ABSTRACT
Introduction In course of the twentieth century, Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) was to be recognized as a great thinker, as well as an economist, who would have a major influence on the understanding of modern societies. In his nearly 60 years of academic research life from the 1920s to 1980s, Hayek has left us with nearly 20 key works and a plethora of academic papers. In the 1920s and 1930s, F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) had debated with Oscar R. Lange (1904-1965) and Abba P. Lerner (1903-1982) on the possibility of what was known as ‘socialist calculation’, regarding the possibility of a rational economic calculation in a socialist economic system. Hayek had already published his book on Collective Economy Planning in 1937, then The Road to Serfdom in 1944, and Individualism and Economic Order in 1948, in which he analysed the infeasibility of central planned economies in depth, interpreted the rational and functional efficiency of a market system as a ‘spontaneous’ order and discussed the general rules and principles of modern society, Democracy and the Rule of Law notwithstanding. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hayek went on to debate with John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) (see the later chapter on Keynes and China in this volume), particularly on the issues of monetary theory and business cycles, for more than a decade, although remaining on most cordial terms. In this period, such issues were discussed a great deal and business cycles theory, as marked by the ‘Hayekian Triangle’, in modern economics established. Then, in ‘Economics and Knowledge’ (in Hayek, 1948: 33-56), ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (in Hayek, 1948: 77-91) and other papers that were published in the 1940s, Hayek discussed the function of prices in the process of resource-allocation, which has exerted a persistent impact on modern economics since the 1940s. In the 1950s, he published two significant works in psychology, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundation of Theoretical Psychology (Hayek, 1952a) and The Counter-Revolution of Science (Hayek, 1952b). In the 1960s and after, he brought out The Constitution of Liberty (Hayek, 1960), Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Hayek, 1967), Law, Legislation and Liberty (Hayek, 3 volumes, 1973, 1976a, 1979), Denationalization of Money
(Hayek, 1976b) and New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (Hayek, 1978), amongst others. In the late 1980s, the aged Hayek summed up the thoughts of his life and then finished his important work, The Fatal Conceit (Hayek, 1988). In 1974, the Swedish Nobel Committee had announced that the Nobel Prize for Economics was granted to Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987), a Swedish economist, and to F. A. Hayek, an Austrian one, ‘for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena’ (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1974: 1). Hayek’s analysis of the functional efficiency of different economic systems is now regarded as one of his most significant contributions to economic research in the broadest sense. His guiding principle for his analysis was ‘to study how efficiently all the knowledge and all the information dispersed among individuals and enterprises is utilized’ (ibid.). Hayekian thought was introduced to China from the 1940s, onwards. However, he was regarded as particularly relevant to Marxism by the CCP’s propaganda organ, after Mao Zedong (1893-1976) took power and indeed before the ‘Cultural Revolution’, because of the discussion about the impossibilities of ‘socialist calculation’ by Hayek and Mises in the 1940s, and Hayek’s criticisms of the central planning economy in The Road to Serfdom. Professor Weizao Teng (1917-2008), the late president of Nankai University from 1981 to 1986, as well as a well-known economist in China, went on to translate Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) in 1962, as well as Prices and Production (1931) in 1958, into Chinese. As Hayek was regarded as a Western ‘reactionary bourgeois ideologist’, Teng pointed out in the prefaces of the two books that the aim of translation was just for critique and ‘reference’. Consequently, the two books were published as ‘internal readers’ in this period and could not be read publicly by the lay intellectuals because of Hayek’s ‘reactionary position’. Even so, the two translated books had spread Hayek’s thoughts in Mainland China. On the other side, after the complete withdrawal of the Nationalist Party of China (Kuomintang/Guomindang) from the Mainland to Taiwan, the regime of Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) controlled the spread of the Western liberal thought for a long period of time. Although some scholars translated Hayek’s works into Chinese very early and wrote articles and books to recommend Hayek’s thoughts in Taiwan, Hayek’s thoughts were not truly accepted and put into practice by the Taiwan authorities until the 1990s. Seen from the chronological order, some liberal economists in Taiwan recommended Hayek’s works much earlier than those in Mainland China, but the works published in Taiwan did not spread to Mainland China, mainly due to the tensions across the Taiwan Straits. Nevertheless, the situation changed fundamentally from the late 1980s. With the reform and opening-up in China since 1978, a number of Hayek’s works written after the 1940s on economics, laws, politics, social theory and so on were translated into Chinese, which was to have a significant impact on those fields in China.
