Wang Yanan: Only practice is the most reliable test

　 Wang Yanan (1901-1969), formerly known as Ji lord, Zhihuai, ziyu estate, a native of Huanggang, Hubei. In 1922, he studied at the Department of Education of Wuchang Zhonghua University. He graduated in 1926 and taught at Wuchang Chengcheng Middle School. The following year, he participated in the Northern Expedition and served as a political instructor in the Officers' Teaching Corps. In 1928, he translated Capital with Guo Dali. The following year, he went to Japan to study political economy. In 1931, he returned to China and became a professor at The National Jinan University in Shanghai. In 1933, he was appointed as a member of the Cultural and Educational Committee of the Fujian People's Government and the director of the People's Daily. Later, he went to Germany and Japan to engage in research. At the end of 1935, he returned to China and continued to translate Capital. In 1937, he was appointed as an executive member of the Anti-Japanese Association of Chinese writers. In 1940, he became a professor, director and dean of the Department of Economics at Sun Yat-sen University, where he taught courses such as advanced economics, Chinese economic history, and history of economic thought. In 1944, he became the director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Fujian Academy of Sciences. In 1945, he became the dean of the Law School of Xiamen University and the head of the Department of Economics. From 1950 to 1969, he was the president of Xiamen University. Advocate that "Xiamen University should face the ocean, face Southeast Asia and overseas Chinese, and serve millions of overseas Chinese", support Southeast Asian studies and marine studies to become characteristic disciplines; oppose the emphasis on light literature and emphasize the coordinated development of the two disciplines of arts and sciences; advocate "learning their own research" and "bo specialized"; and support Chen Jingrun's mathematical research. He was elected as a member of the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the Standing Committee, a deputy to the National People's Congress, and a vice chairman of the Fujian Provincial Committee He has translated "Capital", "The Wealth of Nations", "Political Economy and The Principles of Taxation", authors of "History of Economics", "The Past, Present and Future of Germany", "Outline of China's Social and Economic History", "The Origin of China's Economy" ("Research on the Economic Form of China's Semi-feudal and Semi-Colonial Economy"), "New Theory of Social Science", "Outline of the History of Political Economy", "Research on Chinese Bureaucratic Politics", "Chinese Bureaucratic Politics and Bureaucratic Capital", "Research on China's Social and Economic Transformation", "Marxist Population Theory and the Chinese Problem", "Marxist Population Theory and the Problem of Chinese". Textbooks and works such as "Outline of The Feudal System of China's Landlord Economy", "Research on Capital", "History of Political Economy" and so on.

　　Wang Yanan (1901-1969), a native of Huanggang, Hubei Province, was a member of the Communist Party of China, an important disseminator of Marxism in China, the initiator of "Chinese economics", an outstanding Marxist economist and an outstanding people's educator. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mr. Wang Yanan was appointed president of Xiamen University by the Government Council of the Central People's Government, and ran Xiamen University for 19 years, the highest number of presidents in office. He and Mr. Ma Yinchu, who was also appointed president of Peking University, are called "Southern Kings and Northern Horses", because both have outstanding theoretical achievements in economics. As a Well-known Marxist economist, Mr. Wang Yanan is based on Capital, whose research fields cover Marxist political economy, history of economic theory, economic history and other fields, and is a knowledgeable intellectual giant who has learned both ancient and modern, and has studied Both China and the West. His scholarly works embody the three characteristics of "Chinese, practical, and critical". General Secretary Xi Jinping commented: "Mr. Wang Yanan is not only a translator, educator, but also an economist, and his understanding of Capital is very thorough. Not only translating Capital, Mr. Wang Yanan also took Marxism as the guide, conducted a profound analysis of the old Chinese economic form, and published a series of influential works, including "The Origin of China's Economy", "Outline of China's Landlord Economic Feudal System", "Chinese Bureaucratic Politics Research", etc., I have also read it. ”

　　A milestone in the spread of Marxism in China

　　Capital is a scientific masterpiece written by Marx with his life's painstaking efforts, one of the greatest works of his life, and the foundation of Marx's political economy, which is known as the "Bible of the Working Class". In 2013, UNESCO included the manuscript of the Communist Manifesto and the first volume of Capital, Marx's self-annotated version, on the Memory of the World Register. Before 1930, China did not have Chinese full translation of Capital, not even the Chinese translation of individual chapters. The translation of Capital by Chinese scholars began in 1930. Chen Qixiu, Pan Dongzhou, Wang Shenming (Wang Sihua, Youming), Hou Wailu (Yushu), Wu Bannong, and so on, successively translated some of these chapters and volumes, and officially published them. However, until 1937, there was no full translation of Capital in China. The task of completing this amazing work fell to two spirited young people, Mr. Guo Dali and Mr. Wang Yanan.

　　In 1928, Mr. Wang Yanan and Mr. Guo Dali met at the Great Buddha Temple in Hangzhou, and the two of them agreed to jointly establish the ambition of translating the book "Capital". Since Capital involves a large number of classical economic theories and categories, in order to better understand and accurately translate, they have made full preparations, starting with the translation of Western classical economic classics and economic history masterpieces. Mr. Wang Yanan has traveled to Japan and Europe. While living in Tokyo, in addition to translating, writing, and studying Japanese and German, he also immersed himself in Marxist economics and was deeply influenced by the Japanese Marxist thinker Kawakami. During his stay in Germany, Mr. Wang Yanan came into contact with the Working Class in Germany, truly understood the history, current situation and customs of Germany, and gained a rich perceptual understanding. In Marx's hometown of Trier and britain, the birthplace of Capital, he extensively collected Western economic materials, deeply examined the capitalist system in Western Europe, and paid attention to the development trend of Western economics. During this period, he independently translated and co-translated 9 translations, which became a model for systematically introducing Western classical economic masterpieces to Chinese scholars. Among them, Guo Dali and Wang Yanan's "The Wealth of Nations" is regarded as the most cited and influential authoritative translation so far.

　　After 10 years of hardship, the three volumes of "Capital" translated by Guo Dali and Wang Yanan were finally published by the Reading Life Publishing House in 1938, which was the most complete translation in China at that time. Their translation work has effectively promoted the spread of Marxism in China and made landmark contributions to the cause of the proletarian revolution in China, to the cause of the Chinese people to seek liberation, and even to socialist construction.

　　Since the publication of the three volumes of Capital, generations of Chinese have been deeply influenced by it, constantly drawing wisdom and ideas from them. In 1938, after Mao Zedong obtained the translation of Das Kapital translated by Guo Wang, he began to study it carefully, circled and marked most of the contents of chapters 1 to 12 of the first volume (including some notes), circled and marked some passages in chapters 13 to 20 and chapters 37 to 39 of the third volume with pencils and blue pencils, corrected the typos in the original book, corrected the inappropriate punctuation marks in the original book, and added the missing words one by one. This set of books, which mao Zedong personally corrected and annotated, is now preserved in Zhongnanhai and has become a rare and precious cultural relic. When General Secretary Xi Jinping was a zhiqing in Liangjiahe, northern Shaanxi, he particularly admired Guo Wang's translation of "Capital", he read through "Capital" three times and took many notes.

　　In order to improve the chinese translation of Capital, Mr. Wang Yanan and Mr. Guo Dali revised the old translation of Capital twice from 1952 to 1953 and from 1963 to 1965. It is precisely because of the excellence in translation that Guo Wang's translation of "Capital" is refined and is recognized as a rare book. In 1955, in accordance with the decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Central Compilation Bureau began to compile the Chinese edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, that is, the first edition of the Chinese, based on the second edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels in Russian. The first edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels Chinese lasted 30 years, and by 1985 all 50 volumes and 53 volumes were produced, of which volumes 23-25 were volumes 1-3 of Capital. When translating The First Volume of Capital, the Central Compilation Bureau compared the Translation of Guo Wang sentence by sentence, and when translating and proofreading Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, it directly revised it on the basis of Guo Wang's translation.

　　Mr. Wang Yanan's translation of Capital aims to spread Marxism and transform Chinese society. In 1932, the "Anti-Japanese Association of Chinese Writers" led by the Left-Wing Writers' Union was established in Shanghai, and 17 people were elected as executive members, and in 1937, Mr. Wang Yanan became one of the executive committee members. At that time, the living conditions were extremely poor, and Mr. Wang Yanan suffered from severe neurasthenia and stomach ulcers, but he still actively participated in the anti-Japanese salvation movement with great perseverance and insisted on translation and propaganda work. In September 1940, Mr. Wang Yanan went to Sun Yat-sen University to teach, and under the influence of the underground party of the Communist Party of China, he united many progressive professors. In 1944, he was invited to Yong'an, the capital of fujian province during the war, and served as the director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Fujian Provincial Research Institute, which not only turned the institute into an academic research highland, but also became a frontier for propagating Marxism and the War of Resistance under special conditions. In the autumn of 1945, Mr. Wang Yanan, as dean of the Law School of Xiamen University and director of the Department of Economics, hired a group of progressive professors, including Mr. Guo Dali, to teach at Xiamen University, which greatly strengthened the spread of Marxism in Xiamen University, and Xiamen University thus became a "southeastern democracy fortress".

　　Marx wrote in the preface and trek of the Legal text of Capital: "There is no smooth road to be taken in science, and only those who are not afraid of toil on the climb of the rough path can hope to reach the peak of glory." Mr. Wang Yanan was also a practitioner of this famous saying, and throughout his life, he pursued the truth, spread the truth, and grew into a staunch revolutionary theorist in practice.

　　Chinese Capital

　　In 1939, Mao Zedong first proposed the concept of "new democratic revolution" and published "On New Democracy" the following year. During the period of the new-democratic revolution, the Chinese Communists represented by Mao Zedong integrated the general principles of Marxism with China's reality, and their theoretical achievements were Mao Zedong Thought. Influenced by Mao Zedong Thought, Mr. Wang Yanan put forward creative major theoretical issues such as "studying political economy with the qualifications of Chinese", and initiated "Chinese economics" and put it into practice.

　　In "An Open Letter to students of the Department of Economics of Sun Yat-sen University", Mr. Wang Yanan said when describing his own path of governance: "I use my own ideas, my own sentences, and my own writing methods to establish my own economic theory system, and according to this system, I extend it to all social science fields. It can be seen that in the process of translating Capital, Mr. Wang Yanan has gradually "internalized" it, not only taking the materialist view of history and materialistic dialectics as the guide, constructing his own theoretical system, but also touching the category and bypassing it, taking one example and three examples, and expanding it to many social science fields such as politics, philosophy, history, and culture. He used the most advanced Marxist theoretical methods at that time to analyze and study Chinese issues, and was committed to sinicizing Marxist economics and building a Chinese economic system, especially theoretical innovation combined with the political system, economic structure, social form and historical and cultural traditions with Chinese characteristics. He emphasized the unity of the general principles of Marxism with China's particularity, and strived to integrate the principles and methods of Capital with China's reality, and his representative work "The Original Theory of China's Economy" fully embodied this combination. Following the paradigm of Capital, the book examines and analyzes the economic form and production mode of China's semi-colonial and semi-feudalism, and is a model for the sinification of Marxist economics, and is known as "Chinese-style Capital".

　　"The Original Theory of Chinese Economy" can be called the founding work of Chinese economics, made important contributions to the propagation of Marxist economic theory, and provided an important theoretical source for the transition from new democracy to socialist economic construction after the founding of New China. In 1955, "The Original Theory of China's Economy" was translated and published by the Japanese Society for Chinese Economic Research. In 1957, when the People's Publishing House reprinted it, it was renamed "Research on the Economic Form of China's Semi-feudal and Semi-Colonial". In 1958, the Moscow Socio-Economic Literature Publishing House published the Russian edition under the title reprinted by the People's Publishing House. In 1998, the book was named one of the "10 Economic Works Affecting The Economic Construction of New China", and was the only economic work selected to be published before the founding of New China. At the meeting and academic seminar to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Wang Yanan's birth, Professor Tao Dayong, former vice chairman of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League, member of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and famous economist, educator, and social activist, commented that Mr. Wang Yanan's "Theory of China's Economic Origins" is a bold and successful attempt to use the scientific system, basic categories, and laws of Capital to study China's semi-feudal and semi-colonial economy, and is still second to none in China. It is a precious spiritual treasure left by Mr. Yanan to future generations. Professor Hong Yuanpeng, vice president of the China Capital Research Association, honorary president of the National Comprehensive University Capital Research Association, and professor of Fudan University, said: "Wang Yanan is not only a grandmaster in the field of Chinese economics, but also a pioneer and practitioner who advocates Chinese economics. His masterpiece "The Origin of China's Economy" flexibly applies the basic principles and scientific methods of "Capital" to comprehensively analyze the ins and outs of the old Chinese economy, the law of operation, the root causes of long-term stagnation, and the prospect of inevitable transformation, which is of extremely great significance. The academic value of the book was highly evaluated by both academic predecessors.

　　During the Liberation War, when the Kuomintang's rule on the mainland was about to collapse, Mr. Wang Yanan kept pace with the times and turned his research perspective to the study of China's social and economic transformation and the new democratic economic form in a timely manner. He used the basic principles of Capital to boldly carry out theoretical innovations, published works such as "Research on the Problem of China's Social and Economic Transformation" and "Research on the Ideology of China's Social and Economic Transformation", and put forward many far-sighted arguments, which made useful discussions on China's special economic development path and economic system. Since the early 1950s, he has devoted himself to the study of Capital, published a series of articles, made in-depth analysis of the object, system and structure of Capital, and formed a unique insight, forming a recognized "royal" theory in the academic circles. In addition to the study of Capital, he also worked diligently in the fields of "generalized political economy" and Marx's economic methodology, and he has produced results. It can be said that in terms of scientific research, Mr. Wang Yanan has achieved both "inward" and "out of the outside" and truly integrated Marxist economic theory.

　　The study of Chinese bureaucracy and politics is the first to be founded

　　In the summer of 1943, Joseph Needham, an academician of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a famous scholar, visited Pingshi, Guangdong Province, and had a long talk with Mr. Wang Yanan, then a professor of economics at Sun Yat-sen University, in a local hotel. When it came time to separate, Needham raised the topic of "Chinese bureaucracy", hoping that the latter would explain it from historical and social aspects. Mr. Wang Yanan was embarrassed by this problem that Ping Su did not pay much attention to, and he excused himself: "There is no research on this, and there is a research after tolerance, and then I will give advice." Since then, questions about "Chinese bureaucratic politics" have been haunting him and forcing him to answer them, which is the origin of his book "A Study of Chinese Bureaucratic Politics".

　　We know that Needham's mention of this topic is not out of thin air. In 1954, in the preface to his monumental work History of Science and Technology in China (Volume 1), he first asked the question: In the 1st and 15th centuries, China's scientific inventions and discoveries were far ahead of their contemporaries in Europe, but why did Chinese science continue to stay in the empirical stage and only primitive or medieval theories? After the 16th century, Europe gave birth to modern science, which has proved to be one of the basic factors in the formation of a modern world order, while Chinese civilization has not been able to produce similar modern science in Asia. The above questions raised by Needham have caused wide repercussions in the international academic community, and have been hailed as "Needham's Question" or "Needham's Problem". After 1950, parts of the 7th volume of the History of Science and Technology in China were published in advance in the form of papers. Needham made a general discussion of the formation and defects of China's "Asiatic bureaucracy", the status and role of Confucianism in bureaucratic politics, the discrimination and suppression of the merchant class, and the continuous suppression of commercial profits and entrepreneurship, which led to the loss of Chinese and modern science. Obviously, in Needham's view, the study of Chinese bureaucracy is a key link in solving these mysteries.

　　After nearly 5 years of brewing and accumulation, Mr. Wang Yanan's first article "On the So-called Bureaucratic Politics" was published in September 1947 in the "Time and Literature", Vol. 2, No. 1. By June 1948, he published 17 monographs in the magazine Time and Text. In October 1948, he compiled a series of monographs into a book, under the name of "Studies on Chinese Bureaucratic Politics", which was published by the Shanghai Times Culture Publishing House. Mr. Wang Ya'nan modestly described his research in the field of bureaucratic politics in China as "a by-product of the study of China's economic history" and "an arrogance to study a political system that is not specialized." Unexpectedly, however, his "never-before writing has received as much attention as this 'study'". In the 1940s, bureaucratic capital was rampant and rampant, which caused a fierce discussion in the academic circles. With a rational eye, Mr. Wang Yanan keenly perceived the close relationship between bureaucratic capital and bureaucratic politics, and worked hard to explore the historical origins of the two, excavating the malpractice and the root cause of their diseases, so that the book became the pioneering work of Chinese bureaucratic politics and one of Mr. Wang Yanan's representative works. In the book, Wang Yanan combines history and logic, interlocking and deepening layer by layer, from abstract and concrete, from partial to complete, and makes a profound systematic analysis of the bureaucratic political form of China from the Qin and Han Dynasties to the Republic of China. Mr. Wang Yanan pointed out: "The problem of the long-term stagnation of Chinese society is, in fact, nothing more than a problem of the long-term survival of the typical or special feudal organizations in China; and because China's special feudal organizations have adopted the form of a centralized and authoritarian bureaucracy in politics, the long-term survival of our special feudal social system has been extremely closely related to the autocratic bureaucratic political form from the beginning. This is one of the most incisive arguments of the book.

　　From the May Fourth Movement to the end of the 1940s, there were as many as 600 special papers and nearly 40 monographs on the history of China's political system, which is not a small number, but the content is still mainly based on the study of the official system, basically in accordance with the norms of historical research objects and methods, with historical facts, reviews, evaluations and other ways, to clarify the origin and evolution of various canonical systems, and rarely examine the form, essence, mechanism and gains and losses of the political systems of previous dynasties from the perspective of political science. Mr. Wang Yanan benefited from the translation and research of Capital, and was obviously at ease in studying and applying the Marxist materialist view of history and methodology. He not only takes the economic structure as the starting point, but also extends to many fields of social science, especially the field of social history, and systematically examines them as an organically linked whole, which is an attempt to integrate political, economic and cultural history.

　　Mr. Wang Yanan discusses Chinese bureaucratic politics as a specific form or system, and through comparative research, reveals the basis, characteristics, evolution, and bureaucratic style and abuses of Chinese bureaucratic politics from the two aspects of "technology" and "society". At the same time, his research is closer to the norms of political science, so it is praised as "one of the most theoretical and rare works in the study of the history of China's political system in this period" and "a summary of the discussion since the 1930s".

　　More than 30 years after its first edition, the book has been reprinted and reprinted no less than 20 times. This shows from one side that it continues to influence generations of scholars, and is an academic heritage worth cherishing.

　　Pioneer of Marxist economic history

　　Mr. Wang Yanan's historical thought is mainly embodied in economic history thought, which is characterized by taking economic history as the key to understanding the history of social development. He completely put forward the famous "local economic theory", established the theory of China's semi-colonial and semi-feudal economic form, scientifically analyzed the "theory of stagnation and development" of China's feudal economy, and became a pioneer in Marxist economic history.

　　In the 1930s, a debate was set off in the domestic academic circles on the nature of Chinese society, and Mr. Wang Yanan naturally did not stay out of the matter. In 1936, his book Outline of China's Socio-Economic History, published by Shanghai Life Bookstore, focused on the mode of production in Asia Minor and the question of whether slavery existed in China, and was a synthesis of the results of his participation in this controversy. Mr. Wang Yanan believes that China lacks typical slavery, and feudal society is not only divided into two stages: the lord economy and the landlord economy, but also has a particularly long time compared with Europe, revealing the characteristics of China's historical development. He objected to some scholars simply applying the Marxist "five-stage theory" of metaphysical view of history. In addition to participating in the "Controversy on the Nature of Chinese Society", he has published a number of historical articles in Social Sciences, Literature, History and Philosophy, and Academic Forum.

　　Mr. Wang Yanan is also an outstanding theorist of China's semi-feudal and semi-colonial economy. In 1954, another of his masterpieces, "Outline of China's Landlord Economic Feudal System", was published by the East China People's Publishing House in Shanghai. The book focuses on the analysis of the essence of China's feudal economy, the laws of movement and the characteristics of super-economic exploitation, and takes the lead in proposing the theory that China's landlord economic system is flexible, creating a school of Chinese economic history. Starting from the social and economic history of ancient China, he not only revealed the characteristics of China's two-stage development of feudal society, but also classified China's semi-colonial and semi-feudal society after the defeat of the Opium War into a special stage of the landlord economy of China's feudal society, rather than a special stage of capitalist development.

　　In addition to economic history, Mr. Wang Yanan has also deeply cultivated the history of economic theory, and his research covers the two major fields of "History of Western Economic Theory" and "History of Marxist Economic Theory", and has published a large number of papers, and has published monographs or collections of papers such as "Introduction to Modern World Economy", "Outline of the History of Political Economy", "Collection of Papers on the History of Wang Yanan's Economic Thought", etc. After the founding of New China, he actively engaged in the study of Mao Zedong's economic thought, planning to compile "Mao Zedong Economic Thought" and a "History of Economic Theory" (university textbook) from Marx to Mao Zedong.

　　In summary, Mr. Wang Yanan's academic contributions are multifaceted, and he has become a far-reaching academic figure with pioneering research. It is worth mentioning that due to the experience of studying in Japan and Europe in his early years, as well as the accumulation of knowledge in classical economics in the West, Mr. Wang Yanan has always adhered to an open world vision and analyzed China's problems with an international perspective, and his inclusive academic thinking has surpassed many scholars of the same era. His academic thinking has always shone with the theoretical brilliance of Marxism, running through Marxist epistemology and methodology, and has a slightly important enlightening effect and era value for governing the country in the new era.

　　(The author is a professor at the School of Economics of Xiamen University and a member of the System and Political Economy Committee of the China Economics Annual Conference)

Source: China Social Science Network - China Social Science Daily Author: Zhang Xingxiang