ABSTRACT
The first translation of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) was published in China in 1964, at the beginning of which there was an introduction written by a Chinese scholar, Zai Shi, entitled ‘An Assessment of Marshall’s Principles of Economics’. The author of this review wrote that Alfred Marshall, the most famous economist at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, absorbed the old and the new ‘Vulgar Economics’ theories at that time and that ‘the book, the Principles of Economics’ established an economics system with ‘eclecticism’ as its main characteristic. At that time, it noted: ‘The British ruling classes urgently needed a new economic theory to justify the strengthening exploitation on the working class. Marshall’s economics text thus fitted this need’ (Marshall, 1964, preface: 2). The earliest Chinese full translation (the first Chinese edition) of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory (1936) was published in 1957 by China SDX Joint Publishing Company translated by Y. Xu (Keynes, 1957) and in 1963 it was re-published by the Commercial Press (Keynes, 1963). When the latter reprinted the book in 1977 (Keynes, 1977), it increased the length of the Chinese version’s preface. The preface author, Y. N. Li, wrote: ‘John Maynard Keynes is a famous British bourgeois vulgar economist. . . . All of Keynes’s life is to maintain the monopoly bourgeoisie, to oppose revolution, oppose communism, and oppose Marxist theory’ (Keynes, 1977, preface: 1). It concluded after summarizing the basic viewpoints of the General Theory as follows: ‘it is clear that this theory “Keynes-trafficking” is completely vulgar and anti-science’ (Keynes, 1977, preface: 5). He finally wrote: ‘reprinting the Chinese version of the General Theory is to make it negative teaching material, in order to carry out criticism of the Keynesian Theory and develop Marxism in the struggle’ (Keynes, 1977, preface: 32). The comments over the period of these two Chinese scholars on Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) and Keynes’s General Theory (1936) typically represented the mainstream attitudes and evaluations of Chinese academia vis-à-vis Western Economics at that time (see the chapter on Keynes in this volume).
