Japanese Colonial Finance and Early Chinese Stock Exchanges
The first Chinese stock exchange in Shanghai was established in 1920. The next year saw the formation of more than 140 additional Shanghai stock exchanges (with more in other cities). Most would not survive the year. This talk examines the British and especially Japanese colonial backstory for this financial bubble.
Speaker: Bryna Goodman, Professor Emerita in the History Department at the University of Oregon; IIAS Visiting Researcher.
This lecture will be held in the IIAS Conference Room from 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Amsterdam Time/CEST (not online).
All are welcome; please register as seating is limited.
The Lecture
Chinese stock exchange law (first promulgated in 1914) and Chinese stock exchanges themselves, took shape amid European and Japanese imperial ventures in China. These included an array of implanted financial institutions on Chinese soil, including extraterritorial land (primarily Japanese) colonial stock exchanges, established between the years 1905 and 1945. Many of these Japanese stock exchanges were established in Japanese colonial leasehold territory in Northeast China; others were established in the key commercial ports of Shanghai, Hankou, Tianjin and Guangzhou. These unusual and little-studied extraterritorial stock exchanges— and the counterpoised Chinese concerns to protect the Chinese economy that they aroused—were foundational to Chinese ideas of finance and the establishment of competing Chinese stock exchanges. The early history of Chinese stock exchanges should thus be understood in the twin frameworks of Japanese imperial financial ventures and a politics of Chinese resistance to Japan. A single-city or purely national, economic, or financial analysis of Chinese stock exchange formation would miss this crucial context. This talk sketches the entanglement of Japanese and Chinese stock exchanges in the interstices of empire and offers an overview of some of the characteristics of Japanese colonial deployment of stock exchanges in China based on Japanese archives and Chinese materials.
The Speaker
Bryna Goodman is Professor Emerita in the History Department at the University of Oregon. Author of Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853- 1937 (University of California, 1995) and The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic (Harvard University Press, 2021); co-editor of Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World (Routledge, 2012). She is writing a book about economics and the imagination of China as a republic. This project examines understandings of finance and financial institutions that emerged amid concerns about sovereignty, risk, economic rationality and citizenship in the context of European and Japanese colonial ventures in China and the formation of a new Chinese republic.
Registration (required)
All are welcome, but please register via the web form on this page as seating is limited.