Remembering the Workshop in the Summer Palace

Abstract

Even the Penglai Island in Summer Palace could not escape from the intense heat of the summer in 1980. Despite this however, more than 100 people gathered there for the seven-week Econometrics Workshop in Summer Palace. Seven economic professors gave lectures, including Lawrence Klein, T.W. Anderson, A. Ando, Gregory Chow, Laurence Liu, Vincent Su and Cheng Hsiao. Veteran scholars likeWu Kejie from Nanjing University and Lin Shaogong from Central College of Engineering were also among the students. Though, this workshop seemed to be a crash course or a literacy class for most of the students. Taking account of its significance, the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has celebrated its 10th and 20th anniversary respectively in 1990 and 2000. And the academia deems it as influential as “the first class in Huangpu Military Academy”. It might be the only workshop that has received such glory and appreciation in the history of economics. After all, it represents enthusiasm, initiation and breakthrough, being a cornerstone of quantitative economics. We owe all this to Professor Klein, the initiator of the econometric model and Nobel Prize winner. He took notice of China not only because of the intention of including China into his LINK model, but also because of his experience of being an American communist in the 1930s. Klein was forced to leave America for Oxford during the upsurge in McCarthyism. Until the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and America in 1979, he could lead American economists to China. The first time they came, they handed in economic theses however without any feedback from the Chinese side because Chinese economics had long been left behind. Later, Klein negotiated with Xu Dixin, the then Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Director of the Institute of Economics at CASS, and decided that an econometrics workshop led by Klein should be held in China the next year. Xu Shengwu, the Vice Director of the Institute of Economics took charge and Zhang Shouyi made arrangements for the opening of the class. Zhang Shouyi was first exposed to economic-mathematic method when he was at the Moscow National Institute of Economics, and was allocated to the Economic-Mathematical Method Research Group by Sun Zhifang…