Abstract

"Colonial Finance and Co-Creation of Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Stock Exchanges"

Bryna Goodman, University of Oregon (bgoodman@uoregon.edu)

Prior to the 1920 emergence of Chinese stock exchanges, multiple and competing colonial
financial institutions operated across the Chinese landscape, in semicolonial treaty ports
and in colonized spaces like Manchuria. Studies of colonialism and capitalism that have
addressed the stock exchange have largely focused on exchanges in the metropole.
Researchers have only just begun to recognize colonialism as a force for the extraterritorial
implantation of the exchange, facilitating its globalization. By focusing on the European
metropole or extraterritorial exchanges designed to integrate colonial economies with,
notably, London, studies have overlooked imperial Japan. But after the Russo-Japanese
War, Japan ventured into a distinctive colonial deployment of stock exchanges in China.
This paper highlights the local and global politics underlying exchange formation in China,
highlighting the spread of Japanese colonial exchanges on Chinese territory (1906- 1945),
not long after the formalization of a Shanghai British stock exchange in 1905. Although
Chinese investments on this British exchange facilitated preliminary habituation to the
institution (and the exchange-borne “rubber bubble” of 1910), Japanese financial
imperialism more deeply shaped Chinese exchange formation, as the urgent nationalist
imperative to create competitive Chinese institutions necessitated contradictory reliance
on Japanese advisers, partners, and capital (despite the anti-Japanese sentiments that
informed their creation). Meiji law served the drafting of Chinese exchange laws; Japanese
teachers ran training classes for Chinese exchange employees, and Japanese economic
advisors advocated a Japanese exchange business model as better suited to the cultural
and credit environments of Japan and China than Euro-American forms. This inquiry, based
on Japanese Ministry of Foreign A]airs Archives and Chinese and Japanese reportage,
details the non-economic political motives, deceptions, friction, and collaborations that
infused the Japanese exchanges and those of their Chinese counterparts, and some of the
problems that ensued.