Abstract: Abstract: The construction of China’s independent knowledge system of economics is both a mission of the times and an academic challenge. This paper takes Wang Yanan’s economic research as its subject, and systematically reviews his academic approach to applying Marxist political economy to China’s economic reality, focusing on how to grasp reality systematically, how to extract indigenous categories from reality, and how to support these two processes with methodological self-awareness. Taking the “specificity of categories” as his starting point, Wang Yanan revealed the structural characteristics of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal economy through the negative identification of Chinese forms of commodities, capital, rent, wages, and so on. He achieved a fundamental shift from mechanically applying existing theories to extracting original categories and discovering inherent laws. The combined use of the comparative, comprehensive, and developmental methods he advocated is inherently consistent with the retroductive analysis of critical realism at a deep methodological level. Furthermore, his emphasis on and integrated application of the “trinity” of political economy, economic historiography, and China’s economic history established a research paradigm of “theory-history-reality”, which transcends the opposition between “historical detail studies” and “persistence studies” in contemporary economics and historical studies. Wang Yanan’s methodological legacy still provides important insights for the contemporary construction of China’s independent knowledge system of economics.

Key words: Wang Yanan, specificity of categories, Sinicization of Marxist economics, critical realism, independent knowledge system