ABSTRACT
Introduction In order to shed light on this fascinating diffusion of economic ideas in the twentieth century and beyond, we look at the links between John Maynard (later Baron, known as Lord) Keynes (1883-1946) and China.1 The chapter is divided into three sections, respectively covering the early, interim and later periods of this connection. The early section deals with his initial interest in the ‘Middle Kingdom’; the next one deals with the translation of his main works and the diffusion of his ideas in Republican China; and the last deals with the influence of his thinking in the People’s Republic of China after 1978, up to the present time, vis-à-vis the notion of Keynesianism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. His surname may be represented in its Chinese form, in pinyin Mandarin, as ‘Kai’ensi’; his school of thought – namely ‘Keynesianism’ – as ‘Kai’ensi li lun’; and what has been called Keynesianism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ as ‘juyou Zhongguo tese de Ka’iensi li lun’ (see Warner, 2001: 140; Alexandroff et al., 2004: 114). We then go on to discuss, in our analysis of the above, the apparent ‘paradox’ that, although Keynes’ involvement in China may have been in a ‘minor key’, its interest in his ideas was decidedly in a ‘major’ one. Keynes, probably the most original economist of the twentieth century, has lately been named in a recent work on his life, as a ‘Master’, who is said to have now ‘returned’ (see Skidelsky, 2010: 1). The description is made by a scholar who had earlier come to prominence as his biographer, with a three-volume study of his life and times (Skidelsky, 1983, 1992, 2000) namely, Robert J. A. (later Baron) Skidelsky (1939-), who is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. A number of this author’s biographical works on Keynes have also been published in translation into Chinese, for example, a recent one entitled Keynes: A Biography (Kai’ensi zhuan), appeared in 2006 (Skidelsky, 2006; see WorldCat, 2016). Keynes has also lately been compared by a number of contemporary Chinese commentators (see Skidelsky, 2007: 1), with another ‘Master’, this time one in antiquity, namely Confucius (551-479 bc), (Kongzi, literally ‘Master Kong’). Skidelsky notes that:
A thinker may be dead in some bits of the world and alive in others. This has to some extent happened to Keynes. Keynes lives on in developing countries, even though his work was not about development at all. In some of these countries he is taken up as a critic of globalization, or apostle of a ‘balanced’ and ‘harmonious’ economy – strands which can readily be plucked out of his interwar writing, though they form no part of the General Theory model. In China he has been compared to Confucius. A thinker may be alive in a different sense to those so far discussed, because of the sheer fertility of his thought.
