Monnaie, crédit, finances en Chine de 1840 à 1937

Abstract

Money, credit and financial issues in China from 1840 to 1937 The issues related to money, finance, credit and banks in China's history deserve to be examined in the context of current Asian crises. China's position in these different mechanisms is quite original, given that international historians and economists are willing to consider this country as the cradle of money, both coins and notes, in old times, before those years when western currency developments took place. Public financial issues are, on the contrary, very different because they do not really appear in the state model before the XIXth Century. Finally, foreign exchange remained almost absent from the Chinese system until the beginning of the XXth Century. But, the main aspects of Chinese financial and money model descriptions in this article deal particularly with very sensitive evolutions between 1840 and 1937, including foreign interventions, monetary and banking reforms and economic reconstruction projects. The sequence of political regimes in this period has significantly modified, generally in a positive way, the financial system organisation in China until the Sino-Japanese war of 1937.