China's economic thought has its own origin and a long history, and once occupied a place in the world economic thought system; China's economics, on the other hand, is a product influenced by foreign economics since modern times. An important clue of the development and evolution history of China's modern economic thought is that in the process of "learning from the west", there was a contest and struggle between China's traditional old economic thought and the fresh economic thought introduced from the west. Its general trend is that traditional economic thoughts are replaced by foreign economic thoughts and withdraw from its dominant position. The content of imported economic thoughts is not fixed, but with its continuous spread in China, from the surface to the inside, from the shallow to the deep, that is, from the initial general economic knowledge to the theoretical system of economics. The result of the contest and struggle is that foreign economic thoughts have defeated traditional economic thoughts. The decline of traditional economic thought does not mean its disappearance. Based on hundreds of years of historical accumulation, it will still show its traditional strength in China's social and economic life. However, after the impact of foreign economic thoughts, China people have gradually completed the transformation from the traditional antique form to the new scientific form when thinking and discussing economic issues, especially economic theory issues. In this sense, the spread of imported economic thoughts actually released the shackles and cleared the obstacles for China's economics based on modern science.

The introduction of modern imported economic thoughts began after the first Opium War in 1840. Under the threat of gunboats from foreign powers, the Qing government was forced to abandon its closed-door policy and open to the outside world. At first, people came into contact with some superficial western capitalist economic knowledge through foreign impressions or sporadic news reports of China people living in Europe and missionaries coming to China. By the 1980s of 19, China students began to analyze China's economic problems with the western economic theories they had learned. There are also foreigners in China who have introduced some western economic works in order to run western courses. However, this period lasted until the end of 19, and basically remained at the stage of applying western economic theories piecemeal or mechanically using traditional economic concepts and terms to explain and apply theories. It was not until the early 20th century, marked by the official publication of Adam Smith's masterpiece "The Wealth of Nations" translated by Yan Fu in 1902, that the introduction of classical theories of economics broke through the previous pattern of being limited to general economic knowledge, formed systematic theories of various western economic disciplines, and was introduced into China in large quantities in the form of translation or self-editing by Chinese people. 1903 also published a book that systematically introduced the development history of western bourgeois economics. One is A Brief History of the Evolution of Livelihood Theory written by Liang Qichao, and the other is Jixue Pingyi written by American C. Rand and translated by Chen Changxu. These two books introduce the English Orthodox School and the German Historical School respectively. Its publication reflects that the spread of western bourgeois economics in China has aroused people's understanding of its theoretical origin. After the May 4th Movement, I went abroad to study.