Myth and Reality in Chinese Financial Cliques in 1936

BRETT SHEEHAN

Much of current scholarly work argues that China and Chinese communities are distinguished by a culturally specific and unique pattern of networking based on personal relations (guanxi), but there is little agreement about whether such personal relations produce discrete factions or more disbursed, weblike connections. The literature on banking networks is similarly unclear, and most discussion has focused on regional groups, such as a clique made up of natives from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, or shared professional values among bankers. None of these approaches adequately describes actual connections, and this case study provides a new and empirically broad approach that applies tools of network analysis to interlocking bank directorships in 1936. This analysis shows the existence of twenty-four isolated banks; three very small, discrete, and regionally based groups; and one huge, diffuse, and weblike bank network that included virtually all Chinese bank assets and extended to most of China’s economically developed regions. This network had a multicenter core made up of densely linked large banks and a number of small start-ups associated with prominent individuals. Diffuse connections also characterized networks of individual bankers, though dense ties existed either among the most important bankers who each sat on numerous boards of directors (suggesting associations based on business ties, professional interests, and the importance of banks) or among

© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/es/khi058 BRETT SHEEHAN is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Contact information: Department of History, 455 N. Park Street, Humanities 3211, Madison, WI 53706, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

This article has been made possible by grants from the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the research assistance of Ta-chi Wang. The comments of Madeleine Zelin and others at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in San Diego in 2004 were very helpful. I am also indebted to Andrea McElderry, who generously shared her research on bank networks with me.

452 Chinese Financial Cliques 453

individuals who shared common native place, defined at the level of adjacent counties (suggesting the simultaneous existence of strong but very local guanxi ties). In the end, bank networks arose as much from historical contingency as from cultural predisposition.

Much of the scholarly work on China and Chinese communities suggests that a specific kind of network based on personal relations lies at the heart of economic, social, and political life. In this view Chinese society is distinguished by a culturally specific and unique pattern of networking based on personal relations, what the Chinese call guanxi. These guanxi relations arise from “common shared attributes,” such as “local- ity (native place), kinship, coworker, classmate, sworn brotherhood, surname, and teacher-student,” or from a process of cultivating mutual obligations through patronage or the exchange of gifts and banquets.1 In spite of broad agreement in the literature about the importance of personal relations on Chinese organization, there is little agreement on exactly what Chinese networks look like. On the one hand, there is the strong suggestion that networks based on guanxi result in discrete subgroups: cliques, factions, business groups, kinship lineages, or family firms, for example.2 In this vein, Andrew J. Nathan has pro- duced the most formal model of network shapes that followed lines of patronage. In his model, each faction is generally discrete, and there are few horizontal linkages between factions as illustrated by the two factions (F1 and F2) on the left side of figure 1.3 This conceptualization is a

1. Ambrose Yeo-chi King, “Kuan-hsi [guanxi] and Network Building,” Daedalus 120 (Spring 1991): 63–84, reprinted in Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspec- tives on Business and Management, ed. R. Ampalavanar Brown, 4 vols. (London, 1996), 2: 326 (quotations); Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994). Of course, business networks based on personal connections are not limited to China. There is a growing literature on the importance of networks in the West, which stems primarily from Mark Granovettor’s pathbreaking article, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Prob- lem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (Nov. 1985): 481–510. 2. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 13; Ichiro Numazaki, “The Role of Personal Networks in the Making of Taiwan’s guanxiqiye (Related Enterprises),” in Business Networks and Economic Development in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Gary G. Hamilton (Hong Kong, 1991), 77–93, in Chinese Busi- ness Enterprise, ed. Brown, 2: 410–23. 3. Nathan’s fullest theoretical formulation of this model can be found in Andrew J. Nathan, “A Factionalism Model for CCP Politics,” China Quarterly 53 (Jan.–March 1973): 34–66. Although this article concentrates on the post-1949 period, Nathan has also posited similar ideas for Republican China in Peking Pol- itics, 1918–1925: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism (Berkeley, Calif., 1976). On political factions in the 1930s see William Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford, Calif., 1984), 157–66. 454 SHEEHAN

Figure 1 Left: Hierarchical factions with two central actors (F1 and F2) and three subsidiary actors (1, 2, and 7). Right: Simple star with central actor (A).

hierarchical version of the “star” described by social network theory (see the right side of figure 1).4 On the other hand, the same literature on Chinese networks also opens the possibility for horizontal or diffuse ties among individuals and subgroups.5 R. Ampalavanar Brown even goes so far as to argue that Chinese business networks are “ad hoc.”6 Like the work on Chinese organizational practices as a whole, previous work on banking networks in China can be interpreted to indicate two different kinds of network formation. Analyses that emphasize either the importance of native-place affinities (Susan Mann Jones, Marie-Claire Bergère, Yao Huiyuan) or regional groups (Yao, Cheng Linsun) suggests the existence of discrete, possibly com- petitive cliques. At the same time, much of the literature (sometimes the same literature) also points either to common shared professional values among prominent bankers (Bergère, Andrea McElderry, Cheng) or to the dominance of natives from the provinces of Zhejiang

4. On “stars” see John Scott, Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, 2d ed. (London, 2000), 10. Figure 1, and all network drawings in this article, use Steve Borgatti’s Netdraw 1.38, Graph Visualization Software (Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002). Nathan’s factions differ from the “star” because they are hierarchical. At lower levels in the hierarchy (nodes 1, 2, and 7), there are subsidiary central actors who link nodes even farther down the chain. 5. Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 35, 29; David L. Wank, Commod- ifying Communism: Business, Trust, and Politics in a Chinese City (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 164; Numazaki, “Role of Personal Networks,” 420. 6. R. Ampalavanar Brown, “Introduction: Uses and Abuses of Chinese Business History and Methodology,” in Chinese Business Enterprise, ed. Brown, 1: 12. Chinese Financial Cliques 455 and Jiangsu—the so-called Zhejiang-Jiangsu financial clique, Jiangzhe jinrong caituan—(Bergère, and especially Yao) such that other native- place factions were virtually irrelevant.7 In this case, shared values or dominance of one native-place clique could point to a more unified structure. Besides being open to differing interpretation on the shape of networks, these previous banking histories have other limitations. In Bergère’s work, assumptions about the naturalness of “traditional” solidarities need to be questioned. She never shows how the Ningbo (or Zhejiang) clique of the nineteenth century described by Mann Jones transformed into a Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique in the twentieth. There is no reason to assume that natives of these two provinces would have a natural affinity for one another. In fact, the diary of the banker Bian Baimei shows that considerable tension existed between the two groups well into the twentieth century.8 Tension did not pre- clude cooperation, of course, but I have shown elsewhere that the connections noted by Bergère between the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui bankers in the 1910s and 1920s grew as much from involve- ment by them or their forebears in government-sponsored projects as from native-place affinities.9 As for regional groups, evidence of cooperation in operations is strongest for the so-called Northern Four [banks], which institutionalized their collaboration through two organizations: one to issue paper money and one to take savings from ordinary individuals.10 With these and other regional groupings it is important to note that cooperation in lending and other operations

7. Susan Mann Jones, “The Ningpo Pang [Ningbo Bang] and Financial Power at Shanghai,” in The Chinese City between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (Stanford, Calif., 1974), 73; Yao Huiyuan, Jiangzhe jinrong caituan yanjiu [Research on the Zhejiang-Jiangsu Financial Clique] (Beijing, 1998), 7–8; Marie-Claire Bergère, “The Shanghai Bankers’ Association, 1915–1927: Modernization and the Institutionalization of Local Solidarities,” in Shanghai Sojourners, ed. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 15–34; Andrea McElderry, “Confucian Capitalism? Corporate Values in Republi- can Banking,” Modern China 12 (July 1986): 401–16; Andrea McElderry, “Robber Barons or National Capitalists: Shanghai Bankers in Republican China,” Republican China 11 (Nov. 1985): 52–67; Cheng Linsun, Banking in Modern China: Entrepre- neurs, Professional Managers, and the Development of Chinese Banks, 1897–1937 (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 46–52. 8. Bian Baimei, “Diary,” 5 March 1922, Tianjin Zhengxie Hui, Tianjin, China. In March 1922 he wrote about a crisis on the Shanghai stock exchange, saying, “the Shaoxing/Ningbo bang [group] lost and the Jiangsu bang won.” 9. Brett Sheehan, “Urban Identity and Urban Networks in Cosmopolitan Cit- ies: Banks and Bankers in Tianjin, 1900–1937,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph Esherick (Honolulu, 2000), 47–64. 10. Brett Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times: Money, Banks, and State-Society Relations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 103–4. 456 SHEEHAN

sometimes followed regional lines, but often did not. Likewise, most large banks had multiple branches in many parts of the country, and local branches often cooperated with each other regardless of the locations of their headquarters.11 In addition, most of the current literature on Chinese banking history looks primarily at Shanghai and at the handful of prominent professional bankers whom Linsun Cheng has labeled “Schumpete- rian entrepreneurs.”12 Although Shanghai was indeed China’s most important financial center, and these individuals did play important roles, there is much to be gained by increasing the empirical scope and broadening the lens through which we look. For example, because of the focus on large institutions, no one has yet adequately addressed the question of why China had a small number of very large banks and a large number of very small banks.13 Likewise, focus on this small group of entrepreneurial bankers—the “usual suspects”—neglects many banking figures who were equally central to the shape and form of financial networks. Many factors thus point to the need for a fresh approach to analyzing Chinese networks in general and Chinese banking networks in particular. Previous work that is consistent with either discrete factions or a unified network, a banking literature that sees personal guanxi relations interacting with a developing sense of more impersonal professionalism, and limitations in the banking history literature’s approach to networks all suggest that guanxi relations in China do not work in a mechanistic or easily predictable fashion. Chinese networks, including banking networks, vary based on specific time and circumstances.14 The present article is an attempt to look at the history of banking networks with a broadly inclusive empirical approach that uses methodologies borrowed from sociological network analysis as applied to the interlocking directorships of 122 banks in 1936. What provided the basis for Chinese banking networks in the Republican period (1911–1949)? Did personalistic guanxi ties, such as family, native place, and patronage, outweigh impersonal links such as profession and common political outlook? Did bank networks

11. See ibid., chap. 4, for evidence on government lending by the Tianjin branches of both northern and southern banks in the 1920s. 12. Cheng, Banking in Modern China, chap. 7. 13. Ibid., 64, notes that China’s large banks grew internally and not from amal- gamation, but otherwise no one has described or offered explanation of the structure of the system. 14. For a similar conclusion in relation to marketing networks, see Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corpo- rations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000). Chinese Financial Cliques 457 take the form of discrete factions, such as stars and concentric circles, or were they diffuse, interconnected webs? Did networks have regional foci, or did they extend nationally? The answers to these questions have dramatic implications for understanding the history of China’s banking system, as well as the nature of Chinese political, economic, and social organization. Networks based on attributes such as family and native place might be more insular than those based on profession or political orientation. Similarly, discrete factional organization might limit cooperation between groups. Alterna- tively, connections in diffuse webs might not produce ties deep enough for trust and cooperation to develop, or geographically delimited networks might hinder economic integration between regions. In brief, this analysis shows the existence of twenty-four isolated banks; three very small, discrete, and regionally based groups; and one huge, diffuse, and weblike bank network that included virtually all Chinese bank assets and extended to most of China’s economically developed regions. At the core of this network, large banks linked densely to other large banks regardless of the geographic location of their head offices or the native places of their principals. At the same time, the core also included a number of very small start-ups associated with prominent individuals, though the list of important bankers needs to be expanded beyond the few “usual suspects” discussed in previous studies. Diffuse connections also characterized networks of individual bankers, though identifiably linked subgroups arose based on two kinds of very different shared attributes. Dense ties existed either among the most important bankers who each sat on numerous boards of directors (suggesting associations based on business ties, professional interests, and the importance of banks) or among individuals who shared common native place, defined at the level of adjacent counties (suggesting the simultaneous existence of strong but very local guanxi ties). Native place (guanxi) played an important role in network formation, but native-place networks were neither inclusive nor discrete from one another. Other attributes such as political connections, personal history, and shared professional interests played equally important roles in defining network shapes. In the end, bank networks arose as much from historical contingency as from cultural predisposition.

Research Design

By 1936 China had a large and thriving financial industry composed of modern banks based on foreign designs and indigenous financial 458 SHEEHAN

institutions called qianzhuang or yinhao.15 For analysis here, I will focus on the modern banking sector, which had the vast majority of China’s financial assets. In this modern banking sector China had a small number of very large banks—many with nationwide branch networks—and a large number of very small banks (see appendix). Four of the large modern banks—the Central Bank, the Bank of China, the Bank of Communications, and the Farmers Bank of China—had close association with the central government through historical ties and outright ownership and control imposed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nation- alist government.16 Provincial and municipal governments also had captive banks, but many other banks were privately owned. In order to understand associational practices in this dynamic sector, I will use network analysis, which examines actors and relations, rather than the conventional approach, which looks at actors and attributes.17 For business actors and relations, a corporate network is “an organizational form that has grown up ‘between’ markets and hierarchies and [that] possess a ‘structure’ just as markets and bureaucracies do.”18 The forms of linkages in networks can include commercial relations, ownership, or connections among individuals involved in firms such as with interlocking directorships. Interlocking directorships, in particular, have been widely studied because information on directors is more widely available than on transactions or

15. Modern banks were distinguished from indigenous financial institutions (sometimes called native banks or traditional banks) by possessing several charac- teristics: use of the word ‘bank’ (yinhang) in their names; more capital; “use of the joint-stock, limited liability form of organization; large, often nationwide, branch structures; much larger customer bases; buildings that used foreign architectural styles; and loans based on collateral, rather than solely on the reputation of the bor- rower.” See Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times, 11. On the growth and nature of the banking industry, see also Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, U.K., 1989); Thomas G. Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), chap. 3; Zhongguo jinrong shi [A History of Chinese Finance] (Chengdu, 1993), chap. 2; Cheng, Banking in Modern China; David Faure, ed., Money and Banking in Republican China (Hong Kong, forthcoming), especially the chapters by Chan, Cheng, Köll, Lee, and Mickey; and Zhaojin Ji, A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise and Decline of China’s Finance Capitalism (Armonk, N.Y., 2003) chaps. 4, 6. 16. I have rendered bank names into English according to the conventions used by each bank in the 1930s with two exceptions. First, for the sake of consis- tency, I have used standard Hanyu Pinyin to transliterate place names that formed part of bank names. Second, I have also used Hanyu Pinyin for banks that did not use a standard transliteration at the time. Hanyu Pinyin for the Chinese names of the banks can be found in the appendix. 17. Robert A. Hanneman, “Introduction to Social Networks,” included with UCINET software, 2001, p. 3. 18. Paul Windolf, Corporate Networks in Europe and the United States (Oxford, U.K., 2002), 53. Chinese Financial Cliques 459 ownership, and that is certainly true in the case of Republican-period banks in China. Interlocking directorships arise under three scenarios. First, interlocks can stem from relations between or among people that then extend to the corporations with which they are involved. Sec- ond, they arise from relations between or among firms that are then cemented by positions on boards. Third, parties unknown to the principals of firms, perhaps because of their political influence, are invited (or, where politics outweighs property rights, invite themselves) to sit on the boards of directors of two or more firms. In this way they create a link where none existed previously. Regardless of how the relationships arise, the corporate network that results is more than the sum of its parts. Interlocking directorships provide a direct line of communication between two or more firms, providing each with information on the other that would be otherwise unavailable.19 In addition, personal connections might create or strengthen business ties or, conversely, business ties might create or enhance personal relations. One caveat is in order. The analysis of interlocking directorships shows structure and not behavior. It provides, in the words of Paul Windolf, a “map of opportunities” but “does not provide us with an evaluation of the actual use of . . . power, only its potential.”20 For this analysis of the banking sector in early twentieth-century China, I use data on interlocking directorships contained in the 1936 All China Directory of Bank Employees, published by the Bank of China.21 Use of this source provides two major advantages. First, unlike many lists of directors, the directory includes information on native province and age for many of its entries.22 Second, among

19. See the discussion in John Scott and M. Hughes, “Capital and Communi- cation in Scottish Business,” Sociology 14, no. 1 (1980): 29–47, reprinted in The Sociology of Elites, ed. John Scott (Hants, U.K., 1990), 3: 261–79. 20. Windolf, Corporate Networks, 15. 21. Quanguo yinhang zhiyuan zhinan [All China Directory of Bank Employees] (Shanghai, 1936), on deposit at the library of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sci- ences, Tianjin, China. 22. The information on age and native place from the directory is supple- mented by other sources that have been used to compile the larger database, including many bank records from various archives, including the Number Two Historical Archive in Nanjing, the Shanghai Municipal Archive, and the Tianjin Municipal Archive, and published sources such as Fu Runhua, ed., Zhongguo dangdai mingren zhuan [Biographies of Contemporary Chinese Figures] (Shanghai, 1948); Han Min, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo renwu zhi [Gazetteer of Contemporary Chinese] (Shanghai, 1939); Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders, 4th ed., 4th ed. suppl., 5th ed. (Shanghai, 1931, 1933, 1935); George F. Nellist, ed., Men of Shanghai and North China (Shanghai, 1933); Chen Yutang, ed., Zhongguo jinxiandai renwu minghao da cidian [Great Dictionary of Names and Aliases of Contemporary and Modern China] (Hangzhou, 1993); and Zhejiang renwu jianzhi, xia [Brief Gazetteer of Zhejiang People, vol. 2] (Hangzhou, 1984). 460 SHEEHAN

Table 1 Number of Modern Banks in 1936

Type of Bank Number of Banks in 1936

Central Government Special Banks 4 Provincial and Local Government Banks 25 Commercial Savings (shangye chuxu) Banks 80 Agricultural and Industrial (nonggong) Banks 31 Specialized Banks 15 Overseas Chinese (huaqiao) Banks 9 Total 164

Source: Quanguo yinhang nianjian [Bank Annual] (Shanghai, 1937), A10.

currently available sources, the directory provides a set of directors’ names from the broadest population of modern banks. The 1937 Bank Annual lists a total of 164 modern Chinese banks in 1936 (see table 1). The Directory of Bank Employees includes information on directors for 122 of these banks, including the four central government banks, as well as many of the commercial and savings and specialized banks. It also includes a handful of banks operated by provincial and local governments, but no overseas Chinese banks (see appendix). The 122 banks in the sample represent 74 percent of China’s banks and approximately 96.5 percent of the 7.3 billion yuan in assets owned by all 164.23 Thus, the sample comprises a large majority of the banks and the vast majority of bank assets. Although the 1936 directory has many advantages, it also presents certain problems. Most important, it was published in 1936, after the events of 1935 when the Nationalist government nationalized China’s two largest commercial banks, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications, as well as a few smaller ones like the National Industrial Bank. In addition, by the mid-1930s, in part due to the threatening Japanese presence in the Northeast, many northern banks had moved their headquarters to Shanghai. The earlier pattern where Shanghai was first among equals of China’s financial centers had shifted, and Shanghai’s dominance was firmly established.24 The primacy of Shanghai as a financial center is clear from the locations of the headquarters of the banks in the sample. Almost half (57) had their headquarters in Shanghai by 1936.25 Chongqing, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Guangzhou each host several banks, with the

23. On the total assets of banks, see also Cheng, Banking in Modern China, 252. 24. Sheehan, “Urban Identity,” 47–64. 25. The date of Kincheng’s move from Tianjin to Shanghai is unclear, but it may have happened by 1936, and it is considered a Shanghai bank here. Chinese Financial Cliques 461 remainder spread among a number of cities (see table 2 and figure 2). Because of these developments, the importance of government- controlled banks and Shanghai banks is likely to be greater than during earlier periods.

Table 2 Locations of Headquarters of Banks in Sample

Location Number of Banks Percentage

Shanghai 57 46.7% Chongqing 9 7.4% Hangzhou 8 6.5% Tianjin 7 5.7% Guangzhou 5 4.1% Hankou 4 3.3% Qingdao 3 2.5% Other 29 23.8% Total 122 100.0%

Source: Data presented in the appendix of this article.

Figure 2 Geographic Nodes of Bank Headquarters, 1936. 462 SHEEHAN

In order to analyze these networks, I will use three concepts from social network analysis: connectedness, centrality, and density. ‘Connectedness’ simply refers to links among banks. Any director who sits on more than one bank board creates a link between those banks. Banks need not be connected directly by sharing a common director to be considered part of the same network. Indirect links (such as those between F1 and 4 or B and E in figure 1) also produce connectedness. Banks or individuals with no connections to other banks are considered ‘isolates.’ ‘Centrality’ refers to the number of connections to any one member of a network. The higher the number of connections or the greater the number of paths of connection that cross in a given node, the greater the centrality of that node (such as with 1, 2, F1, F2, and A in figure 1). These central nodes can play key roles in lines of information exchange, patronage, business transactions, or capital flow. ‘Density’ refers to the number of actual connections as a percentage of possible connections in any network.26 High density among a particular group shows that its members are more closely related to each other than to others outside that group, indi- cating the existence of factions or subgroups. Interlocking directorships can be studied from two vantage points. On the one hand, the banks themselves made up a network linked by individuals who had seats on two or more bank boards. In this case, the banks comprise the nodes in network diagrams and the individuals the connecting lines. On the other hand, the banks created links among a network of individuals. In this case, the nodes are people, and the lines are banks. I will begin from the standpoint of networks of banks, and then consider that of bankers as individuals.

Bank Networks

Previous work on Chinese banking history suggests three possibilities about the shape of bank networks. First, the existence of regional networks, if reflected in interlocking directorships, should show up as discrete groups or subgroups. The most common examples of this sort mentioned in histories of Chinese banks are the so-called North- ern Four (Kincheng, Yien Yeh, Continental, and China and South Sea) and the Southern Three (National Commercial, Zhejiang Industrial,

26. Density is calculated as: number of lines/(number of banks × [number of banks – 1] / 2); see Scott, Social Network Analysis, chap. 4. Most density figures and other network analysis measures were derived using S. P. Borgatti, M. G. Everett, and L. C. Freeman, UCINET for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis (Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002). Chinese Financial Cliques 463 and Shanghai Commercial and Savings).27 Yao Huiyuan takes the geographic approach further by positing the existence of four regional groupings. In his scheme, there was a North China group centered on Beijing and Tianjin (including the Northern Four), a South China group centered on Guangzhou and Hong Kong, a West China group centered on Sichuan, and a Zhejiang-Jiangsu group centered on Shanghai (including the Southern Three).28 Second, the banking coup of 1935 could have been a decisive influence, and government- affiliated banks might make up the network’s core(s). Third, those banks associated with high-profile bankers, the “usual suspects,” might play a salient role either separately, as centers of competing subgroup “stars,” or together as a multicenter core for the entire network. None of these options, however, adequately explains the shape of Chinese banking networks. Of the 122 banks in the sample, 98 or 80.3 percent had at least one interlocking director relationship with another bank, leaving 24 banks as independent isolates with no interlocking directorships. This pro- portion represents a high level of inclusiveness, with less than one-fifth of the banks unconnected to any other bank.29 The ninety-eight connected banks broke down into four groups. Three of these were small groups that roughly corresponded with geographical division. In the far south in Guangdong province, two banks (Guangdong and Canton Municipal Banks) were linked to each other, but not to any other banks. In the northern Chinese province of Shandong, three Qingdao banks (Agricultural and Industrial Bank, Shantso, Chung Lu) comprised a discrete network, though not in the same location as the northern network in Beijing and Tianjin centered on the Northern Four, as posited by Yao Huiyuan. And in Zhejiang province in the lower Yangzi river delta region—in the middle of the most dense collection of interconnected banks in China—two banks in Sheng County made up their own network. The remaining ninety-one banks were connected, directly and indirectly, to each other in what I call the primary network. The members of this primary network did not break into easily identifiable subgroups based on the location of their headquarters, either. In fact, the headquarters of the primary network banks stretched across all geographic regions, except for the far south in Guangdong province and the economically undeveloped southwest and northwest (see figure 2). Even the Sichuan banks in the west

27. The “Northern Four” was something of a misnomer since China and South Sea had its headquarters in Shanghai from the beginning. On these two bank groups see Cheng, Banking in Modern China, 46–52. 28. Yao, Jiangzhe, 7–8. 29. On inclusiveness, see Scott, Social Network Analysis, 69. 464 SHEEHAN

(Yao Huiyuan’s fourth geographical group) were connected to the main network, though the largest Sichuan bank, the Young Brothers Bank, was an isolate connected neither to its Sichuan brethren nor to any other banks in China. Likewise, government affiliation of some banks did not significantly affect the shape of the primary network. The four central government banks were all very “central” (having a large number of direct connections), but they did not constitute the center of a star system, nor did they connect discrete cliques. As a test, I eliminated them from the sample and then tested the remaining banks for inclusiveness and density. Elimination of these four banks did not significantly affect the shape of bank linkages, and only one small set of three, relatively unimportant banks broke off into a discrete group. The remaining eighty-four banks (ninety-one initial banks minus four central government banks minus the three banks no longer connected) still constituted a broadly connected main network account- ing for the vast majority of remaining bank assets. The activities of prominent bankers did indeed impact the shape of the primary network, though with some surprises not anticipated in the current literature. Some, but not all, banks that were closely associated with the prominent bankers well known from the current literature had a high level of centrality. Table 3 shows the twenty- five banks in the primary network with the most direct connections to other banks. Besides the four government banks, the other most central banks are an eclectic mix. Zhejiang Industrial Bank, one of the Southern Three but not the largest of them, is present, as are Continental (the only member of the Northern Four with its headquarters still in Tianjin and not the largest of the Northern Four), Sin Hua Trust and Savings, Manufacturers, and Agricultural and Indus- trial Bank of China. All of these are large and well-established banks, and their interconnectedness comes as no surprise. The absence of the remaining two banks of the Southern Three and the remaining three of the Northern Four seems surprising. The managers of these banks (such as Chen Guangfu, Hu Bijiang, Wu Dingchang, and Zhou Zuomin) are normally included among the small group of elite bankers at the center of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique. In contrast, the list does have some unexpected inclusions. Most surprising, half of the twenty-five most connected banks are small newcomers such as Chung Wai and Shanghai Silk Industry.30

30. Very little is known about the operations of these banks, but capsule histories are available in the 1937 Quanguo yinhang nianjian [Bank Annual] (Shanghai, 1937). Chinese Financial Cliques 465

Table 3 The Twenty-Five Most Central Banks

Number of % of Total 519 Rank of Bank Interlocking Banks Connections Total Assets

Bank of China 42 8.1% 1 Bank of Communications 36 6.9% 3 Central Bank 35 6.7% 2 Manufacturers Bank 28 5.4% 15 Zhonghui 25 4.8% 30 Zhejiang Industrial 25 4.8% 18 Shanghai Silk Industry 24 4.6% 41 Zhejiang Commercial and Savings 23 4.4% 91 China State 22 4.2% 17 Jiangsu 22 4.2% 21 China Equitable 21 4.1% 47 Commercial Bank 20 3.9% 12 China Investment 20 3.9% 46 Guotai 19 3.7% 88 Sin Hua Trust and Savings 19 3.7% 24 Pudong Commercial and Savings 19 3.7% 59 Bank of Asia 18 3.5% 55 Agricultural and Industrial 17 3.3% 19 Ming Fo Union Commercial 17 3.3% 87 Sing Tai 17 3.3% 65 City Bank of Shanghai 16 3.1% 42 Continental 16 3.1% 10 Ningbo Commercial and Savings 16 3.1% 13 Zhedong 16 3.1% 85 Chung Woo Commercial and 16 3.1% 66 Savings

Sources: See footnote 22.

The presence of so many small banks among the most centrally connected derives in part from their association with prominent bankers. New bank foundings increased dramatically in China in the period from 1928 to 1935.31 Not all were as highly connected as the ones in table 3, but many were. Indeed, some of the biggest names in banking circles appear on their boards. Tang Shoumin, president of the Bank of Communications, Chen Guangfu, president of Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, and Qian Yongming, former president of the Bank of Communications, all appear on the boards of some of these small banks. Surprisingly, the prominent bankers usually associated with the Zhejiang-Jiangsu financial clique were sometimes more likely to come together on the boards of these small new banks than on those of their larger and better-known enterprises. Just as notable, the inclusion of others of these small banks in table 3 is due to their

31. Ibid., A8. 466 SHEEHAN

association with equally important, though less well known figures such as Yu Zuoting, a prominent Ningbo financier, and Du Yuesheng, a famous gangster. In fact, Du appears on the boards of no fewer than four of the well-connected upstarts in the most central twenty-five. Clearly, our list of “usual suspects” needs to be expanded. If the primary network, then, did not have easily identifiable regional subgroups, did not focus on government banks, and did not exactly replicate the population of the “usual suspects” of Zhejiang and Jiangsu bankers, what did it look like? Figure 3 shows a graphic representation of the shape of the primary network. The fifteen circles represent the fifteen largest banks by asset size. For clarity, ties among these fifteen banks and bank names are not shown. In the circle of largest banks, the four central government banks are arrayed across the top. The Northern Four are on the right, and the Southern Three are on the left. The remaining four largest banks are on the bottom. With the exception of the Sichuan banks, which constitute a virtually separate group in the upper left-hand corner, there are no visible factions or subsets. In acknowledging the existence of a “Sichuan group,” however, it is also important to remember that the largest bank in Sichuan had no interlocking ties with any other banks, and the remaining small banks there linked to the primary network. The shape of the primary network is complex, but three organizing principles are evident. First, connections among banks in the primary network were widespread but not particularly dense. If all ninety-one banks had direct links to all (ninety) other banks, then density would be 100 percent. In reality, only 519 connections out of a possible 4,095 existed, or about 12.7 percent. Comparison is difficult, but to put this figure in perspective it can be noted that studies of interlocking directorships among very large corporations in the 1970s showed densities that ranged from a low of 6.7 percent in Great Britain to 14.2 percent in the United States to a very high 66.7 percent in Belgium/ Luxembourg.32 The relative low density of connections among the large number of connected banks in the Chinese case shows that most connections were indirect. Banks most often did not connect directly to each other, but through mutual connections to other banks. Second, although connections were relatively disbursed, they were not distributed completely evenly. Some banks had more connections than others, and a closer look at table 3 shows that centrality decreases in increments, and this pattern continues below the top

32. Meindert Fennema and Huibert Schijf, “Analysing Interlocking Directorates: Theory and Methods,” Social Networks 1, no. 4 (1978–79): 297–332, reprinted in Sociology of Elites, ed. Scott, 1: 3–38. Figure 3 Primary Network of Ninety-One Banks. Large banks with high levels of centrality are represented by circles, other banks by plus signs. Connec- tions among the circles are omitted for clarity. 468 SHEEHAN

twenty-five. The primary network then, had multiple core banks with no clear break between those more and less central. Third, the best predictors of high levels of centrality and density (groups of banks more densely connected to each other than to the network as a whole) were either association with prominent individuals or size of assets. I have already discussed the former, so let me elucidate the latter. Large banks preferred to establish links with other large banks. Density of connections among large banks is much greater than among the members of the primary network as a whole, and the density of connections generally decreases as ever smaller banks are added to the sample. China’s seven largest banks from the primary network each had 2 percent or more of total banking system assets: China (24.8 percent), Central (16.9 percent), Communications (12.5 percent), Farmers Bank of China (4.8 percent), Shanghai Commercial and Savings (3.6 percent), Kincheng (2.7 percent), and China and South Sea (2.1 percent). These seven banks include all four central government banks, one bank from the Southern Three, and two banks from the Northern Four. In spite of this diversity, these banks had very dense connections with each other; fifteen out of a possible twenty-one ties existed among these seven banks, for a density of 71.4 percent—many times the 12.7 percent density for the primary network as a whole. Expanding the subset of large banks to the fifteen banks with approximately 1 percent or more of assets shows lower density, though it is still very high at 52.4 percent. The connections between these fifteen large banks have been left out of figure 3 for clarity because if present, the center would appear virtually black. Thus from the standpoint of banks, in 1936 one enormous, loosely connected network of ninety-one banks accounted for virtually all bank assets, and the headquarters of these banks extended from the lower Yangzi region west to Sichuan and north to Beijing and Tianjin. This network does not fit with previous notions of organization by geography or native place, and its shape is much more amorphous than either the factional or star models would predict. The banks of the primary network were interwoven in a weblike structure that is more dense in the center and less so in the periphery. It was more like a nebula or a galaxy than a star.

Banker Networks

Making individuals the nodes of our network analysis, with the banks as the connecting lines, creates a somewhat different picture of banking connections. This is partly because directors who sit on the same bank board are already linked in a network of individuals, regardless of interlocking directorships with other banks. For example, the Chinese Financial Cliques 469

Bank of China had twenty-seven directors. Each one of them had a tie to the other twenty-six regardless of ties between the Bank of China and other banks. Shifting the focus to bankers, then, increases the number of nodes in the network substantially and gives insight into networks within bank boards, as well as between them. The existing literature plus the preceding analysis of bank networks suggest four possible lines of inquiry to investigate the shape of networks of bankers. First, the division of China’s banks into three small regional groups and one huge primary network might correlate with the native places of the directors of the banks involved. Second, the shape of the network of bank directors associated with primary network banks is likely to echo the shape of the primary network itself. On the one hand, this would indicate a broad set of highly disbursed connections. On the other hand, it would also point to the presence of a multiple-center core. Third, the individuals at the core of the primary network may have included a clique of natives of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, though we need to be sure to look beyond the small list of “usual suspects.” Fourth, native-place attributes may have inter- acted with shared professional values, though it is not clear if that inter- action took the form of coexistence, conflict, or mutual reinforcement.33 A total of 1,039 individuals held positions as chairman (dongshi zhang), assistant chairman (fu dongshi zhang), standing director (changwu dongshi), director (dongshi), or outside auditor (jiancha ren).34 As expected, connections among directors were both highly inclusive and very dispersed. Out of all 1,039 individuals, only 179, or about 17 percent, sat on the boards of isolated banks. The remaining 860 directors were part of multibank networks, 801 in the primary network, 29 in the Shandong group, 15 in the Guangdong group, and another 15 in the Sheng County group in Zhejiang. In all, only 1,363 connections existed out of more than half a million possibilities for a density of less than 1 percent. Remarkably, only 161 people, about 15 percent of the total, held two or more directorships with an average of three seats each.

33. Mann Jones, “Ningpo Pang,” 73–96, emphasizes the need for traditional ties to change; Bergère, “Shanghai Bankers’ Association,” 15–34, concludes that traditional solidarities reinforced professional values; McElderry, “Confucian Capital- ism,” 401–16, McElderry, “Robber Barons,” 52–67, and Cheng, Banking in Modern China, especially chap. 7, focus on shared values with less attention to native place. 34. I have included the position of outside auditor because these individuals attended board meetings and, theoretically, approved the reliability of financial statements. Interviews with elderly retired bankers in Tianjin in 1995 indicate that the position was sometimes honorary, but nonetheless it represented important connections for the bank. For ease of reference, they will be referred to as ‘directors’ in this article. It is possible that many of the directors linked these banks to other commercial or industrial networks, but that is beyond the scope of the present article. 470 SHEEHAN

Two of the three small regional bank networks correspond closely with native place, but isolated banks drew their directors from a variety of places. Almost all of the directors at the banks of the Qingdao network were Shandong natives, and all the Sheng County network’s directors were from Zhejiang. There is too little information available to make a conclusion about the Guangdong network. These regional networks did not operate entirely exclusively, however, and the Qingdao network also had one director from each of four other provinces: Anhui, Hebei, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. In addition, the 179 directors at isolated banks came from at least eleven different provinces, with significant numbers from Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hebei, and Jiangsu (30, 26, 14, and 10, respectively). Likewise, the primary network drew directors from a variety of places, a total of eighteen different provinces, though both this diversity and its size make further investigation necessary. Native province is known for 501 of the 801 primary network directors. Of them, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces provided a lion’s share (204 and 135, respectively). The primary network also included a healthy representation of natives of other provinces though, with Sichuan, Anhui, Guang- dong, Hebei, and Fujian contributing the most (in descending order). Nonetheless, the large number of Zhejiang and Jiangsu natives is significant. Did they constitute a clique? I tested various groups from the population of primary network directors and discovered that there were two kinds of subgroups in which the density of connections is significantly greater than the group as a whole. Density rises among directors who held seats on large numbers of banks (directors with higher centrality, whom we might call ‘important’ bankers) and among those individuals who shared native place defined at the local level. To begin with the former, I will use number of directorships as a measure of importance; individuals who sat on the boards of three banks were more important than those who sat on two, individuals with four directorships were more important still, and so forth. Mir- roring the shape of the primary network, the connectedness, or centrality, of directors decreased in increments, as shown in table 4. This table includes all nineteen directors with five or more seats, but this same pattern continues for directors with fewer seats each. No one banker or group of bankers was central to the network, but many bankers had gradually decreasing degrees of centrality. The level of importance of directors correlates positively with density of ties. The 161 directors who had two or more seats had a density of connections of 10.6 percent, the sixty-one individuals who held three or more seats had density of 27.4 percent, and the nineteen directors from table 4 who held five or more seats had very dense connections, almost 70 percent, thirty-one times the density of directors in the Chinese Financial Cliques 471

Table 4 Directors with Five or More Seats

Name Number of Seats Native Province

Qian Yongming 13 Zhejiang Chen Guangfu11Jiangsu Du Yuesheng 11 Jiangsu Yu Zuoting 11 Zhejiang Tang Shoumin 9 Jiangsu Hu Bijiang 7 Jiangsu Xu Chenmian 7 Zhejiang Jin Boshun 6 Zhejiang Qin Zuze 6 Zhejiang Xu Boxiong 6 Zhejiang Zhang Jia’ao 6 Jiangsu Feng Gengguang 5 Guangdong Feng Songqing 5 Zhejiang Li Ming 5 Zhejiang Lin Zujin 5 Jiangsu Song Ziliang 5 Guangdong Ye Yu 5 Zhejiang Zhang Xiaolin 5 Zhejiang Zhu Dechuan 5 Jiangsu

Sources: See footnote 22. primary network as a whole (2.2 percent). Clearly there existed a group of important and densely connected individuals, numbering 161 highly connected directors and from approximately twenty to sixty extremely highly connected directors, at the core of the primary network of bankers. These important bankers did not constitute a discrete clique in themselves, nor did they act as links among discrete factions. The network of directors, like the banks they served, had a multiple-center core with higher density among directors with the most seats and lower density among directors who had fewer seats. Native place stands out as the second salient shared attribute associated with increased density of ties among bank directors, though only when defined at a very local level. Table 5 contains the compar- ative density of connections for various native-place subgroups. Den- sity of connections among the 339 bankers from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces was only slightly higher than that of the group of primary network directors as a whole; however, dramatic pockets of dense connections exist at the local level. Directors from groups of adjacent counties, or prefectures, are much more densely connected than individuals who share common province.35 Density of ties among directors from the six prefectures that supplied the most bank

35. Data becomes more scarce when looking for county-level data, but the county-level data that does exist is compelling. 472 SHEEHAN

Table 5 Densities of Banker Networks

Number of Density of Directors Connections

Population as a Whole 1,039 0.3% Primary Network Directors 801 2.2% Importance and Density Bankers with Five or More Seats 19 69.6% Bankers with Three or More Seats 61 27.4% Bankers with Two or More Seats 161 10.6% Primary Network and Native Place Zhejiang-Jiangsu Bankers 339 4.2% Prefectural Breakdowns Zhenjiang (Jiangsu) Bankers 8 50.0% Ningbo (Zhejiang) Bankers 41 29.4% Hangzhou (Zhejiang) Bankers 11 23.6% Songjiang/Shanghai (Jiangsu) Bankers 14 16.5% Shaoxing (Zhejiang) Bankers 13 10.3% Suzhou (Jiangsu) Bankers 25 8.7%

Sources: See footnote 22.

directors ranged from a low of 8.7 percent for Suzhou natives to a high of 50 percent for people from Zhenjiang. Even at the low end of the range, however, density of connections was more than twice that of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu group as a whole. The map in figure 4 shows a graphic representation of the native-prefecture distribution of the many directors who came from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. Density of connections among bankers with shared native place reached levels comparable to that of the ties among important bankers only when that native place was defined very locally at the prefectural level. Cliques among bankers in the primary network arose, then, among bankers from adjacent counties or among important, or elite, bankers who each held seats on many different banks. The former suggests local kinds of connections, such as dialect, early schooling, and family. In addition, there might have been a certain kind of cultural affinity that people from these local areas shared. For example, Bian Baimei commented in his diary on the abilities of Lin Fengbao, an assistant manager who worked under Bian, by writing, “if he could add a generous disposition, he could have unlimited achievements. Unfortunately, his Wuxi attitude is too heavy, [he] pays attention to the little and loses the big, [he’s] unavoidably selfish, and abuses others’ trust, having the tendency to have such a fault.”36 Bian, a native of Yangzhou in Jiangsu, clearly had embraced a stereotypical view of

36. Bian Baimei, “Diary,” 12 June 1927. Chinese Financial Cliques 473

Figure 4 Jiangsu and Zhejiang Prefectures with the Most Directors. his Jiangsu brethren just down the Yangzi River in Wuxi, in Suzhou prefecture. This stereotype did not keep Lin from holding a very responsible position under Bian. In fact, Suzhou prefecture provided many more bank directors than did Yangzhou (see figure 4). Republi- can period bankers such as Bian clearly had a mental map of native place attributes that helped to inform their behaviors, but that map was defined very locally. Connections among important bankers, in contrast, suggest shared professional interests. Many of the names in table 4 are familiar to 474 SHEEHAN

scholars of Republican-period banking. Chen Guangfu, Hu Bijiang, Li Ming, Qian Yongming, Tang Shoumin, and Zhang Jia’ao comprise the core members of what Bergère called the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique. Many of them studied together in Japan, and all considered themselves professional bankers. Work by Bergère, McElderry, and Cheng has talked about shared values among these “usual suspects,” but what about the surprises among the list of important bankers? At least five names on this list stand out as unusual: Yu Zuoting, Feng Gengguang, Song Ziliang, Du Yuesheng, and Zhang Xiaolin. The importance of each in banking networks stems from historical con- tingencies, showing the serendipitous ways that networks reflect both their past (what some might call path dependency) and their present political and economic environment. In order to understand the kinds of social capital accumulated by the surprises from table 4, I will discuss brief biographies of four bankers, including one member of the “usual suspects” for the sake of comparison.

A Tale of Four Bankers

The Foreign-Educated Professional Chen Guangfu was born in Zhenjiang prefecture of Jiangsu province in 1880. He began work fairly young in a customs brokerage in Hang- zhou in neighboring Zhejiang. By studying English at night, he was able to pass the examination required to work in the postal service. He went to the United States as part of the Chinese delegation to the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904, and he stayed to study, eventually earning a degree in business from the Wharton School of Manage- ment at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to China in 1910 and, among other jobs, worked as the general manager of the Jiangsu Bank. In 1915 he started the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, which became one of the largest and most successful banks in China.37 Chen is the only one of the four individuals profiled here who is normally mentioned in the literature as one of the “usual suspects”

37. In addition to the sources mentioned in footnote 22, biographical information on Chen also comes from Bergère, “Shanghai Bankers”; McElderry, “Confu- cian Capitalism” and “Robber Barons”; Chen Guangfu, “Autobiography,” Columbia University, New York, N.Y.; Xu Yu, Gu Guanlin, and Jiang Tianying, eds., Zhongguo shi yinhang jia [Ten Chinese Bankers] (Shanghai, 1997), 141–82; and Chen’s entry in Richard C. Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 4 vols. (New York, 1967–79), 192–96. Chinese Financial Cliques 475 of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique. He shares many of the attributes of this cohort (which includes Zhang Jia’ao, Qian Yongming, Zhou Zuomin, Wu Dingchang, Sun Yuanfang, and Li Ming). He was educated in the modern school system that emerged in China at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then he studied abroad, though most of these bankers studied in Japan rather than America. He worked for government bureaus or government-sponsored banks at an early point in his career. He was an early participant in the activities of the bankers’ associations that emerged in China in the 1910s. These experiences and attributes provided the accumulated social capital that led eleven banks to have Chen as a board member in 1936, and the story would be similar for the other bankers usually mentioned together with Chen as the core membership of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique.

The On-the-Job Educated Professional Yu Zuoting, no relation to his more famous Zhejiang compatriot Yu Xiaqing, generally has a lower profile in the literature than other professional bankers of the Republican period, but he sat on as many boards as Chen Guangfu (eleven). In addition, social network theory has a measure of centrality called ‘betweenness,’ which measures not just the number of direct links to an individual, but “views an actor as being in a favored position to the extent that the actor falls on the geodesic paths between other pairs of actors in the network.”38 By this measure Yu Zuoting was the most ‘between’ bank director in 1936. In spite of this centrality, biographical information on Yu is very scarce.39 Born in 1888, he was a native of Zhenhai County in Ningbo prefecture. His father practiced Chinese medicine, but Yu himself became an apprentice in a merchant shop after studying at a traditional-style school. At the age of twenty, he went to work for an indigenous bank and soon went to Shanghai. Throughout his life Yu held a variety of positions in commercial and financial enterprises normally associated with Ningbo businessmen, as well as in the Shanghai and Ningbo Chambers of Commerce. He moved easily between the indigenous and modern banking sectors and even spent a year as a manager of the Land Bank of China, a modern bank in Tianjin. In spite of this stint in the north, his activities remained primarily in Shanghai and Ningbo. Interestingly, his family did not migrate to Shanghai, and in 1933 his children were attending school in Ningbo.

38. Hanneman, “Introduction to Social Networks,” 68. 39. The fullest accounts are in Zhejiang renwu jianzhi, xia, 171–72; and Nellist, ed., Men of Shanghai and North China, 551–52. 476 SHEEHAN

Yu represents a very different set of life experiences than the elite bankers normally associated with the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique, and yet he was a vital part of that clique, or at least of its Ningbo compo- nent. Figure 5 presents a graphic representation of the thirty-five bank directors in 1936 known to be from Ningbo. Four isolated directors are in the upper left-hand corner, one of whom, Fu Pingui, actu- ally held seats on two bank boards but was not connected to other Ningbo natives. In the upper right-hand corner there are five individuals of the surname Cai who all served on the board of an isolated bank: Teng-Hsu Commercial and Savings Bank. Once again, in spite of their native place, they had no interlocking connections with the main Ningbo network composed of the remaining twenty-six individuals in the center of the diagram. Like bank and banker networks, the Ningbo network had a number of more centrally connected individuals at its core and a periphery of somewhat less connected people. Centrally connected directors, such as Yu Zuoting, Qin Zuze, and Chen Shengwu, appear to be the center of “stars,” but they were closely connected stars rather than discrete factions. In sum, shared native place facilitated but did not guarantee connectedness in the network, and centrality apparently grew out of life experiences and social capital, such as that accumulated by Yu Zuoting. His social capital, however, came from very different sources than that of Chen Guangfu and his cohort.

The Politician Turned Banker Like Yu Zuoting, Feng Gengguang is also overlooked in most accounts of Republican-period bank cliques, so his story adds inter- esting insights.40 Feng was one of only two Guangdong natives among the nineteen individuals with five or more directorships in table 4. The other Guangdong native, Song Ziliang, was brother to the former Nationalist finance minister Song Ziwen, and his presence as a central figure grew out of his political connections. In contrast, Feng Gengguang had little connection with the Nationalist government of the 1930s, nor did he have a background in commerce like many of the Guangdong natives who worked as compradors for foreign firms in Shanghai. Born in 1880, Feng went to military school in

40. Biographical material on Feng is scarce. The best sources are his own auto- biographical article, Feng Gengguang, “Wo zai zhongguo yinhang de yixie huiyi” [Some Memories of My Time at the Bank of China], Zhongguo wenshi ziliao [China’s Literary and Historical Materials] 41 (1963): 1–19; and the brief biographical note in Yao Songling, Zhonghang fuwu ji [A Record of Service at the Bank of China] (Taipei, 1968), 114–15. See also Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times, 80, 102. Figure 5 Connections among Ningbo Bankers. 478 SHEEHAN

Japan. Returning to China, he worked in a number of military and official positions across China, during which time he came to know the militarist, and later warlord, Feng Guozhang (no relation). When Feng Guozhang became acting president in 1918, his finance minister and former head of the Bank of China, Wang Kemin, chose Feng Gengguang to be president of the Bank of China. Feng Gengguang remained with the Bank of China in various capacities for the next forty-five years, outlasting both of his patrons, and surviving the shift of the government south from Beijing to Nanjing in 1928. It is hard to understand the basis for the social capital that Feng had in the 1930s. Feng’s political connections obviously helped his initial entry into banking, but he was somehow able to outlast and move beyond this patronage faction. His experience contrasts with that of Wang Kemin, one of those patrons important in Feng’s early career. Wang had also served as president of the Bank of China during the Warlord period, and in 1936 his political fortunes were on the rise because he was appointed to the Hebei-Chahar Political Affairs Commission, an important Nationalist government organ in north China. In spite of this background, however, Wang did not have the place in interlocking bank networks that Feng did. In 1936 Wang served on the boards of two small banks located in Beijing and Tianjin: the Commercial Guarantee Bank of Zhili and the Frontier Bank. In contrast, Feng sat on the boards of five banks, the Bank of China, the Commercial Guarantee Bank of Zhili, the Agricultural and Industrial Bank of China, Sin Hua Trust and Savings, and that bas- tion of Zhejiang-Jiangsu bankers, the Jiangsu Bank. (The Jiangsu Bank had eight directors whose native place is known. Five came from Jiangsu, two from Zhejiang, and only Feng came from elsewhere.) Unlike Chen Guangfu and Yu Zuoting, Feng had little professional experience or education to bring to the banks he served, and he had not engaged in the day-to-day management of operations as a branch manager or high-level executive. Even when he was president of the Bank of China, Zhang Jia’ao handled day-to-day operations as vice president. Feng was an early investor in Continental Bank, one of the Northern Four, but he did not have a connection as director with this group of northern banks.41 In sum, his career appears more serendipitous than that of either Chen Guangfu or Yu Zuoting. Feng Gengguang serves as proof of the flexibility and sometimes ad hoc nature of Chinese networks.

41. “Registration form for Continental Bank,” Archives of the Tianjin Bankers’ Association, 129–2–1625, Tianjin Municipal Archive. Chinese Financial Cliques 479

The Gangster Du Yuesheng had the most unusual career of all the bankers profiled here.42 He was born in 1888 in Shanghai’s rural hinterland. He received virtually no formal education but became an apprentice in a shop in Shanghai. Eventually, he found his calling in organized crime, and he worked his way up to become a leading member of Shanghai’s Green Gang. In that capacity, he formed a working relationship with the Nationalist government, achieving a certain level of legitimacy, at least on the surface. In spite of the fact that Du Yuesheng sat on the boards of eleven banks—as many as both Chen Guangfu and Yu Zuoting—in 1936 he had had only a short history as a member of banking networks. His emergence onto the financial scene in the early 1930s derived from the new respectability provided by his connections to the Nationalist government and the merging of gangster and respectable society. He played a particularly important role in the “coup” of 1935, when the Nationalist government took over much of the banking system, by providing some of the coercive threat that made that coup possible.43 It is his presence on the boards of a half a dozen small start-up banks that leads me to assume that such banks must have been immensely profitable to their principals. Du serves as the prime example of the outsider who achieves a prominent place within a network based on social capital independent of that network, though he was not the only gangster in the sample. Du Yuesheng sat on a total of eleven bank boards, and an associate of his, Zhang Xiaolin, sat on five boards, as seen in table 4, showing the “gangsterization” of certain aspects of Nationalist period society that had begun in the early 1930s.44 Most accounts of bank networks simply ignore Du and Zhang. It is true that they did not fit the mold of the bankers normally considered in the literature, but then neither did Yu Zuoting or Feng Gengguang. In fact, Zhang Xiaolin had tight links to the network of Ningbo bankers, as shown in figure 5. In analyzing networks, it is important to maintain empirical breadth and inclusiveness. Focus on Chen Guangfu and his cohort provides an incomplete picture of the networks of bankers.

42. For biographical information on Du, see his entry in Boorman, ed., Bio- graphical Dictionary; as well as Brian Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1996). 43. On the events of 1935, see Parks Coble, Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 172–87; and Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times, chap. 6. 44. Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 254–55. 480 SHEEHAN

Conclusion

This article raises as many questions as it answers, and before con- cluding, I would like to outline some of those briefly. First, to what extent did operations and capital holding follow the structures of interlocking directorships? Cheng Linsun has partial evidence to show that a number of private Shanghai banks purchased shares in the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications during the late 1910s and 1920s.45 I suspect that this pattern of capital holding helped determine the structure of the primary network. Very little is known about the actual operations of banks, though, and much work needs to be done on both large banks in the core and the smaller banks in both the core and the periphery. An extension of this question would follow the structure of networks beyond the banking sector. Banks loaned money to and invested in many types of firms, and these connections and operations in China remain obscure. Sec- ond, what does the structure of the banking network tell us about the Republican Chinese economy? Why did so many small banks exist in a financial system dominated by a small number of very large banks? Third, how did the structure of Chinese banking networks change over time? Did discrete regional groups slowly merge into the primary network, or did the roots of the core exist from the beginning? How did Zhejiang and Jiangsu natives come to be so dominant? Although lower Yangzi capital accumulation was important, that was not the whole answer. I have argued elsewhere that the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications provided an important training ground for professional bankers who went on to work in other banks, but that still does not explain the dominance of Zhejiang and Jiangsu bankers.46 Fourth, and finally, the structure of the banking network outlined here shows dramatic interpenetration of political and economic power. Did this represent power of the financial clique in government, power of the government over the financial clique, or some third pattern? In spite of these many unanswered questions, the analysis here does lead to several conclusions. Most important, current under- standings of regional groupings or a “Zhejiang-Jiangsu” clique are simply inadequate to describe the reality of Republican-period financial networks in 1936. This article has taken a more comprehensive approach than earlier work by broadening the number of banks and

45. Cheng, Banking in Modern China, 59–63. 46. Brett Sheehan, “Warlords, Cadres, and Bankers: Private Commercial Bank- ing in the Republican and Post-Mao Periods,” Journal of Asian Business 14, no. 1 (1998): 5–22. Chinese Financial Cliques 481 bankers under study and by applying some of the techniques of social network analysis. As a result, it is clear that previous assumptions about native place and regional cohesion do not hold true. From the standpoint of banks, there were small regional groupings in Guangzhou, Qingdao, and Sheng County, Zhejiang. In addition, a group of banks in Sichuan made up another cohesive, though not isolated, unit. These regional networks did not monopolize banking in any region; however, in each place other banks existed that did not join these networks. In fact, twenty-four banks remained independent isolates with no interlocking directorships with other banks. Besides isolates and small regional groups, the vast majority of banks (and bank assets) in China comprised one primary network that interlinked in a complex, weblike fashion. Although some banks, especially large banks and some small banks linked to prominent individuals, had denser connections to the network than others, neither the network as a whole, nor parts of it, can be described by factional or star models. Instead, the primary network had a cluster of centrally connected banks, and centrality decreased incrementally over a range of a large number of banks. From the standpoint of bankers as individuals, there was—as with banks—a large interconnected network with multiple centers, and centrality decreased in increments over a large number of individuals. Density of connections was greater among ‘important’ bankers (those with many seats on different banks) and among individuals who shared a common native place. Native-place subgroups, however, only become apparent on the subprovincial level. Zhejiang and Jiangsu bankers were not particularly closely connected. Only when bankers were divided into subgroups based on groups of adjacent counties did the density of connections rival that of the important bankers. Rather than talk about a Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique, it would be more accurate to note that individuals from southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang specialized in banking in disproportionate numbers. A web of disbursed connections linked bank directors regardless of their native place, and the density of this web increased among important bank directors (each holding many seats) and among individuals from particular adjacent counties. Brief profiles of some of the important bank directors show the various kinds of social capital that resulted in seats on bank boards. Some, like Chen Guangfu and his cohort, are already familiar in the literature. They were highly educated, usually abroad, and had lots of professional experience. In fact, their shared experiences and values were possibly as important as native place in promoting cohesion among them. Yu Zuoting is typical of a different path. Yu, like many of the directors, received little formal education and began professional 482 SHEEHAN

training with apprenticeship. His social capital derived from real- world experience and business connections that depended heavily, though not completely, on native-place networks. In contrast, Feng Gengguang had little business education or experience. He became a banker through dint of his political connections. Although associated with a particular warlord faction of the 1910s and 1920s, he was able to outlast this faction and remain tightly connected to banking circles during the Nationalist period. The gangsters Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin also relied on political connections to enter the banking world, though their connections were tainted by illegal activity. They seem unusual in terms of their social capital, but they played major roles in banking after 1935 and can be ignored only at the risk of mis- understanding banking networks. Analysis of financial networks in 1936 shows evidence of two kinds of networks: cliques—among bankers if not among banks—and diffuse, weblike connections among both banks and bankers. On the one hand, cliques of densely linked bankers from certain adjacent counties show the persistence of the importance of native-place ties well into the twentieth century. Here my conclusions agree more with Bryna Goodman’s view of Shanghai than William Rowe’s view of nineteenth-century Hankou.47 On the other hand, the dual nature of bank networks demonstrates a flexibility in native-place affinity that is discussed, but not emphasized, in the literature on Chinese associational practices. Once again, this echoes Goodman, who concludes that “the transformation of urban identity was a process of accretion of identities, not the displacement of native-place identity for newer, more ‘modern’ ones.”48 It appears, though, that native place played a different role in the networks of bankers with different kinds of social capital. Native place was less important for bankers who had political connections, like Feng Gengguang, or shared professional values obtained through business education abroad, like Chen Guangfu, while native place was more important to bankers like Yu Zuoting, who worked their way up through the commercial ranks. Without a doubt native place played a key role in the formation of networks, but native place did not work in a vacuum, nor did it eliminate the effects of institutional processes, historical contingency, and individual variation.

47. Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 45; William Rowe, Hankow [Hankou]: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford, Calif., 1987), 247–48. 48. Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 46. Chinese Financial Cliques 483

Bibliography of Works Cited Books Bergère, Marie-Claire. The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, U.K., 1989. Boorman, Richard C., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. 5 vols. New York, 1967–79. Brown, R. Ampalavanar, ed. Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspec- tives on Business and Management. 4 vols. London, 1996. Chen Yutang, ed. Zhongguo jinxiandai renwu minghao da cidian [Great Dictionary of Names and Aliases of Contemporary and Modern China]. Hangzhou, 1993. Cheng Linsun. Banking in Modern China: Entrepreneurs, Professional Man- agers, and the Development of Chinese Banks, 1897–1937. Cambridge, U.K., 2003. Coble, Parks. Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927– 1937. Cambridge, Mass., 1986. Cochran, Sherman. Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937. Berkeley, Calif., 2000. Faure, David, ed. Money and Banking in Republican China. Hong Kong, forthcoming. Fu Runhua, ed. Zhongguo dangdai mingren zhuan [Biographies of Contem- porary Chinese Figures]. Shanghai, 1948. Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937. Berkeley, Calif., 1995. Han Min, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo renwu zhi [Gazetteer of Contemporary Chinese]. Shanghai, 1939. Kirby, William. Germany and Republican China. Stanford, Calif., 1984. Martin, Brian. The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937. Berkeley, Calif., 1996. Nathan, Andrew J. Peking Politics, 1918–1925: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism. Berkeley, Calif., 1976. Nellist, George F., ed. Men of Shanghai and North China. Shanghai, 1933. Quanguo yinhang nianjian [Bank Annual]. Shanghai, 1935, 1936, 1937. Quanguo yinhang zhiyuan zhinan [All China Directory of Bank Employees]. Shanghai, 1936. Rawski, Thomas G. Economic Growth in Prewar China. Berkeley, Calif., 1989. Rowe, William. Hankow [Hankou]: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889. Stanford, Calif., 1987. Scott, John. Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. 2d ed. London, 2000. Scott, John, ed. The Sociology of Elites. 3 vols. Hants, U.K., 1990. Sheehan, Brett. Trust in Troubled Times: Money, Banks, and State-Society Relations in Republican Tianjin. Cambridge, Mass., 2003. Wakeman, Frederic. Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937. Berkeley, Calif., 1995. Wank, David L. Commodifying Communism: Business, Trust, and Politics in a Chinese City. Cambridge, U.K., 1999. Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders. 4th ed., 4th ed. suppl., 5th ed. Shanghai, 1931, 1933, 1935. 484 SHEEHAN

Windolf, Paul. Corporate Networks in Europe and the United States. Oxford, U.K., 2002. Xu Yu, Gu Guanlin, and Jiang Tianying, eds. Zhongguo shi yinhang jia [Ten Chinese Bankers]. Shanghai, 1997. Yang, Mayfair. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. Yao Huiyuan. Jiangzhe jinrong caituan yanjiu [Research on the Zhejiang- Jiangsu Financial Clique]. Beijing, 1998. Yao Songling. Zhonghang fuwu ji [A Record of Service at the Bank of China]. Taipei, 1968. Zhaojin Ji. A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise and Decline of China’s Finance Capitalism. Armonk, N.Y., 2003. Zhejiang renwu jianzhi, xia [Brief Gazetteer of Zhejiang People, vol. 2]. Hangzhou, 1984. Zhongguo jinrong shi [A History of Chinese Finance]. Chengdu, 1993.

Articles and Essays Bergère, Marie-Claire. “The Shanghai Bankers’ Association, 1915–1927: Modernization and the Institutionalization of Local Solidarities.” In Shanghai Sojourners, ed. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh. Berkeley, Calif., 1992, pp. 15–34. Brown, R. Ampalavanar. “Introduction: Uses and Abuses of Chinese Busi- ness History and Methodology.” In Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, ed. R. Ampalavanar Brown, vol. 1. London, 1996, pp. 1–14. Feng Gengguang. “Wo zai zhongguo yinhang de yixie huiyi” [Some Memo- ries of My Time at the Bank of China.” Zhongguo wenshi ziliao [China’s Literary and Historical Materials] 41 (1963): 1–19. Fennema, Meindert, and Huibert Schijf. “Analysing Interlocking Director- ates: Theory and Methods.” Social Networks 1, no. 4 (1978–79): 297–332. Reprinted in Sociology of Elites, ed. John Scott, vol. 1. Hants, U.K., 1990, pp. 3–38. Granovettor, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91 (Nov. 1985): 481–510. King, Ambrose Yeo-chi. “Kuan-hsi [guanxi] and Network Building.” Daed- alus 120 (Spring 1991): 63–84. Reprinted in Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, ed. R. Ampalavanar Brown, vol. 2. London, 1996, pp. 321–38. Mann Jones, Susan. “The Ningpo Pang [Ningbo Bang] and Financial Power at Shanghai.” In The Chinese City between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner. Stanford, Calif., 1974, pp. 73–96. McElderry, Andrea. “Confucian Capitalism? Corporate Values in Republican Banking.” Modern China 12 (July 1986): 401–16. ———. “Robber Barons or National Capitalists: Shanghai Bankers in Republi- can China.” Republican China 11 (Nov. 1985): 52–67. Nathan, Andrew J. “A Factionalism Model for CCP Politics.” China Quarterly 53 (Jan.–March 1973): 34–66. Chinese Financial Cliques 485

Numazaki, Ichiro. “The Role of Personal Networks in the Making of Taiwan’s guanxiqiye (Related Enterprises).” In Business Networks and Economic Development in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Gary G. Hamilton. Hong Kong, 1991, pp. 77–93. Reprinted in Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, ed. R. Ampalavanar Brown, vol. 2. London, 1996, pp. 410–23. Scott, John, and M. Hughes. “Capital and Communication in Scottish Busi- ness.” Sociology 14, no. 1 (1980): 29–47. Reprinted in The Sociology of Elites, ed. John Scott, vol. 3. Hants, U.K., 1990, pp. 261–79. Sheehan, Brett. “Urban Identity and Urban Networks in Cosmopolitan Cities: Banks and Bankers in Tianjin, 1900–1937.” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph Esherick. Hono- lulu, 2000, pp. 47–64. ———. “Warlords, Cadres, and Bankers: Private Commercial Banking in the Republican and Post-Mao Periods.” Journal of Asian Business 14, no. 1 (1998): 5–22.

Digital Sources Borgatti, S. P., M. G. Everett, and L. C. Freeman. UCINET for Windows: Soft- ware for Social Network Analysis. Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002. Borgatti, Steve. Netdraw 1.38, Graph Visualization Software. Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002. Hanneman, Robert A. “Introduction to Social Networks.” Included with UCI- NET for Windows software, 2001.

Archival Sources Bian Baimei. “Diary.” Tianjin Zhengxie Hui, Tianjin, China. Chen Guangfu. “Autobiography.” Columbia University, New York, N.Y. Archives of the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications, Number Two Historical Archive, Nanjing, China. Archives of the Shanghai Bankers’ Association, Shanghai Municipal Archive, Shanghai, China. Archives of the Tianjin Bankers’ Association, Tianjin Municipal Archive, Tianjin, China. Appendix

Table A1 Banks and Interlocking Directorships, 1936

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Banks with at Least One Interlocking Directorship Agricultural and Industrial Bank of China (Zhongguo nonggong) 59.2 0.81% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 19 P Agricultural and Industrial Bank of the City of Qingdao 1.0 0.01% Local Government Qingdao 9 Q (Qingdao shi nonggong) Bank of Agriculture and Commerce (Nongshang) 12.7 0.17% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 16 P Bank of Asia (Yazhou) 5.6 0.08% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Bank of China (Zhongguo) 1,803.1 24.78% Central Government Shanghai 27 P Bank of Communications (Jiaotong) 907.2 12.47% Central Government Shanghai 27 P Bank of Greater Asia (Daya) 2.4 0.03% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 10 P Canton Municipal Bank (Guangzhou shili)a 12.7 0.17% Local Government Guangzhou 7 G Central Bank of China (Zhongyang) 1,231.2 16.92% Central Government Shanghai 21 P Cheh-Tung Commercial (Zhedong shangye) 2.0 0.03% Commercial and Savings Ningbo 12 P Cheng Lu (Zhonglu)b 4.6 0.06% Commercial and Savings Qingdao 16 Q Cheng Ming Commercial and Savings (Zhengming) 4.4 0.06% Commercial and Savings Hangzhou 11 P China and South Sea (Zhongnan) 149.2 2.05% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 5 P China Development (Zhongguo qiye) 11.9 0.16% Specialized Shanghai 12 P China Equitable (Shanghai zhizhong) 9.7 0.13% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 11 P China Investment (Guoxin) 9.7 0.13% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 20 P China State Bank (Guohua) 65.3 0.90% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 14 P China United Commercial and Savings (Tongyuan) 3.5 0.05% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Chinese Industrial (Zhonghua quangong) 9.8 0.13% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 11 P Chongqing Commercial and Savings 24.1 0.33% Commercial and Savings Chongqing 13 P Table A1 (continued)

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Chuankang zhiye 16.7 0.23% Specialized Chongqing 8 P Chung Foo Union (Zhongfu) 35.3 0.49% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Chung Hwa Commercial and Savings (Zhonghua) 5.6 0.08% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 8 P Chung Wai (Zhonghui) 32.6 0.45% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 16 P Chung Woo Commercial and Savings (Zhonghe) 3.6 0.05% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 14 P City Bank of Greater Shanghai (Shanghai shi) 12.2 0.17% Local Government Shanghai 8 P Commercial Bank of China (Zhongguo tongshang)b 93.6 1.29% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 15 P Commercial Guarantee Bank of Zhili (Beiyang baoshang) 15.0 0.21% Commercial and Savings Beijing 6 P Continental (Dalu) 129.2 1.78% Commercial and Savings Tianjin 10 P Cultivation (Zhiye)a 3.2 0.04% Specialized Tianjin 9 P Dah Kong Bank (Da kang) 4.4 0.06% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 14 P Dah Lai Commercial and Savings (Dalai Shangye Chuxu) 4.7 0.06% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 11 P Development Bank of Sichuan (Sichuan jianshe) 3.3 0.05% Specialized Chongqing 11 P Farmers Bank of China (Zhongguo nongmin) 346.6 4.76% Central Government Hankou 10 P Frontier (Bianye) 2.4 0.03% Specialized Tianjin 9 P Guangdong 304.3 4.18% Local Government Guangzhou 9 G Guotai Commercial and Savingsa 1.8 0.02% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 13 P Haining Farmers (Haining nongmin) 0.3 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Haining 9 P Hangzhou huidi n/a n/a Local Government Hangzhou 10 P Hankou Commercial (Hankou shangye) 2.9 0.04% Commercial and Savings Hankou 12 P Huaan Commercial and Savings n/a n/a n/a Shanghai 7 P Hubei Provincial (Hubei sheng) 39.6 0.54% Local government Hankou 9 P Jiading Commercial (Jiading shangye) 1.8 0.02% Commercial and Savings Jiading 11 P Jiangfeng Agricultural and Industrial (Jiafeng nonggong) 2.3 0.03% Agriculture/Labor Suzhou 6 P (continued) Table A1 (continued)

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Jiangsu Farmers (Jiangsu sheng nongmin) 37.8 0.52% Agriculture/Labor Zhenjiang 9 P Jiangsu yinhang 47.6 0.65% Local Government Shanghai 10 P Jianzhong Commerciala 1.2 0.02% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 10 P Kincheng (Jincheng) 194.7 2.68% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 8 P Land Bank of China (Zhongguo kenye) 36.0 0.49% Specialized Shanghai 11 P Longyou Local n/a n/a n/a Longyou 13 P Manufacturers Bank of China (Zhongguo guohuo) 65.5 0.90% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 18 P Mercantile Union (Jianghai) 9.2 0.13% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Ming Fo Union Commercial and Savings (Minfu) 1.9 0.03% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P National Commercial (Zhejiang xingye) 110.0 1.51% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P National Industrial Bank of China (Zhongguo shiye)b 65.5 0.90% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 18 P Ningbo Commercial and Savings (Siming)a 87.0 1.20% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 6 P People’s Bank of Chongqing (Chongqing pingmin) 2.2 0.03% Commercial and Savings Chongqing 14 P Pudong Commercial and Savings 4.7 0.06% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 16 P Salt Industry Bank of Sichuan (Chongqing chuanyan) 28.3 0.39% Specialized Chongqing 16 P Shantso (Shanzuo) 2.0 0.03% Commercial and Savings Qingdao 7 Q Shanghai Coal Merchants (Shanghai meiye) 3.3 0.05% Specialized Shanghai 11 P Shanghai Commercial and Savings 259.1 3.56% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 19 P Shanghai Guanghua Commercial and Savings 3.4 0.05% n/a Shanghai 12 P Shanghai Guomin Commercial and Savingsa 1.0 0.01% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Shanghai Mercantile (Hengli) 4.2 0.06% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 11 P Shanghai Silk Industry (Shanghai chouye) 12.3 0.17% Specialized Shanghai 16 P Shaoxing Commercial (Shaoxing shangye) 1.3 0.02% Commercial and Savings Shaoxing 11 P Shaoxing Farmers (Shaoxing nongmin) 0.2 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Shaoxing 11 P Table A1 (continued)

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Sheng County Agricultural and Industrial (Shengxian nonggong) 1.1 0.02% Agriculture/Labor Sheng 9 Z Shengxin Local Savings (Shengxin difang chuxu) n/a n/a n/a Shaoxing 10 Z Sichuan Commercial 17.4 0.24% Commercial and Savings Chongqing 7 P Sichuan Local (Sichuan difang) 39.5 0.54% n/a Chongqing 2 P Sichuan meifeng 37.5 0.52% Commercial and Savings Chongqing 6 P Sin Hua Trust and Savings (Xinhua xintuo chuxu) 39.1 0.54% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Sing Tai (Xintai) 3.7 0.05% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 10 P Ta Sun (Dasheng) 6.1 0.08% Commercial and Savings Tianjin 11 P Tah Chung (Dazhong) 35.2 0.48% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 13 P Taiping 2.5 0.03% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 11 P Tung Lai (Donglai) 26.2 0.36% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 13 P Union Commercial (Shanghai Tonghe) 8.3 0.11% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 14 P Wai Chung Commercial and Savings (Huizhong) 3.2 0.04% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 13 P Wenzhou Industrial (Ouhai shiye) 0.9 0.01% Agriculture/Labor Jiaxing 13 P (Ouhai) Woman’s Commercial and Savings (Shanghai nüzi) 7.1 0.10% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 14 P Wujin Commercial 4.2 0.06% Commercial and Savings Wujin 10 P Wuxian tianye 2.2 0.03% Specialized Suzhou (Wu) 13 P Xinfu Commercial and Savings 2.6 0.04% Commercial and Savings Suzhou 9 P Xuzhou National (Xuzhou guomin) 5.5 0.08% Commercial and Savings Xuzhou 10 P Yadong Commercial and Savingsa 0.7 0.01% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 P Yeong Dah (Yongda) 11.4 0.16% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 9 P Yien Yeh Commercial (Yanye) 132.8 1.83% Specialized Shanghai 9 P Yung Hung (Shanghai yongheng) 6.5 0.09% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 13 P Zhejiang Chu Fong (Zhejiang chufeng) 1.8 0.02% Commercial and Savings Hangzhou 13 P (continued) Table A1 (continued)

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Zhejiang Commercial (Liangzhe shangye) 2.9 0.04% Commercial and Savings Hangzhou 16 P Zhejiang Commercial and Savings 1.4 0.02% Commercial and Savings Hangzhou 23 P Zhejiang Construction (Zhejiang jianye) 6.3 0.09% Commercial and Savings Hangzhou 12 P Zhejiang Industrial (Zhejiang Shiye) 65.3 0.90% Agriculture/Labor Shanghai 18 P Zhejiang Provincial (Zhejiang difang) 52.2 0.72% Local Government Hangzhou 9 P Zhejiang Tien Yeh (Zhejiang dianye) 1.1 0.02% Specialized Hangzhou 15 P Subtotal 6,893.8 94.75% 1,176 Banks with No Interlocking Directorships Chongde Farmers (Chongde nongmin) 0.1 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Chongde 8 I Chung Yuen Commercial and Savings (Zhongyuan) 1.2 0.02% Commercial and Savings Tianjin 12 I City Bank of Nanjing (Nanjing shimin) 2.9 0.04% Local Government Nanjing 1 I Da Foo Commercial and Savings (Dafu) 7.2 0.10% Commercial and Savings Hankou 14 I Dah Dong Commercial (Datong) 0.9 0.01% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 10 I Hebei Provincial (Hebei sheng) n/a n/a Local Government Tianjin 1 I Jiashan Farmers (Jiashan nongmin) 0.1 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Jiashan 5 I Jinwuyong Local Farmers (Jinwuyong difang nongmin) 0.4 0.01% Agriculture/Labor Jinwuyong 9 I Nanfang Industrial Savings (Nanfang shiye chuxu)a 0.3 0.00% Commercial and Savings Guangzhou 7 I Nantong Commercial (Huitong) 0.5 0.01% Commercial and Savings Nantong 2 I Pingyang Farmers (Pingyang nongmin) 0.1 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Pingyang 9 I Qu County Farmers (Quxian nongmin) 0.1 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Qu 6 I Shaanxi Provincial (Shaanxi sheng) 18.3 0.25% Local Government Xi’an 1 I Shandong Min Sheng (Shandong shengminsheng) 18.6 0.26% Local Government Jinan 23 I Silk Bank (Siye) 1.1 0.02% Specialized Guangzhou 10 I Taicang 0.5 0.01% Commercial and Savings Taicang 5 I Table A1 (continued)

Assets (Millions Percentage of Headquarters Number Bank of yuan) Total Assets Type Location of Directors Network

Taipei n/a n/a n/a Shanghai 1 I Teng-Hsu Commercial and Savings (Dunxu) 2.0 0.03% Commercial and Savings Shanghai 12 I Xingzhong Commercial and Savings n/a n/a n/a Guangzhou 10 I Yidongpu Local Farmers (Yidongpu difang nongmin) 0.1 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Yidongpu 2 I Yongrui Farmers (Yongrui nongmin) 0.2 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Yongrui 12 I Young Brothers (Juxingcheng) 69.4 0.95% Commercial and Savings Chongqing 1 I Yu Tsin (Yujin) 2.7 0.04% Commercial and Savings Tianjin 8 I Yuyao Farmers (Yuyao nongmin) 0.2 0.00% Agriculture/Labor Yuyao 12 I Subtotal 126.9 1.74% 181 GRAND TOTAL 7,020.7 96.49% 1,357

Notes: Abbreviations in the far-right column indicate the following: P = primary network; G = Guangdong network; Q = Qingdao network; Z = Zhejiang Sheng County network, I = Isolate, no interlocking directorships. Source: Quanguo yinhang nianjian [Bank Annual], 1935, 1936, 1937; Quanguo yinhang zhiyuan zhinun [All China Directory of Bank Employees], 1936. a1935 figure. b1934 figure.