This talk introduces the social scientist and economic philosopher, Wang Yanan, and his 1930s Chinese critique of the Austrian School of Economics. Wang was an original translator of Marx, Smith, and Ricardo, and by the late 1930s, he had turned his attention to the seeming "common sense" of the Austrians in order to thoroughly refute their flat version of the world. Part of my recently published book "The Magic of Concepts" (Duke University Press 2017), this talk presents a historical consideration of capitalist economic concepts as they helped shape Chinese understandings of their simultaneously local and global worlds.
