Yang Xiaokai
Yang Xiaokai (October 6, 1948-July 7, 2004
1 _span strong span2span 1 _span strong) -In 1968, 19-year-old Yang Xiaokai was sentenced to ten years in prison for a big-character poster entitled "Where is China going?" There were many well-educated wise men in the prison of the 1940s. Yang Xiaokai learned English, mathematics, and history with them every day. After reading " Capital", he became fascinated by economics. After ten years in prison, he initially formed a division of labor. His economic thoughts. During his studies at Princeton, he finally turned his thoughts into a beautiful economic model, and then he became famous for explaining the theory of economic growth by the endogenous evolution of the division of labor. He founded New classical economics has challenged the traditional neoclassical economics. Yang Xiaokai is considered to be the closest Chinese economist to 's Nobel Prize in Economics. It is a pity that God is jealous of talents, July 2004, 56 The year-old Yang Xiaokai died young. Today (October 6) is Mr. Yang Xiaokai’s birthday. This official account published his oral statement to commemorate the 73rd anniversary of the birth of this great economist.Oral: Yang Xiaokai: finishing : Xiao Rui, Li Liming This article has a total of 6193 words,It takes about 12-15 minutes to read.
My family
_strong184span _p6span _p6span My original name is _p6span 2 After being released from prison for ten years in 1978, I reactivated my childhood name.
I was born in Jilin in 1948 and grew up in Changsha, Hunan. My grandfather was a landlord and opened a school in the country. He received a strict Confucian education, and he also asked future generations to learn Confucianism. I remember when I was in elementary school, my father asked my aunt to teach me to read "The Analects" at home.
Both my parents joined the revolution in 1938. My father used to be a senior cadre of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee. In 1959, he supported Peng Dehuai's views and opposed the Great Leap Forward and public cafeterias. He was labelled a rightist opportunist. It was the autumn of 1959, when I was still very young. One day, my father took me to the window and said to me kindly: "The cadres have been in the institutions above for a long time, and they don’t understand the situation at the grassroots level below. Let’s get to know the situation.” I looked at the red leaves on a big maple tree outside the window, wondering why my father’s attitude was surprisingly gentle at the time. In fact, my father was in a bad mood those days, and he often argued with his mother. Three years later, I learned that my father was labeled as a Right opportunist in 1959 because of his opposition to the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune policy.Dad told me that in 1962 the Party Central Committee rehabilitated him and admitted that their views in 1959 were correct.
My brother was also labeled as a rightist in 1957 because he was in love with the daughter of a big capitalist. He was a member of the Communist Youth League at that time, and the love of the Communist Youth League members was approved by the League organization. His Tianjin Medical College ’s party organization forbids him to fall in love with the capitalist’s daughter. He refuses to accept it. In 1957, he posted a big-character poster and complained about the lack of freedom of love. Naturally he quickly became a rightist.
1960 and 1961 were very dark days for our family. After my father went to the countryside, our family moved out of the compound of the Provincial Party Committee and moved into the office where my mother was. We are threatened by hunger like all the people around us. We can't eat meat for a long time. I feel hungry and uncomfortable every morning until the third class. You can't buy any food on the street except fruit candy. Many people are swollen from hunger. Institutions and schools have reduced work and study time because everyone lacks energy. Almost every family’s window sills are filled with glass jars that contain a kind of algae plant , which people rely on to replenish their hunger. In the yard where we live, people spend most of their time sifting out the cobblestones in the open area and growing vegetables. The flush toilets in all institutions were closed, and people built simple toilets in order to collect the feces and use them to grow vegetables. The agency’s canteen produces a " double steamed rice " and " artificial meat ". "Double steamed rice" means steaming rice twice with water, and two or two rice rice absorbs a lot of water and becomes as much as a catty of rice. Artificial meat is made from the above mentioned algae and bran, and it gets stuck in the throat when eaten. Of course these things do not have the power to truly resist hunger.
In 1962, I graduated from elementary school and entered junior high school.At that time, China was recovering from the chaos and hunger after the Great Leap Forward, everything was "turning to the right"-rural areas were engaged in " contracting output to households", factories were implementing "60 industrial regulations", emphasizing " "Profits in command", "business first", "material stimulus", and "expert route". The education sector is changing the enrollment policy. In the past, admission was dependent on family composition, and people with bad backgrounds were not allowed to enter good schools. In 1962, the only admission criteria was changed to test scores. Changsha No. 1 Middle School has become a national key middle school, and many rightists have been invited back to No. 1 middle school to improve the quality of teaching. My teenagers of the same age in the compound of the Provincial Party Committee failed to pass the first high school because of poor grades. I am one of the very few children of high-ranking cadres admitted to the first middle school. There are no children of senior cadres in my class. Most of my classmates are the children of engineers, doctors and teachers. Later, two senior cadres' children re-entered our class from the senior class, and I only had two senior cadres' students. The admission criteria for students who are one grade higher than ours to enter the middle school are based entirely on family background and not on test scores. I remember that my math teacher, biology teacher, and foreign language teacher were all rightists who were just invited out of the labor camp by the school.
Remember the first day of class, our head teacher told us that the quality of education since the Great Leap Forward was much lower than in the early 1950s, so the school should re-emphasize the quality of education and restore 97% of Changsha No. 1 Middle School before the Great Leap Forward. Rate of enrollment.
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1966 outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, since my parents are more sympathetic to Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai’s point of view,After being labeled as counter-revolutionary revisionists, we became families of gangsters, and we were very discriminated against. At that time, I was a high school student in Changsha No. 1 Middle School. I was not allowed to join the Red Guards because of discrimination, so I joined the rebels against the Red Guards. The organization I participated in belongs to the "Provincial Without Union" organization. At that time, the difference between the Red Guards and the rebels in the school was that the Red Guards were all rooted and upright. Most of the rebels were from bad backgrounds, and they opposed the "pedigree theory." In the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the masses could form their own organizations and participate in different organizations according to their views. In 1967, the government (military) began to ban mass organizations and forbid the masses to engage in political organizations. On February 4, 1967, Hunan’s largest rebel organization " Xiangjiang Fenglei " clashed with the authorities. In the chaos, I was taken to the Changsha City Public Security Bureau Detention Center, where I was detained for more than two months.
After that time was released, I wrote a lot of big-character posters one after another, including the "Investigation Report on Chinese Urban Intellectual Youth Going to the Mountain and Countryside", "Government Out of the Barrel of a Gun" and so on. In 1968, I wrote a big-character poster "Where is China going?" ", advocating that China implement a Paris Commune-style democracy. This article was classified as a "counter-revolutionary" by the preparatory group of the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee at the time. Soon, my articles were reported to the Central Cultural Revolution. Kang Sheng, deputy leader of the Central Cultural Revolution Leading Group, believes that this poster is "a counter-revolutionary'horse mourning'." Kang asserted: "I have a feeling that Yang Xiguang's (referring to me) theory was definitely not written by middle school students or even college students. There are counter-revolutionary black hands behind him." In his speech, Chen Boda even called: "Anyone who received Zhou Guohui, Those blinded by Yang Xiguang should turn their heads and don’t be led by their noses."
A few days later I was "hand-picked" and taken to prison and locked up in the Zuojiatang Detention Center of the Changsha Public Security Bureau. .
I was detained in the detention center for more than a year. In October 1968, I switched from detention to arrest. It was a sunny winter day in November of this year, and I was sentenced to for counter-revolutionary crimes ten years in prison,He was escorted to the Jianxin reform-through-labor farm by the Dongting Lake in Yueyang, and was released until the end of his sentence in early 1978.
After reading "Das Kapital", I want to be an economist
1span _strong4 6 "This article not only imprisoned myself, but also brought great disasters to my family. Kang Sheng stated in his instructions on January 24, 1968 that such an essay was not written by middle school students, nor was it written by college students. There must be black hands behind it. "To find out the teacher Chen who shook the goose feather fan behind these students."
Yang Xiaokai’s mother Chen Su (first from the left)
br674 I was instructed to give birth to her surname after Kang Sha, she was also instructed to span In the second criticism, his hands were blackened with ink and forced to kneel in public. The black hand symbolizes the "black hand". My tortured mother was so humiliated that she chose to hang herself. My father was locked up in a study class. My two younger sisters were left homeless. One younger sister was sent to the mountainous area of western Hunan. The other younger sister went to Shanxi to seek refuge with relatives. The older brother was also expelled from public office and drove to the countryside.
During the one-and-a-half years of detention in Zuojiatang Detention Center, although physically and mentally hard, I happily found my teacher among a group of "ghosts, ghosts and snakes"-I learned English from a teacher.Learn electrical machinery, learn mechanical drawing. I also read " General History of the World " and a book called "Long Live Mao Zedong Thought". A teacher Chen lent me "Das Kapital", and I carefully read the three-volume "Das Kapital" in Zuojiatang .
After reading "Das Kapital", I don't know why I expect me to become an economist in the future. Three ideas emerged in my heart. One was to clarify the importance of use value in 's theory of value , the second was to integrate the division of labor into the theory of value, and the third was to mathematicize the theory of value. Later, I wrote an economics notebook along this line of thinking in the labor reform team.
I found in my reading and thinking that besides the labor theory of value, another important factor that determines value—use value is ignored. It took me many years to learn that what Marx called use value is called utility in contemporary economics. But I really like Marx's play on the division of labor theory of Adam Smith .
I am writing "Where is China going?" "I have always pursued idealism, but when I was in jail, I had no idealism at all. I believe that the value standards that people judge themselves will change with history, so how history will develop is far more important than ideal goals. In the past, the question I cared about was "what is good, what is bad, and what should this world be like". What I asked in prison was: "How will this world develop?" Subjective judgments about what is good or bad are meaningless. How to adapt to the environment and survive is the most important thing.
I learned English and mathematics during the ten years from the detention center to the labor reform team.Prisons discriminate against educated people, so if you respect them, they are more willing to teach you. In the labor reform team, my math teacher is He Minhe. He graduated from Zhongshan University in 1948 and has been an engineer since 1949. At that time, I encountered difficulties in self-study calculus. Realizing that it is difficult to study mathematics by myself, I asked Mr. He to teach me mathematics. My English teacher is a prisoner who has been an English teacher. My father sent me some quotations from Chairman Mao in English, works by Marx and Engels, and English-Chinese dictionaries. I also asked someone to order a Beijing Weekly . I use these resources to learn English.
I have always had the habit of taking notes. I write down my inspiration on politics, economy, literature, and mathematics in a small notebook every day. When I was studying, I also recorded some things I was interested in and my thoughts. Especially after Nixon’s visit to China, China’s " reference news" newspaper often published news on American politics and economics. People in the infrastructure team in prison often stole the cadre’s "reference news" newspaper, which reported about Watergate The report of the event , as well as the campaign speech of Carter and his inaugural speech all gave us a more direct understanding of the political and social system of the United States. Every time I get a stolen "Reference News" newspaper, I always have to extract a lot of interesting things in my notebook. Over the years, I have accumulated more than a dozen notebooks. I made a total of fifty or sixty reading notes in jail, and a film literary script. These materials contained many things that were incompatible with the official ideology at the time.
By 1977, news of the resumption of the college entrance examination reached my prison. One day, a cadre of the field office talked to me and said that there were dozens of children of cadres who had graduated from high school and were working on the farm. I was selected to help them with tutoring mathematics.In this way, I was still teaching high school mathematics for a period of time in the reform-through-labour team.
When I was in prison, I had no training in Western neoclassical economics. In that state of isolation, new ideas popped up in my mind from time to time. In the labor reform team, I derive the "Gerson’s Second Law" (the marginal utility of each dollar is equal), the hierarchy theory, the Nash bargaining model, and the division of labor theory. I thought these were my own great discoveries, but when When I could read more books, I discovered that these ideas have long been developed into mathematical models by Western economists. However, this is what I came up with. "Heroes see the same thing." I think I am also one of the heroes.
My experience of the past ten years is written in Oxford University Press published in 1997 in the book "The God of the Cows, Ghosts and Snakes".
_1span4 As the author of "Go", I stayed at my father's house for a year. This year, I attended the mathematics class at Hunan University Department of Mathematics. These observations were arranged by some right-wing professors who had just returned to work at Hunan University. At this time, I started to reuse my nickname Yang Xiaokai. Later, I entered the Hunan Xinhua Printing Factory in Shaoyang and worked as a proofreader for half a year.
In 1979, I applied for Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Economics Master student,But because of "counter-revolutionary history", he was refused to take the exam. In 1980, I applied for the exam again. With the help of Yu Guangyuan, the then vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, I finally got the opportunity to take the quantitative economics exam. After passing the exam, I was admitted as an intern researcher. After that, he worked at the Institute of Quantitative Economics and Technical Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for nearly two years.
From 1979 to 1982, I studied neoclassical economics systematically. I often went to some universities to attend classes, borrowed books in the Beijing Library, and participated in the econometrics training class, learning system theory, information theory, control theory, operations research, and doing some measurement Research on economics, calculated some shadow prices, translated a textbook of economic cybernetics, published "Economic Cybernetics Preliminary" and "Basic Mathematical Economics", probably at the level of intermediate microeconomics. Later, I met some international students abroad. They all said that their main understanding of western economics in China was reading these two books of mine.
By 1982, I was hired by Wuhan University as a lecturer and worked at Wuhan University for a year and a half, teaching mathematical economics and economic cybernetics courses. During this period of time, I published "Economic Control Theory" and "Fundamentals of Mathematical Economics". At the same time, I began to prepare to study abroad. Because some econometric models in these books of mine attracted the attention of professor of Princeton University who was visiting Wuhan University at that time,With the help of Professor Zou, in 1983 I was admitted to the Department of Economics of Princeton University as a PhD student. At that time, I had not been rehabilitated and I was unable to go abroad for a political review. At the critical moment, I still relied on the help of Professor Zou Zhizhuang. He wrote to the leaders at the time, hoping to help. Later, this letter was forwarded to the then President of Wuhan University Liu Daoyu . Enlightened, President Liu immediately approved my application for going abroad. In 1983, I reported to Princeton University as scheduled.
At the same time, following the instructions of Hu Yaobang "Yang Xiguang's problem should be dealt with by the court according to law.", the Supreme Court ordered the Hunan Provincial High Court to re-examine my "counter-revolutionary" issue. The Judicial Committee of the Higher Court of Hunan Province unanimously held that: "Where is China Going" "is a question of ideological understanding, does not have counter-revolutionary purposes, and does not constitute a crime. According to this, the original verdict of the first instance and the second instance is improper and should be revoked, and Yang Xiguang was declared no Sin."
Qianlong Tengyuan
491span _span_strong 49 _strong p6 _strongp At the time of the doctorate. I am already familiar with some doctoral courses, so I have the energy and time to carefully compare my neoclassical ideas with my ideas to see where the differences are, and to see what values I have thought about. I realized that some of my ideas obviously have no meaning for further research. For example, I used to derive Gerson’s second theorem using mathematics in prison. At that time, I thought it was a discovery. understood. The bargaining model Nash created is much better than I thought.
When I came to the United States, I read more and learned a lot, and I found it more difficult to innovate. People are very similar, and others you can think of can also think of. But my luck is good. The equilibrium model of the division of labor theory that I have been thinking about has not been studied, and later it became my doctoral thesis.
I have two doctoral thesis supervisors, one is Gene Grossman, an international trade economist; the other is Edwin Mills, an urban economist. But my thesis basically did not follow their research. Generally speaking, the dissertations of doctoral students are not their own innovations, but to advance other people's things a little bit, or apply it, which is easier to succeed. However, it is not easy and risky to be original. From this point of view, the style of study at Princeton University is good. I can do my own thing completely without following any mentors, which actually allows me to get a degree, and my doctoral thesis is rated very high. One reason is that there are fewer graduate students in the Department of Economics of Princeton University and more teachers. Teachers are often competing for students. I heard people say that doing things like me in other universities may not get a degree, and students have to follow their tutors. However, although the original ideas of my thesis are my own, the basic theoretical methodology is derived from Hugo Sonnenschein, an expert in general equilibrium theory and mathematical economics; the applied theoretical methodology is derived from Hugo Sonnenschein and trade theorists Gene Grossman and Avinash Dixit; there are scales The general equilibrium model of increasing and endogenous product categories is learned from Gene Grossman, Avinash Dixit, which played a key role in the industrialization theory that I later developed with Shi Heling. Empirical and quantitative research methodology are from Zou Zhizhuang (Gregory Chow), Whitney Newey, Anguish Deaton, Richard Quandt; information economics and game theory are from Joseph Stiglitz, Barry Nalebuff, Sanddy Grossman,This played a key role in my later research on the impact of endogenous transaction costs on the division of labor. Macroeconomics is from Alan Blinder and John Taylor; industrial organization theory is from William Baumol, Michael Katz, Robert Willig. Of course, I am not working behind closed doors, but crawling in and out, searching the existing literature as much as possible, and using new methods to mathematicalize my original ideas.
In 1987, my thesis passed the defense, and I went to Yale University Economic Growth Center for a year as a postdoctoral fellow. After that, I came to Australia to teach in the Economics Department of Monash University . I was promoted to senior lecturer in 1989, full professor in 1992, elected to the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in 1993, and promoted to chair professor in 2000. Over the years, although I have been teaching at Monash University, I spend almost one-third of my time every year as guest professor in the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 1998, I have spent more time returning to China, and now I am also a visiting professor at Peking University and Fudan University .
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