Li Jingwen, an economist and management scientist who was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, died in Beijing on March 31 at the age of 89 after a long illness. During his lifetime, he led the economic argumentation for the Three Gorges Project, which he called a “democratic and scientific decision.
“Li Jingwen, a Soviet economist, dies after a long illness
As one of the pioneers of technical economy and engineering management theory in China, Li Jingwen was an early researcher on the feasibility of engineering projects using technical and economic argumentation methods, and used mathematical models to predict economic trends, editing the “Economic Blue Book” for nearly a decade, according to the official Chinese media Guangming Daily.
He has presided over the technical and economic demonstration of mega-projects such as the Three Gorges Project, South-North Water Diversion, and Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway, and participated in the formulation of economic development strategies and plans for the Bohai Sea Economic Circle, the five central provinces, Hainan, and Shenzhen.
Huang Qialiang, Secretary General of the Chinese Society for Technical Economics, told the station, “Academician Li Jingwen is a high mountain in our discipline. He is the main pioneer of technical economics, learned and knowledgeable, and is principled, bold and scientific in challenging authority. He is also one of the earliest founders of economic situation analysis and forecasting in China. He was a monumental figure in both the fields of economics and management.”
Wang Weiluo: On the Three Gorges issue, Li Jingwen could have been a truth-telling scientist
In 1986, the central government organized 412 experts to conduct a three-year feasibility study of the Three Gorges Project, and eventually only nine experts, including Lu Qinkan, Fang Zongdai, Hou Xueyu and Guo Laixi, refused to sign.
Li Jingwen, then deputy head of the comprehensive economic evaluation team for the Three Gorges Project demonstration, led the team to conclude after more than a year of investigation that “it is better to build the Three Gorges Project than not to build it, and it is more beneficial to build it earlier than later.”
While Lu Qinkan lost his CPPCC membership for rebelling against Junyi and journalist Dai Qing was thrown into Qincheng prison for documenting historical facts, Li Jingwen was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2001.
Twenty years later, he is still very proud of this demonstration, calling it “a model of democratic and scientific decision-making”, so much so that the South-North Water Transfer and Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway projects he later participated in were modeled after the Three Gorges.
“The signatures will be preserved forever, and the results of the argumentation will be responsible to history and will stand the test of history, and we all treasure our names and do not want to be sinners in history.”
Wang Weiluo, a long-time expert in land planning, recalls that more than twenty people, including Li Jingwen, later became engineering academicians for signing the Three Gorges Project. None of those who refused to sign became academicians, so much so that later intellectuals learned the hard way that there was little opposition to the South-North Water Transfer Project.
Li Jingwen mentioned that the Three Gorges Project cost 185 billion yuan at the time of settlement, which basically matched his prediction. Wang Weiluo argued that Li would have had a chance to stop the Three Gorges Project from going ahead if he had spelled out the 190.89 billion yuan cost in his general report, but he reported 37.1 billion yuan (called a static investment, which was changed to 57 billion yuan in 1992 when the National People’s Congress made its decision).
“By saying in 1992, ‘I calculated 1900 billion yuan,’ Li Jingwen was considered a scientist who told the truth. What’s the use of waiting 22 years later to say he did the math correctly? Li Jingwen, who knew full well that Li Peng and Zou Jiahua had lied when they made their report, only announced 57 billion yuan to the Chinese people.”
The scientific nature of the Three Gorges Project decision has been controversial. Wang Weiluo’s research shows that 14 professional groups, including sediment, flood control, environment and immigration, worked in closed groups and talked about themselves back then. “Li Jingwen couldn’t bother with immigration or the ecological environment. Each group is arguing for itself, and the argumentative reports of 14 groups put together are contradictory.”
“The biggest side effect is the damage to the ecology and the social shock. The scary thing is that no one dares to speak out against it anymore.” He sighed.
Li Nanyang, the daughter of Li Rui, who strongly opposes the Three Gorges Project, also said that if the data made out is right and the Three Gorges vote does not come out to speak, “then it is not a scientist, but a learned official, as a career ladder. After the Communist Party came to power, real scientists, like Huang Wanli, were beaten as class enemies and never allowed to turn over. The South-North Water Transfer is a battle with the sky, destroying the natural properties of the river, like pumping human blood. But these experts know that they are no longer alive when the drawbacks appear.”
A view of the Three Gorges Dam in China (Reuters file photo)
Inspired by Mao Zedong when he stayed in the Soviet Union, he spent his life being “the sun at eight or nine o’clock”
Guo Laixi, a geographer who also stayed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, changed from activist to opponent because of his concern for the livelihood of millions of Three Gorges migrants.
Wang Weiluo regrets that Li Jingwen had the opportunity to become a “truth-telling scientist” like Guo Laixi, but he chose to follow the party’s “one heart” and the political mission of the Soviet scholars transcended everything.
“A large group of people who stayed in the Soviet Union were second-generation Reds, or children from poor backgrounds. Politically, the Communist Party considered them to be very reliable. This group of foreign students from the Soviet Union was a disaster for China; look at Jiang Zemin, Li Peng and Li Lanqing. Academia also formed gangs, not with science and freedom as the highest norm, science for the proletariat, a tool of politics. They think that Soviet plus electrification equals communism.”
Born into an underground family, Li Jingwen, who grew up witnessing the fires of the Liberation War and his father’s torture by the Kuomintang, enrolled in the Economics Department of Wuhan University in 1951 and joined the Chinese Communist Party.
On November 17, 1957, Mao Zedong went to the auditorium of Moscow University on Lenin Hill to give a speech, “The world is yours and ours, but in the final analysis it is yours. You young people are vigorous and are flourishing, like the sun at eight or nine o’clock in the morning ……”
Li Jingwen, who was studying in Moscow at the time, sat on the stage and listened, remembering for life. 1953 he was selected to study in the Soviet Union, studying economics and mathematics hard, and returned to China after graduation in 1958.
Li Jingwen later recalled to Guangming Daily that Mao’s words encouraged him and millions of other young people to study, work and strive to create a better world.
After his return to China, his wife Yu Ping described him as following the needs of the country, “going wherever the organization arranged to go.
Before and after the Cultural Revolution, Li Jingwen worked mainly at the grassroots level of the Planning Commission and the Beijing Institute of Economics, and hibernated for many years until he was appointed the first director of the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics in 1985.
Over the years, he has moved from one position to another in politics and academia, but what remains the same is the red sun in his heart.
More than ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Li Jingwen mentioned in a public speech that the United States had deliberately dismantled the Soviet Union and now wanted to divide Taiwan and Tibet to weaken China; Nixon preached replacing communism with religious and family revival, and Chinese people should also have the faith of the new era, such as the “Three Represents”.
According to U.S.-based historian Liu Zhongjing, Li Jingwen was a son of the White Party, between the Red Party and speculative bourgeois experts like Li Siguang. “After the new generation of proletarian intellectuals was cultivated in the 1960s, (Yellow Russia) beat them into various factions or deprived them of real power, so that the Red Party and the proletariat could go directly to them. After the Cultural Revolution, the policy of concessions was implemented and they were brought back into use. In a word, they are on the periphery of their own people, and power will never be given to outsiders.”
Liu Zhongjing pointed out that this category of cadre party technocrats grew out of the process of running big projects and the need to keep inventing new ones to perpetuate themselves, but their own technical standards had actually become obsolete long ago, largely a product of the 1930s in the United States and the 1950s in the Soviet Union.
“Because of institutional rigidity and resource monopoly, their presence has effectively made it impossible for a decentralized path of investment to exist beyond technocratic project orientation. The sloppy style of Chinese science and technology has much to do with their own crash course style.”
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