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AbstractThe history of the transmission of Western knowledge to China—Western Learning or Xixue—usually revolves around travelers. What is unmentioned, however, is that the identity of the two types of Chinese travelers of economic knowledge evolved throughout the Western Learning Movement. One-way travelers introduced political economy as a means to improve institutions and statecraft. First-generation Chinese students overseas continued to promote economics as a science capable of enriching a nation's wealth but focused on the theoretical aspect. The second-generation students became economics professionals, who were primarily concerned with practical economic problems and created a scene of practical pluralism of economics during the interwar period. Not all travelers were of the same quality. To judge between the good and bad traveler, further criteria are required. It can be said that good travelers may have a correct understanding of Western theory, and that their translations are faithful, yielding the knowledge they transmitted with integrity. But travelers confronted the problems of trading off faithful and significant knowledge transmissions. Such conundrums can be explained by distinguishing between their distinct conceptions of economics—economics as statecraft, as science, and as a discipline characterized by its practical pluralism—concerning travelers' ideas of solving China's practical economic problems in different periods.

This article explores how diagrams are performed in actual scientific practice by examining two studies of the structure of periodic markets in rural China before and during the World War II. These are Ching-Kun Yang's pioneering study of systematic field observations of Chinese periodic markets in the 1930s, and the US anthropologist William G. Skinner's model, which accounts for the social and economic structure of rural China. In both cases, the empirical studies involved in uncovering the Chinese market structure are closely connected to Western theories of geographical research: Yang's research is influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, led by Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess; Skinner's theoretical research applies the central place theory of Walter Christaller and August Lösch of the German Location School. The author argues that the social scientists' practices demonstrate how diagrams have a specific epistemic virtue for guiding the idealization and representation, both as a process and end product, in formulating explanations for the distribution of locations. Moreover, whereas the diagrams are represented as pure geometrical shapes, they not only are the outcome of idealization but also play an important role in guiding the process of evidentiation.

This article argues that the credibility of both theoretical and empirical models in economics is best understood through their connection with the empirical aspects of the real world. The discussion herein demonstrates that the similarity between the model and the real world is not enough to justify a theoretical model's explanatory power. The best way to secure the model's credibility is to prove the existence of representation theorems.

This essay studies the contribution of Ta-Chung Liu to econometrics by focusing on the models and methods of Liu's econometric practices from the 1950s to the 1970s. We document his development of an exploratory econometric approach, a development he effected by experimenting with tools and elements in the model-building process and which led him finally to accept the recursive methodology represented by Herman Wold. We also discuss Liu's theoretical and empirical concerns for econometric models that spurred his involvement in a series of debates against the Cowles Commission approach in the 1960s and 1970s, and we discuss his legacy to contemporary econometrics.