Rethinking Debt in Modern China: Chinese Foreign and Domestic Debt from the Late Qing Dynasty to the War of Resistance

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The institutional development of public debt has long been recognized as an important part of modern state-building. However, China’s use of public debt before 1949 has so far mainly been viewed as part of either imperialist exploitation or failed domestic fiscal policies of successive Chinese governments. This panel proposes to reframe this narrative by looking at the issue of public debt from a global perspective that stresses the role both local agency and international flows of capital and knowledge played in its institutional development in modern China.
Li Wenjie discusses how early Chinese bonds issued on foreign markets acted as models for China’s first domestic bond issuance in 1898. Ghassan Moazzin shows that increased Chinese reliance on foreign debt meant that by 1911 foreign capital markets became pivotal for the outcome of political events in China. Matthew Lowenstein studies how Chinese warlords attempted to use local public debt to establish independent financial regimes in the pre-war period. Lawrence Ho explores how the breakdown of Chinese public finance during the War of Resistance led to renewed interest in using foreign capital. Collectively, these papers argue that the institutional development of public debt in China was an important part of larger Chinese efforts to use and adapt new institutions of public finance and build a modern fiscal state during China’s transition from empire to nation. This panel suggests that an understanding of China’s historical experience with public debt is essential for comprehending its more recent re-engagement with global and domestic capital markets.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Ghassan Moazzin, University of Cambridge

Chair

• Brett Sheehan, University of Southern California

Individual Presentations

• Financial Crisis and the Birth of Domestic Debt in the Late Qing Dynasty - Wenjie Li, East China Normal University

• Investing in the New Republic: International Finance and the 1911 Revolution in China - Ghassan Moazzin, University of Cambridge

• Sichuan's Money: Wars, Panics, and the Evolution of Public Debt and Currency in Liu Xiang’s Chongqing, 1930-1935 - Matthew Lowenstein, University of Chicago

• Aligning China with the United States: The Tin Loan and China’s War of Resistance, 1939-1940 - Lawrence Ho, Independent Scholar

Discussant

• Elisabeth Kaske, Carnegie Mellon University