Zi Yang

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: The article explores what transparency ought to be in the context of the contemporary UK financial regulatory system, against soaring social inequality and the emergence of blockchain innovation. By asking transparency to whom and for what, the article distinguishes transparency from information disclosure. It criticises the UK financial regulatory system for being hijacked information disclosure both before and after the Financial Crisis of 2008. As a notion of transparency, information disclosure suits regulators and market participants’ pursuing of efficiency. But it also feeds into the excessive speculative culture and leads to excessive concentration of information, wealth, and power in financial intermediaries. This excessive inequality caused the Financial Crisis of 2008 and is still dividing the society. Looking back into history, transparency was strongly associated with morality. The Pujo Report 1912 unveiled the Money Trust in the US stock market, hence, called for people to take actions against banks’ unfair exploitation. Similarly, in Benedict v Ratner, Judge Brandeis challenged off-balance sheet accounting, thus ensuring fairness in distribution of wealth among creditors. These historical notions suggest that transparency can serve a higher purpose of easing the concentration of information, wealth, and power in society. Nevertheless, historical transparency reforms failed to keep the public informed and unified in the long-term. This article argues that social media and de-centralised blockchain technology could overcome these obstacles by sharing knowledge, decision-making power and access to investment with the public. Thus, technology innovation contains the seed for achieving transparency to the public in contemporary financial market. However, it is also undeniable that the public’s involvement in investments is highly speculative. This article argues that such speculation mimics the excessive speculative culture in the traditional financial market, which highlights the urgency to change the narrowed focus on efficiency and embrace transparency to the public.

2026 London

Abstract: Using co-creation as an analytical framework, this paper examines how HSBC’s institutional identity developed through asymmetrical yet interactive engagements among British founders, colonial administrators, and Chinese employees and customers. Founded in 1865 amid British imperial expansion into Asia and the rise of Chinese commercial enterprise, HSBC emerged as both a creation and an agent of cross-cultural financial exchange. Originating as a financial arm of empire, the bank evolved into an intermediary linking Chinese commerce and British finance, and later redefined itself within the shifting landscape of decolonisation and global capitalism. This paper traces HSBC’s transnational evolution across three historical stages: the imperial stage, when the bank operated within the hierarchies of empire; the cosmopolitan stage, when it served as a financial conduit between Chinese markets and British capital; and the postcolonial stage, when its identity was reconstituted through the negotiation of multiple sovereignties, regulatory regimes, and cultural expectations within an increasingly fragmented global order. Building on this three-stage analysis, the paper addresses two interrelated questions. First, how did HSBC’s material and visual archive—including its architectural design, iconography, and corporate symbolism—reflect and reinforce processes of co-creation across different historical moments? Second, in what ways were these processes reshaped through the participation of Chinese staff in corporate governance and managerial practice, and of Chinese customers in influencing the bank’s market orientation and commercial networks? These inquiries reveal the evolving forms of collaboration, adaptation, and negotiation that shaped HSBC’s institutional development. Ultimately, the paper reconsiders HSBC not merely as a British institution operating in Asia but as a hybrid banking enterprise co-created across cultural, economic, and political boundaries.