Xiao-Li confirmed that they didn’t like Bayes in China (or at least in Shanghai) when he was a student. He writes:
Yes, I do [remember], and it’s no laughing matter then!
What happened was that the notion of “prior”
contradicted one of Mao’s quotation
“truth comes out of empirical/practical evidence”
(my translation is not perfect, but you
can get the essence) — and anything
contradicts what Mao said was banned!
Do any other Chinese statisticians have stories like this?
Hi, Andrew,
You know, things change. At least, when I was in Peking University, I learned something about Bayes, although not that systematically. I took a course called "statistical computing", which actually taught us from general Bayesian rules to EM & MCMC algorithms. The course was taught by one of the professors in statistics department in Peking University who does research in Bayes, even causal inference. Also, in department of management of Peking University, Professor Junni Zhang (you might know her, who was a former Statistics PhD in Harvard) also does research in Bayes. In history, around 1980s-1990s, Chinese don't like Bayes because of the reason Prof. Xiao-Li said. But now, things are changing, at least in Peking University.