 per cent of the authors of economics books and articles listed in the Nankai bibliographies of economics had studied in the West.
The combination of the intellectual orientation and the employment of many overseas trained economists, let alone their isolation from policy fields after 1949, meant that the influence of Western economics was at best limited or at worse pernicious in shaping the policies of the Maoist decades. Trescott has done us a service in telling this subtle and complex story. For those who are interested in reading the works of these and post-1949 economists, Guangdong Economics Press published a three-volume set Zhongguo jingjixue bainian jingdian (A Hundred Years of Economic Studies in China) in 2005, which complements well Trescott's study.
