Wang Yanan

Wang Yanan

Wang Yanan (1901-november 13, 1969), male, is a famous economist and educator in modern China. He has been teaching in the University for more than 30 years. He has accumulated rich teaching experience and school running experience, and has a deep understanding of education. In particular, he has brilliant views on the nature and function of modern education, how to run a comprehensive university well, how to cultivate and use talents, and how to study. Wang Yanan's educational thought runs through Marxist epistemology and methodology, which is a valuable heritage of China's educational theory.

On November 13, 1969, after years of cruel torture and persecution, Wang Yanan died unjustly in Shanghai Huadong Hospital.

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Wang Yanan (1901-1969), male, from wangjiafang village, Huanggang County, Hubei Province (now Tuanfeng County, Huanggang City, Hubei Province). Famous modern economist.

Wang Yanan's parents died early. With the support of his elder brother, he finished primary school in Huangzhou. After graduation, he was admitted to Wuchang No.1 middle school and the Education Department of Wuchang Chinese University (the predecessor of central China Normal University). During the great revolution, he joined the Northern Expedition army in Changsha and served as a political teacher in the army. After the failure of the great revolution, he went from Wuchang to Shanghai and then to Hangzhou, where his career took a major turn.

Translation of Das Kapital

In addition to raising monks and mountains, Chinese temples also shelter many poor scholars. During his stay in Hangzhou, Wang Yanan was forced to live in the Great Buddha Temple. Here, he met his important partner in his career, namely Guo Dali, who also lived in the Great Buddha Temple after graduating from the Philosophy Department of Shanghai Daxia University. The two young people were congenial, they talked about their ideals at first sight, and soon became close friends. During this period, Wang Yanan began to study Marxist political economy, looking for ways to change society and save the country. Seeing that he had a strong interest in economics, Guo Dali suggested that they should work together in the translation of capital. Since then, he and Guo Dali began nearly 40 years of friendship and cooperation. Das Kapital has also become a classic of Wang Yanan's lifelong learning and research.

In 1928, Wang Yanan went to Japan to study and read a lot of Marx's works and European classical economics. After the September 18th Incident, he returned home angrily and engaged in progressive cultural activities in Shanghai as a translator and teacher. In the past two years, he has translated Adam Smith's famous work on the wealth of nations, Malthus's population theory, John Mill's principles of economics and other economic works. His own works, history of economics and an introduction to world politics and economy, have also been published one after another. In the academic circles, Wang Yanan has begun to show himself.

In 1933, Wang Yanan died in Europe because he was wanted in Fujian incident. In Germany, Marx's hometown, and England, the birthplace of Das Kapital, he extensively collected western economic materials, paid attention to the development trend of western economics, and translated some western economic works. In 1935, he returned to Shanghai and met with Guo Dali again. He talked about his European travel experience, and they began to translate Das Kapital. At this time, the person in charge of reading life publishing house, which has close ties with the Communist Party of China, went to Wang Yanan to explain to him the urgency of translating Das Kapital. He hoped to translate it as soon as possible, go to press as soon as possible, and paid some expenses in advance. In 1938, under the condition of extremely difficult economic life, in the dry land of China, which urgently needs the moistening of Marxist theory, Wang Yanan and Guo Dali's hard struggle for more than ten years finally came to an end: the three volume Chinese translation of capital, the cornerstone of Marxism, was finally published! At that time, it was not only a new thing in China's economic and scientific research, but also a major event in the spread of Marxism in China, which had an important impact on China's communist movement.

Wang Yanan devoted all his life to the study of Marxist political economy. From the five volumes of Wang Yanan's collected works, we can see the road that an outstanding economist and educator has taken. He is an economist with rich translations. His outstanding contributions in the field of economics mainly include four aspects

Wang Yanan and Guo worked hard for 10 years to overcome many difficulties. In 1938, they published the complete translation of three volumes of Marx's great work capital, which is a milestone in the systematic dissemination of Marx's economic theory in China. Das Kapital is generally acknowledged as a great work of great breadth and profundity. However, there has not been a complete translation of Das Kapital in China before that. In order to translate it into Chinese accurately, we should not only have excellent Chinese expression ability, but also have deep and solid theoretical cultivation and profound knowledge accumulation. In strict accordance with their plan, Wang Yanan and Guo energetically translated six economic and economic history masterpieces before Marx in eight years, including Adam Smith's on the wealth of nations and Ricardo's principles of political economy and taxation, which opened a channel for the complete translation of capital. Under the white terror of KMT's "cultural encirclement and suppression" at that time, Guo and Wang had no fear, went forward bravely, went through hardships, and finally successfully completed the translation work. This is their contribution to the proletarian revolutionary cause and the Chinese people, and their outstanding achievement will last forever.

The pioneer of economic history

Wang Yanan is one of the pioneers of Marxist economic history in China. From the 1930s, he began to explore the social and economic problems of old China from the perspective of Chinese economic history, and achieved fruitful results. He boldly innovated, set a school of his own, and put forward the famous "landlord economy theory" completely and systematically. He believes that China's feudal system can be divided into two major stages: the Lord's economy and the landlord's economy. Taking the landlord's economic form and the semi feudal mode of production as a whole, he studies comprehensively and systematically from the aspects of economic structure, political system and cultural thought, so as to explain the problem of "stagnant development" which has been debated for a long time in China's social and economic history This is "a summary of the discussions since the 1930s". This is a prominent scientific research achievement in the field of Chinese economic history before 1949. Its theoretical contribution is of far-reaching significance and has attracted the attention of international historians.

Anecdotes of teenagers

Wang Yanan was ambitious and fond of reading when he was a child. When he was in middle school, in order to get more time to study, he sawed one foot of his wooden bed half a foot short to make a three legged bed. Every night, when he was tired, he went to bed and turned over in a daze. The bed tilted towards his short feet. He was awakened and got out of bed immediately to read at night. It's like this every day. It never stops. As a result, he achieved excellent results every year and was praised as one of the three outstanding students in the class. Because he studied hard in his youth, he finally became an outstanding economist in China.

Wang Yanan, a famous Marxist economist and the earliest Chinese translator of capital, went to Europe by boat in 1933. When the passenger ship arrived at the Red Sea, there were huge waves and the ship swayed so that people could not stand still. At this time, Wang Yanan, wearing glasses, with a book in his hand, went into the restaurant and begged the waiter to say, "please tie me to this post!" the waiter thought that he was afraid of being thrown into the sea by the waves, so he tied Wang Yanan firmly to the post as he said. After binding, Wang Yanan opened the book and read it attentively. When the foreigners on the ship saw it, they all threw surprised eyes at him and said, "ah! Chinese, it's amazing

theoretical research

Wang Yanan's most outstanding contribution in his life is to study the theory of Chinese semi feudal and semi colonial economic formation. He combined the basic principles of Marxism with China's reality and made a profound analysis of the old China's semi feudal and semi colonial economic formation. He has published a series of influential monographs, including his masterpiece "the theory of Chinese economy", and two other masterpieces "an outline of Chinese landlord economy and feudal system" and "a study of Chinese bureaucratic politics". Through the above works, we have our own unique and incisive views on the old China's commodity economy theory, capital theory, profit interest theory, economic crisis theory, bureaucratic politics theory, and form a complete economic theory system. In these systematic studies, he emphasized that in the social and economic relations of modern old China, there were not only foreign capital, bureaucratic comprador capital and national capital, but also feudal economy, which had the nature of transition. In the long-term debate about the social and economic nature of modern old China in the economic circle at that time, he made a scientific and systematic theoretical explanation for the correct view that modern old China was a semi feudal and semi colonial society. This is of great significance to the understanding of the nature, object and revolutionary strategy of China's new democratic revolution, and is an outstanding contribution to the theory of the new democratic revolution. In the academic discussion of the stages of Chinese ancient history. Wang Yanan is a famous scholar of "Western Zhou Dynasty feudalism".

Initiate the concept of "Chinese economics"

One of Wang Yanan's important contributions to the methodology of economic research is that he strongly advocates "studying economy from the standpoint of Chinese people". He thinks that economic science is a practical science, which should face the reality of China, make Marxist political economy Chinese, and establish "Chinese economics". He set an example and practiced it. One of his representative works, the original theory of Chinese economics, is known as the capital of China. The academic circles before liberation thought that his works had "three characteristics of China, practice and criticism" was a proper evaluation. After liberation, Wang Yanan continued to adhere to Marxism

Chinese PinYin : Wang Ya Nan