Abstract

The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School is a unique work. The author, Chen Huan-Chang, was a civil servant in the last years of the Qing Empire. After a traditional education in classical Chinese, Chen befriended and became a student of the great reforming scholar and leader Kang Yu-wei, who deepened and broadened his knowledge of Confucianism. Finally, he went to the USA and took a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia University, studying with such noted names as Edwin Seligman and John Bates Clark, producing his Ph.D. and this book in the very year of the collapse of the Chinese Empire, 1911. Uniquely, Chen was trained in both classical and reformist Chinese schools and Western economic thought. It is from this perspective that he produced The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School, a meticulous comparison and contrasting of classical Chinese and classical Western economic doctrines. His reformist position means that he does not automatically defend Chinese doctrines, yet he considers them to be strong and important and does not advocate their replacement with Western models of thought, as some other Chinese reformers of his day did. This two-volume work gives an extremely detailed account of economic thinking in China before the 1911 Revolution. Chen includes not only the Confucians but also accounts of Daoist, Mohist, Legalist and many other schools. Even today, no other study of this depth has ever been produced in English, and much of what Chen describes is still highly relevant in modern times.