Papers presented by Dan Du since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Behind the Teacup: Transforming Joint-Stock Corporations to Reform China’s Tea Economy, 1881-1911"

Abstract:

This paper investigates how Chinese merchants and officials adopted and adapted joint-stock corporations to reform China’s tea economy during the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), an organization initiative which previous scholarship mentions only in passing. To revive China’s withering global tea trade, Chinese merchants and officials proposed to form joint-stock corporations from the 1880s. The term, corporation, was translated into gongsi 公司, which was a financial and social organization to pool monetary and human resources within Chinese local communities. Thus, this conceptualization emphasized the role of joint-stock corporations in serving public interest. Driven by the collective turn, these reformers attempted to form business trusts –so-called “American capitalism” or “monopoly capitalism” –-to centralize tea production and sales. However, their monopolies were based upon the model of the tea guild, a voluntary and self-regulatory trading association among Chinese tea merchants. Moreover, most tea reformers welcomed the government into their enterprises to form the largest trust possible, thus employing joint-stock corporations to retrieve China’s liquan 利權in the global commercial war and to combat the colonization of China. Transforming the ancient concept, liquan, from a term emphasizing “wealth and power” to a synonym of economic right, Chinese reformers integrated joint-stock corporations with the ethos of economic nationalism prevalent in China during the late nineteenth century. Even though most of the efforts were abortive, Qing reformers’ emphasis on collective and centralized management of joint-stock corporations facilitated the nationalization of tea companies during the Republican and Communist eras. Thus, this research is another work that portrays modern reforms in China, including the so-called “State Capitalism” model, as not only a consequence of external influences but also a legacy of Chinese history itself.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"From Canton to the Coast: Reinventing the China-U.S. Tea Trade after the Opium War"

Abstract:

This paper examines how Chinese and American merchants restructured the China-U.S. tea trade and its financial structure after the Opium War (1839-1842). Since the initiation of the direct tea trade between the United States and China in 1784, Americans had grown to be the second largest importer of tea from China. After the Opium War ended the Canton Trade System, which confined Euro-American traders in a single port, Canton, more Chinese trading ports, known as “Treaty Ports,” were open to foreign merchants. While British traders controlled the black tea markets in the Treaty Ports, Americans dominated the green and Oolong tea ports. The changing landscape of the tea trade also reshaped the measures to finance the transactions. Different from the stereotype of China’s foreign trade as a primitive system which relied primarily on silver or barter payments, this research highlights a sophisticated credit system that had buttressed the China-U.S. tea trade since the early nineteenth century. American and Chinese merchants employed credit instruments—promissory notes and bills of exchange—which were conventionally defined as techniques of capitalism to facilitate their de facto transactions. The Panic of 1837, the Opium War, and the unfamiliar Treaty Ports jeopardized merchants’ confidence in each other, so Chinese and American traders resorted to silver and the barter economy during the immediate postwar years. However, adapting to the new trading environment, Chinese merchant‑bankers issued newly invented promissory notes, named zhuangpiao, and native bills of exchange to streamline the transactions. Meanwhile, American companies employed the checks issued by their Chinese employees, known as “Compradors’ Orders,” to pay Chinese tea sellers. Hence, the notes, bills, and checks reconstructed the credit economy of the tea trade and formed a coastal exchange market across the growing number of trading ports in China in the latter half of the century.

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

"Black Gold and White Gold: Weaving a Global Network through the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1815-1842"

Abstract:

The research explores the collaboration of Chinese and American traders in the global tea trade and Asia’s secondary monetary market, which eventually led to the First Sino-British Opium War (1839-1842). The United States was the second largest importer of tea from China in the nineteenth century. To settle their account balances or pay for tea, U.S. traders became the major suppliers of silver from South America to China. However, the rise of opium smuggling between India and China from the late 1820s gave Americans a new way of raising funds, because a secondary monetary market grew in Asia as demand soared from British-Indian merchants for more bills of exchange to remit their proceeds from opium sales back to India and Britain. With the endorsement of prominent Chinese merchants, American traders sold millions of dollars’ worth of bills—generated in the trans-Atlantic cotton trade or issued by the Bank of the United States—in Asia, thus dramatically reducing their shipments of silver to China. The structural change in the Chinese-American tea trade, which inflated the American economy and aggravated the silver drain on China, resulted in the Panic of 1837 in the United States, Chinese merchants’ bankruptcies in Canton, and the Qing government’s crackdown on opium, thus providing another stepping stone for the First Opium War in 1839. The development of the secondary monetary market and the breakout of the war, therefore, demonstrate that late imperial China had already been tightly interwoven into global financial and commercial networks before the Opium War.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"Black Gold and White Gold: Weaving a Global Network through the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1815-1842"

Abstract:

This research explores how the engagement of Chinese and American traders in the commodity and monetary markets reshaped the financial structure of China’s international tea trade and eventually led to the First Sino-British Opium War (1839-1842). To procure tea from China, American traders searched the world for goods suitable for the Canton market. However, until the 1830s, specie from South America remained the major U.S. export to China for American merchants to settle account balance or pay for tea. From the late 1820s, nevertheless, the thriving opium smuggling and cotton trade between India and China gave American merchants, the major provider of silver to China, a new way of gathering specie, as the British-Indian merchants’ demand soared for more bills of exchange to remit their proceeds from opium back to India and Britain. With prominent Chinese merchants’ endorsement, American traders sold millions of dollars’ worth of bills, generated in the trans-Atlantic cotton trade or issued by the Bank of the United States, in China, India, or Southeast Asia and reduced the shipment of specie to China. The structural change in U.S. exports to China aggravated the silver drain originally produced by opium smuggling, resulting in Chinese government’s crackdown on opium and the First Opium War in the 1830s. By tracing the flow of tea, opium, cotton, and bills of exchange through China, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States, this research disentangles how the commercial and financial networks, created by the collaboration of individual merchants, linked the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans.

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