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Money for Empire: The Yokohama Specie Bank Monetary Emissions Before and After the May Fourth (Wusi) Boycott of 1919*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

NIV HORESH
NIV HORESH*
Affiliation:
University of Western Sydney, Australia Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Over the last three decades, a considerable body of English-language academic work has shed much light on Japan's empire-building project in Greater China during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Japanese-language studies of the country's pre-war financial history have also grown in leaps and bounds. Yet, to date, neither body of literature seems to have fully examined what might appear to the naked eye as one of the critical pre-war junctures, where Japanese financial history converged on imperial policy and Chinese nationalist responses thereto.1 This paper will therefore aim to fill part of the gap by examining how the Yokohama Specie Bank, arguably the backbone of Japanese finance in China Proper, was affected by Chinese anti-foreign boycotts throughout the pre-war era (1842–1937).

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , July 2013 , pp. 1377 - 1402
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank Professor Richard Burdekin, Professor Gregory Evon, Ms Mayumi Shinozaki and two anonymous MAS readers for their insightful suggestions concerning earlier versions of this paper.

References

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14 NCH, 23 May 1908, p. 479.

15 NCH, 21 Oct 1911, p. 153.

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17 SOAS, Imperial Maritime Customs [hereafter, IMC] Decennial Reports for 1919–21, p. 63.

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21 Shōhyō no rekishi: beki tsuka no ichishiryō toshite, pp. 5–8.

22 Michael Schiltz, Japan's Money Doctors and the Gold-Yen Bloc, Chapter 4.

23 Taira Tomoyuki, ‘Nihon teikoku shugi seiritsuki, chūgoku ni okeru Yokohama shōkin ginkō’, in Tōkyō daigaku keizaigaku kenkyū. Taira's view is supported by Wray, William, ‘Japan's big-three service enterprises in China, 1896–1936’, in The Japanese informal empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H., Mark, R. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton, 1989), pp. 31–64, 44–47Google Scholar.

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25 Guo Yuqing, Jindai Riben yinhang zai Hua jinrong huodong: Hengbin zhengjin yinhang, 1894–1919, pp. 189, 191.

26 On the ‘chop loan’ and the 1910–12 financial crisis in Shanghai—see McElderry, Andrea Lee, Shanghai Old- style Banks (Ch'ien- Chuang), 1800–1925: A Traditional Institution in a Changing Society (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1976)Google Scholar; Shizuya, Nishimura, ‘The Foreign and Native Banks in China: Chop Loans in Shanghai and Hankow before 1914’, in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 39, issue 1 (2005), pp. 109–132Google Scholar.

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33 Sant ō shuppei to hai nikka undō [The Shandong Expedition and Anti-Japanese Boycott] (Shanghai: Shanhai Nihon Shōgyo kaigisho, 1927).

34 Tsūshō kōhō issues for 16 June 1919 (Changchun); 17 July 1919 (Zhifu).

35 Japan Centre for Asian Historical Records, intelligence report dated 20 November 1919, Reel no. 1–0517, folio 0273. On the longer-term Japanese mercantile anxiety that the May Fourth boycott unleashed, see also Junji, Banno, ‘Japanese Industrialists and Merchants and the Anti-Japanese Boycotts in China, 1919–1928’, in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H. and Peattie, Mark R. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 314–317Google Scholar. However, Banno does not discuss the impact of boycotts specifically on banking.

36 Fung, Edmund S. K., The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain's South China Policy, 1924–1931 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 44Google Scholar.

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42 Niv Horesh, Shanghai's Bund and Beyond: British Banks, Banknote Issuance and Monetary Policy in China, 1842–1937, Chapter 4.

43 The boycott of Japanese-issued notes re-awakened in 1923 in response to Japan's refusal to waive its territorial claims in Northeast China. See NCH, 14 April 1923, p. 81.

44 See, for example, an article by Arthur Sowerby, a member of the Shanghai branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in NCH, 8 August 1925, p. 1925; Dorothy J. Orchard, ‘China's Use of the Boycott as a Political Weapon’, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science— China, p. 256.

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46 Yokohama shōkin ginkō zenshi, vol. II, p. 360, 385. The YSB may have tried to increase its Hankou circulation in the early 1920s in order to offset the fall in demand in Shanghai.

47 Yokohama shōkin ginkō zenshi, vol. I, p. 336.

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51 Share price data compiled from Meiji taishō kokusei sōran [An Overview of Meiji and Taisho-era Official Statistics] (Tokyo: Tōyō keizai shimposha, 1975), p. 315.

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53 NCH, 24 May 1919 pp. 507, 598.

54 NCH, 7 February 1920, p. 374.

55 NCH, 4 January 1919, p. 30. Monday's run on the Bank of Taiwan was thought to have resulted in ‘less than $25.000 of its notes’ and about half the amount in YSB silver dollar notes cashed.

56 Niv Horesh, Shanghai's Bund and Beyond: British Banks, Banknote Issuance and Monetary Policy in China, 1842–1937, Chapter 4.