Eckstein, Alexander, 1915-1976

Professor of economics and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, and consultant on China to the U.S. Department of State.

From the description of Alexander Eckstein papers, 1943-1976. (University of Michigan). WorldCat record id: 34420176

Alexander Eckstein, born December 9, 1915 in Novisad, Yugoslavia, came to the United States as a student in 1936. In 1939, he received his B. S. from the University of California at Berkeley in plant science. He continued his graduate work at Berkeley, studying agricultural economics, and earning his M. S. in 1941 and his Ph.D. in 1952.

On December 6, 1943 Alexander Eckstein became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He served overseas in the U. S. Army from 1943 to 1946, interrogating German prisoners and analyzing captured documents. After the War, Eckstein married Ruth Rubinstein (February 21, 1947).

From 1946 until 1949, Eckstein worked as an economist for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. At the same time, he worked on finishing his dissertation, "The Economic Development of Hungary, 1920 to 1950: A Study in the Growth of an Economically Underdeveloped Area." During 1949-1950, he was appointed Area Research Fellow for the Social Science Research Council, and from 1951-1953, he worked as a senior economist for the Department of State.

In 1953, Eckstein was a lecturer and research associate at Harvard's Russian Research Center. Though he then specialized in comparative economic studies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Eckstein was also becoming increasingly involved in Chinese studies in 1956, be became a lecturer and research associate in the Department of Economics at Harvard, while he plunged into studying China and the Chinese economy. In 1959 he went to Formosa (Taiwan) to Put the finishing touches on his command of the Chinese language.

Upon his return to the United States, Eckstein was named the Haloid-Xerox Professor of International Economics at the University of Rochester. He taught in this position until 1961, when he came to the University of Michigan as a Professor of Economics. He remained at the University of Michigan until his death in 1976. During this period, Eckstein was simultaneously a consultant to the Department of State (1962-1976), Director of the Center for Chinese Studies (1967-1969) and Director of the Chinese Economic Studies project (1975-1976).

Eckstein included among his professional and honorary society memberships the American Economic Association, the Association for Asian Studies (Director, 1961/62 - 1963/64; Program Chairman, 1964; Member of Executive Group, Committee on American Library Resources on the Far East, 1963-1964), the Association for Comparative Economics, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Economic History Association and the Economic History Society. He was also active in a number of national organizations, most notably the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR). From 1966 to 1976 he was a member and a Board member of the Executive Committee of the NCUSCR. He was Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors, in 1968-1969, and Chairman from 1970 to 1972. Eckstein was on the Editorial Board of the magazines World Politics and The China Quarterly. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Board for the National Council for United States-China Trade.

During the last ten years of his life, Eckstein was a part of the Committee on Scholarly Exchanges with the People's Republic of China. For the Social Science Research Council, he served with the Joint Committee for the Study of Contemporary China (also sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies), 1959-1966, and the Committee on the Economy of china, 1961-1969. His other affiliations included the Visiting Committees for the Brookings Institution and Harvard University, the International Committee for Chinese Studies, the Association for the Study of Soviet-Type Economies, and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (of which he was the President in 1974).

In addition to this multitude of professional activity, Eckstein was a prolific author. His own books include The National Income of China (1961), Communist China's Economic Growth and Foreign Trade (1966), China's Economic Development: The Interplay of Scarcity and Ideology (1975), and China's Economic Revolution (1977, published posthumously). He co-authored two books - Prospects for Communist China (1954, with W. W. Hatch, J. R. Kierman, and W. W. Rostow) and Moscow-Peking Axis (1957, with Boorman, Mosely and Schwartz). He was the editor of Economic Trends in Communist China (1968, with Walter Galenson and T. C. Liu), Comparison of Economic Systems: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches (197l), China Trade Prospects and U. S. Policy (1971) and Quantitative Measures of China's Economic Output (1980, published posthumously). He also wrote numerous articles.

Since he believed that Communist China would become a permanent and powerful nation-state on the world scene, Eckstein was an advocate of initiating more cordial relations with the People's Republic of China from an early date. Through his involvement in the NCUSCR, Eckstein played an important role in arranging the visit of the Chinese Table Tennis Team which cleared the way for Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon's historic flights to Peking in 1972. Once the first contact had been established, he continued to work for expanded exchanges between the United States and China, not only in athletics, but also in trade, and scholarly and cultural matters.

Having witnessed the disruption of Chinese studies in the United States during the McCarthy era, Eckstein was concerned about educating a new generation of China scholars. This was the motivation behind his interest in the establishment and maintenance of centers for Chinese research, not only at the University of Michigan but at other universities as well.

His work on China led Eckstein to take a public stand on the Vietnam War. Although he was by no means a dove, he was an outspoken critic of President Johnson's Vietnam policy. Together with several other Michigan professors, many of them also in the China field, Eckstein began a study group on Vietnam. On several occasions he gave testimony before different Congressional committees, and from 1966-1968, he was a member of the State Department Advisory Panel on China.

As a public-spirited man, Eckstein was an active campaigner for Donald M. Riegle and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. He took an interest in the case of Robert Williams, a Black activist accused of kidnapping a White couple. And within the University, he served as a member of the Faculty Reform Coalition, which was primarily concerned with the quality of education received by minority students at Michigan.

Alexander Eckstein died of a heart attack at age sixty-one on December 5, 1976. Through his work, both academic and political, he was an influential force behind the improved relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, and was a significant figure in furthering the study of China in this country.

From the guide to the Alexander Eckstein Papers, 1943-1976, (Bentley Historical Library University of Michigan)