In the past 70 years, the emergence and development of China's consumption economics and its disciplines have always been accompanied by the pace of China's economic development and reform and opening up, along with the changes of the national economic development strategy and economic growth mode, and closely linked with the changes in the contribution status and role of the troika of "export, investment and consumption" to economic growth.
1. Review of the development of consumption economics
From the beginning of the founding of the people's Republic of China to the 1960s of the last century, China's consumption economics is in the stage of quietly budding. Due to the long-term adoption of the mode of "high accumulation and low consumption", coupled with the influence of the political and economic environment at that time and the economic theoretical system of the Soviet Union, the academic circles also had the guiding ideology of "attaching importance to production and neglecting consumption", and the research on consumption problem was ignored. Of course, there are also a few scholars who have courage to discuss consumption directly or indirectly from the perspective of political economy. They admit that consumption can promote production, but deny that consumption is the premise of economic operation. In the ten years of the cultural revolution, consumption was criticized as welfarism and revisionism, and the problem of consumption economy became the forbidden area of research and was deliberately avoided.
2. Problems in the development of consumption economics
As a discipline developed with the reform and opening up, consumption economics has made a series of achievements, but as a new discipline, it has to admit that there are still many deficiencies. At present, the basic theory of consumption economics is weak, and the construction of discipline system and theoretical system needs to be further improved. In the early 1980s and 1990s of the discipline construction, a large number of scholars conducted beneficial exploration on the basic principles based on the Marxist consumption theory. But later, the research on the applied countermeasures concerning a specific problem in the field of consumption has become more and more mainstream. With the extensive use of empirical methods, the principle paradigm of western economics has been more and more absorbed. In recent years, the basic theoretical research of consumption economics, especially the basic theoretical research of Marxist paradigm, has been relatively lagging behind. After nearly 40 years of development, China's consumption economics has formed its own series of discipline context, academic category and unique laws, but because of its multiple attributes of economy, society and culture, consumption economics, consumption sociology, consumption psychology, consumption statistics, consumption behavior science and other disciplines are the research objects, which are interdisciplinary integration The research perspectives, methods and contents of consumption economics are similar to those of other disciplines such as sociology, marketing, psychology and so on. This trend is not conducive to the development of consumer economics.
3. Prospect of consumption economics
Since this century, the political and academic circles have increasingly recognized the status and role of consumption in the national economy, and paid more and more attention to the issue of consumption. The changes of the main social contradictions in the new era also put forward higher and new requirements for consumption research. With the further research on consumption, the research scope and content of consumption economics will be more clearly distinguished. It is imperative to separate from "industrial economics" and become an independent new secondary discipline. In particular, the continuous escalation of Sino US trade war and the resistance and exclusion of China's rise by the developed countries led by the United States have made the external environment of China's development full of uncertainty and antagonism. We need to rely more on tapping domestic demand potential, boosting consumer confidence and expanding domestic consumer market. We need to carry out a series of reform and combination measures from the supply side and the demand side to promote consumption growth 。 All of these need the guidance of scientific consumption economics theory, the judgment of new consumption trend in theory, and the elimination of the obstacles of consumption upgrading and consumption pulling. Under the new historical conditions, we should have a clear and accurate understanding of the historical tasks of consumer economy, grasp the current development opportunities, and give full play to the theoretical leading role of consumption economics. To revive the status and role of the mainstream discipline of consumer economics, we need to make efforts in many ways
