China was long open to Europe for trade and cultural exchange, which can be traced back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when a number of western Europeans landed in Macao and then Hong Kong as missionaries and merchants. We can list Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), Diego de Pantoja (1571–1618), Sabbatino de Ursis (1575–1620), Johannes Schreck (1576–1630), Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666), Nicolas Longobardi (1565–1655), and Jacques Rho (1593–1638) as the first generation of cultural exchange operators. Evidence indicates that these Europeans were in general well received by the empire. Many spent the rest of their lives in China. During this round of cultural exchange, the Chinese ideology of laissez-faire (called wuwei, literally meaning “taking not active action by the state”) impressed the western European intelligentsia and ultimately influenced economic thinkers like Adam Smith. The French Physiocrat, François Quesnay (1694–1774), who was known for his Tableau Économique, was inspired by the Qing agricultural fundamentalism (zhongnong). One may also mention the lasting fad of chinoiserie.

But the Sino-European honeymoon was ended in the early nineteenth century by the cannon shells of a small British fleet in 1839, which marked the turning point after which hostility replaced respect. China's military weakness was exploited to the full by European powers. From 1840 to 1940 China did not win a single war against external invaders. Chinese pride and dignity were severely damaged. It was under these circumstances that members of Chinese elite began to learn from the West. They started with the “hardware” —machines, weapons, ships, and railways— which marked the late Qing Westernization Movement (yangwu yundong). They then gradually moved to the “software” including economics, Western literature, and history. Although this historical pattern is well-known, very few works have been devoted solely to a particular subject. Paul B. Trescott's work has filled in that scholarly vacuum.

The book wins merit in its ownership over data. The author has painstakingly mapped out the personnel, institutes, and a general growth trend of Western economics in Mainland China and Taiwan since 1850. A total of 365 Chinese students and scholars are referred to and five institutes are scrutinized. Although the ending date is stated as 1950, the book goes well beyond it and reveals further changes in Communist China and Republican Taiwan after 1949.

The structure of the book is made of three parts. The first part, from chapter 2 to chapter 6, deals with various individuals who took up Western economics as their university degree courses and research subjects. These individuals can be seen as the seed for the new academic discipline coming from overseas to China. The second part, chapter 7 through chapter 13, reveals teaching and research institutes in China as fruits of that discipline. The last part, chapters 14 and 15, serves as the assessment of the Chinese one-century-long endeavor to revive their civilization and to catch up with the new world leaders in the West in economic growth and development.

However, the title of the book could be misleading. Strictly speaking, only chapter 14 really reflects what the title intends to do, regarding the dynamics of the introduction of Western economics as an academic discipline into China.

The rest of the book is mainly “Who's Who” among Chinese students who studied economics and “Who's Who” among economics faculties who taught and conducted research in economics. Such an approach makes this book excessively descriptive. Debate between different views among Chinese economists is weak; and so is analysis of the motivations, incentives of Western-trained Chinese economists, and their possible impact on society. Rather, the book stops at individual deeds and achievements of those students and faculties. So, the reader has to guess at what sort of academic atmosphere China would have and how it changed over time. In particular, the reader has a hard time working out what difference Western economics and Western-trained economists made in China over the period in question.

Moreover, it is rather odd to include Sun Yat-sen as a key figure in China's economic studies and to devote a whole chapter to him (chapter 3). Sun may have been an excellent politician, but he was only remotely qualified as a trained economist by any standard. On the other hand, the author overlooks Chiang Kai-shek, Sun's political successor, who actually produced a monograph entitled China's Destiny and Chinese Economic Theory in 1943. In that book, Chiang compared the Confucian traditional values, the Marxian labor theory of value, and the Marshallian marginal revolution with some depth. It was a landmark in economic debate in China in the thick of the Second World War.

It is also bizarre for the author to include students who remained outside China after they received training in the West. These students may have been world class, but they were part of the “brain drain.” One wonders what role they could possibly play in China. But when the Soviet-trained Communist students were included in the book, the author clearly lost sight because Soviet economics is anything but Western.

With these defects, for the students of Chinese intellectual history and Chinese history of modern education, Trescott's book will still serve as a solid source of material.