A History of modern shanghai banking: the rise and decline of China's finance capitalism

To attempt a 260 page summary of the history of the Chinese and foreign banks in
Shanghai over a whole century (1842-1952) is an extremely ambitious project.
This was a historical epoch dominated by complex financial and monetary structures,
and agitated by political developments civil and foreign wars, imperialist penetration,
nationalist reactions and revolutionary crisess - , an epoch which appears as both a phase in China's
modernisation and an
episode in the expansion of international capital. As a work of synthesis, Li Zhaojin's
study successfully encompasses all the aspects of this history,
which is narrated in a clear, but necessarily succinct form.
There are nine chapters which start from the birth of the qianzhuang (traditional banks) in the eighteenth century, moving on to the establishment and rapid rise of the foreign banks (mostly British) after the Opium Wars, the efforts of the governments in Peking and Chinese entrepreneurs to meet the challenge by setting up modern banks of their own, the intervention of new players on the scene (the Japanese and the Americans) during the First World War, the Chiang Kai-shek governments policy of control between 1937 and 1945, the collapse of the Nationalist financial system, and finally the nationalisation of the Chinese banks and the elimination of foreign institutions after the revolution of 1949.