Wang Yanan, born in 1901 in Huanggang, Hubei Province, graduated from Zhonghua University and was the president of Xiamen University, an educator and economist in China. He was the first to translate Capital into China.
In 1928, Wang Yanan went to Japan to study and read a large number of Marx's works and European classical economics, and after the "918 Incident", he returned to China indignantly and engaged in progressive cultural activities in Shanghai as a profession of translation and teaching. In the past two years, he has successively translated Adam Smith's famous works "The Wealth of Nations", Malthus's "Population Theory", John Mueller's "Principles of Economics", Ricardo's "Political Economy and Principles of Taxation" and other economic works, and his own works "History of Economics" and "Introduction to World Political Economy" have also been published.
In 1933, Wang Yanan was wanted for his involvement in the "Fujian Incident" and fled to Europe. In Germany, Marx's hometown, in Britain, the birthplace of Capital, he collected extensive Western economic materials, paid attention to the development trend of Western economics, and translated some Western economic works. In 1935, he returned to Shanghai, met guo dali again, talked about his European travels, and the two began to formally translate Capital.
Wang Yanan has been engaged in the study of Marxist political economy all his life, and from the five volumes of the Collected Works of Wang Yanan, we can see the path traveled by an outstanding economist and educator, who is an economist with rich translations.
In 1969, Wang Yanan said while lying ill in Shanghai: "In the past, a scholar said that there are only two kinds of people under the authoritarian system, one is a mute and the other is a liar. ”