Project No. 30

Researcher

Project summary

As part of the core project "Monies, Markets, and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600-1900: Local, Regional, National, and International Dimensions" the Institute of Chinese Studies (University of Heidelberg) investigates the social, institutional, financial and transnational dimensions of the emerging modern Chinese credit institutions that were to replace the traditional banks. The research question will be whether and to what degree the stature and status of foreigners in China at the end of the nineteenth century was instrumental in certifying and securing the creditworthiness of Chinese and foreign loan takers - including private companies and the Chinese state - on the Chinese market. The cases studied will be credit associations pro tempore as the one set up by the Shenbaoguan publishing company in the early 1880s to prefinance the publication of the huge Gujin tushu jicheng, the handling of the first Chinese government loans in the Shanghai market to finance the Xinjiang campaign, and the link between credit and credibility in the most basic form of credit voucher, the foreign currency in use in Shanghai transactions during this period. The project will offer a critical counter text to the twentieth-century master narrative of growing "patriotic" Chinese resistance to foreigners before 1900.

State of the field. Historical studies on the history of the new Shanghai banks (Collis 1965, King 1983, 1987, Ji Zhaojin 2003) have provided solid documentary background on some of the banking institutions. Studies on the traditional banks (McElderry 1976, Zhang 1989) have provided contrast. The Xinjiang campaign in turn has been studied mostly as a military enterprise that had implications for Chinese-Russian relations. No studies have dealt with the link between credibility, credit and foreigners in the period under question. On the new ways of raising funds, such as the Shenbaoguan scheme, not even the basic record of facts has been established.

Own preliminary research. Generally speaking, the applicant has for years done work on nineteenth century cultural, military, and social history. (Wagner 1981, 1984a, 1884b, 1993, 1995, 1998). At present, he is supervising a doctoral dissertation on the Jinchuan campaigns in the late eighteenth century. In particular, the applicant has for several years been working on the role of Ernest Major, the manager of the Shenbaoguan and one of the most respected foreigners in Shanghai between 1872 and 1890 (Wagner 1999a, 1999b, 2001a, 2001b, 2002). A number of books and articles written by young scholars of the Heidelberg research team have helped to establish a good basic record for the Shenbao newspaper as well as the Dianshizhai huabao, both of which were published by the Shenbaoguan (Vittinghoff 2002, Janku 2003, Mittler 2004). Studies on Major himself and the overall role of the Shenbaoguan have been mostly done by the applicant himself. At the core of these studies is the part played by foreigners such as Major in the formation of a modern Chinese public sphere. At the same time, the Shenbaoguan was a highly successful business enterprise that pioneered the raising of funds among Chinese customers for huge projects. Major was also instrumental in several ways to establish the credibility for foreigners in financial matters.

Relevance of the topic and research questions. Foreigners have been largely deleted from a China-centred history of late imperial China and relegated to the role of external aggressors. To accommodate the return of foreign investors to China, PRC historians have been advised to selectively rewrite the historical role of foreigners. The works of this new line while appearing to have brought to light important new archival sources remains as locked in a particular political agenda as their predecessors. By rigidly adhering to the historical records, and not to later rewritings of history, this study will be at the intersection between financial and cultural history and will challenge the underlying methodology of the studies dealing with the role of the Treaty Ports in nineteenth-century China.

Sources. Sources are primarily the North China Herald, the North China Daily News, the Celestial Empire, the Shenbao, the Shanghai consulate's files in the Public Record Office, and the collected works of some of the people involved, above all Zuo Zongtang himself. For the formation of the master narrative about foreign/Chinese relations various Chinese-language histories of Shanghai will be used.

Methods. Cultural practices with regard to money and finance will be studied on the basis of unwitting information contained in news and memoirs about foreigners in Shanghai. These data will be integrated with those available from strictly financial records about banking institutions and loan schedules. A comparison with similar processes in Yokohama and Calcutta will be made. For the master narrative, rules of discourse will be extracted both from Party directives and from present-day histories.

Expected results. Creditworthiness largely hinges on social perception, and social perception in turn hinges on past performance, self-presentation, and prejudice. To arrive at an understanding of the Chinese/foreign interaction during the second half of the nineteenth century hardly an area is better suited than that of financial credibility, and the practices resulting from it. A preliminary check would suggest that creditworthiness of foreigners in general during this period was considered by Chinese to be vastly superior to that of other Chinese. The goal of the project is to find the ingredients that went into this image of the foreigners, and to analyse its consequences not only in the all-pervasive use of the "chit" (promissory note to be cashed in at the office for items as small as a Rickshaw ride) but also in the area of high finance.