Myth and Reality in Chinese Financial Cliques in 1936 History and Methodology,” in Chinese Business Enterprise, ed. Brown, 1: 12. Figure 1 Left: Hierarchical factions with two central

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Myth and Reality in Chinese Financial Cliques in 1936

BRETT SHEEHAN

Much of current scholarly work argues that China and Chinesecommunities are distinguished by a culturally specific and uniquepattern of networking based on personal relations (guanxi), butthere is little agreement about whether such personal relations pro-duce discrete factions or more disbursed, weblike connections.The literature on banking networks is similarly unclear, and mostdiscussion has focused on regional groups, such as a clique madeup of natives from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, or shared pro-fessional values among bankers. None of these approaches ade-quately describes actual connections, and this case study providesa new and empirically broad approach that applies tools of net-work analysis to interlocking bank directorships in 1936. This ana-lysis shows the existence of twenty-four isolated banks; three verysmall, discrete, and regionally based groups; and one huge, diffuse,and weblike bank network that included virtually all Chinese bankassets and extended to most of China’s economically developedregions. This network had a multicenter core made up of denselylinked large banks and a number of small start-ups associatedwith prominent individuals. Diffuse connections also characterizednetworks of individual bankers, though dense ties existed eitheramong the most important bankers who each sat on numerousboards 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 theBusiness History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, pleasee-mail: [email protected].

doi:10.1093/es/khi058

BRETT SHEEHAN is an associate professor of history at the University ofWisconsin–Madison. Contact information: Department of History, 455 N. ParkStreet, Humanities 3211, Madison, WI 53706, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

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

Chinese Financial Cliques 453

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

Much of the scholarly work on China and Chinese communities suggeststhat a specific kind of network based on personal relations lies at theheart of economic, social, and political life. In this view Chinese societyis distinguished by a culturally specific and unique pattern of network-ing based on personal relations, what the Chinese call guanxi. Theseguanxi relations arise from “common shared attributes,” such as “local-ity (native place), kinship, coworker, classmate, sworn brotherhood, sur-name, and teacher-student,” or from a process of cultivating mutualobligations through patronage or the exchange of gifts and banquets.1

In spite of broad agreement in the literature about the importanceof personal relations on Chinese organization, there is little agree-ment on exactly what Chinese networks look like. On the one hand,there is the strong suggestion that networks based on guanxi result indiscrete 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 ofpatronage. In his model, each faction is generally discrete, and there arefew horizontal linkages between factions as illustrated by the two fac-tions (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,” Daedalus120 (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 ofSocial Relationships in China (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994). Of course, business networksbased on personal connections are not limited to China. There is a growing literatureon the importance of networks in the West, which stems primarily from MarkGranovettor’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 andIdentities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 13; Ichiro Numazaki,“The Role of Personal Networks in the Making of Taiwan’s guanxiqiye (RelatedEnterprises),” in Business Networks and Economic Development in East andSoutheast 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 inAndrew J. Nathan, “A Factionalism Model for CCP Politics,” China Quarterly 53(Jan.–March 1973): 34–66. Although this article concentrates on the post-1949period, 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 andRepublican China (Stanford, Calif., 1984), 157–66.

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hierarchical version of the “star” described by social network theory(see the right side of figure 1).4 On the other hand, the same literatureon Chinese networks also opens the possibility for horizontal or dif-fuse ties among individuals and subgroups.5 R. Ampalavanar Browneven 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 toindicate two different kinds of network formation. Analyses thatemphasize either the importance of native-place affinities (SusanMann 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 (sometimesthe same literature) also points either to common shared professionalvalues 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 SteveBorgatti’s Netdraw 1.38, Graph Visualization Software (Harvard, Mass.: AnalyticTechnologies, 2002). Nathan’s factions differ from the “star” because they arehierarchical. At lower levels in the hierarchy (nodes 1, 2, and 7), there are subsid-iary 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 ChineseBusiness History and Methodology,” in Chinese Business Enterprise, ed. Brown,1: 12.

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).


and Jiangsu—the so-called Zhejiang-Jiangsu financial clique, Jiangzhejinrong caituan—(Bergère, and especially Yao) such that other native-place factions were virtually irrelevant.7 In this case, shared valuesor dominance of one native-place clique could point to a more uni-fied structure.

Besides being open to differing interpretation on the shape of net-works, these previous banking histories have other limitations. InBergère’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 MannJones transformed into a Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique in the twentieth.There is no reason to assume that natives of these two provinceswould have a natural affinity for one another. In fact, the diary of thebanker Bian Baimei shows that considerable tension existed betweenthe two groups well into the twentieth century.8 Tension did not pre-clude cooperation, of course, but I have shown elsewhere that theconnections noted by Bergère between the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, andAnhui bankers in the 1910s and 1920s grew as much from involve-ment by them or their forebears in government-sponsored projects asfrom native-place affinities.9 As for regional groups, evidence ofcooperation in operations is strongest for the so-called Northern Four[banks], which institutionalized their collaboration through twoorganizations: one to issue paper money and one to take savings fromordinary individuals.10 With these and other regional groupings it isimportant to note that cooperation in lending and other operations

7. Susan Mann Jones, “The Ningpo Pang [Ningbo Bang] and Financial Powerat Shanghai,” in The Chinese City between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin andG. William Skinner (Stanford, Calif., 1974), 73; Yao Huiyuan, Jiangzhe jinrongcaituan 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 ShanghaiSojourners, 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, “RobberBarons or National Capitalists: Shanghai Bankers in Republican China,” RepublicanChina 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-SocietyRelations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 103–4.

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sometimes followed regional lines, but often did not. Likewise, mostlarge banks had multiple branches in many parts of the country, andlocal branches often cooperated with each other regardless of thelocations of their headquarters.11

In addition, most of the current literature on Chinese banking his-tory looks primarily at Shanghai and at the handful of prominentprofessional bankers whom Linsun Cheng has labeled “Schumpete-rian entrepreneurs.”12 Although Shanghai was indeed China’s mostimportant financial center, and these individuals did play importantroles, there is much to be gained by increasing the empirical scopeand broadening the lens through which we look. For example,because of the focus on large institutions, no one has yet adequatelyaddressed the question of why China had a small number of verylarge banks and a large number of very small banks.13 Likewise, focuson this small group of entrepreneurial bankers—the “usual sus-pects”—neglects many banking figures who were equally central tothe shape and form of financial networks.

Many factors thus point to the need for a fresh approach to analyz-ing Chinese networks in general and Chinese banking networks inparticular. Previous work that is consistent with either discrete fac-tions or a unified network, a banking literature that sees personalguanxi relations interacting with a developing sense of more imper-sonal professionalism, and limitations in the banking history litera-ture’s approach to networks all suggest that guanxi relations in Chinado not work in a mechanistic or easily predictable fashion. Chinesenetworks, including banking networks, vary based on specific timeand circumstances.14 The present article is an attempt to look at thehistory of banking networks with a broadly inclusive empiricalapproach that uses methodologies borrowed from sociological net-work analysis as applied to the interlocking directorships of 122banks in 1936.

What provided the basis for Chinese banking networks in theRepublican period (1911–1949)? Did personalistic guanxi ties, suchas family, native place, and patronage, outweigh impersonal linkssuch as profession and common political outlook? Did bank networks

11. See ibid., chap. 4, for evidence on government lending by the Tianjinbranches 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 structureof the system.

14. For a similar conclusion in relation to marketing networks, see ShermanCochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corpo-rations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000).


take the form of discrete factions, such as stars and concentric cir-cles, or were they diffuse, interconnected webs? Did networks haveregional foci, or did they extend nationally? The answers to thesequestions have dramatic implications for understanding the historyof China’s banking system, as well as the nature of Chinese political,economic, and social organization. Networks based on attributessuch as family and native place might be more insular than thosebased on profession or political orientation. Similarly, discrete fac-tional organization might limit cooperation between groups. Alterna-tively, connections in diffuse webs might not produce ties deepenough for trust and cooperation to develop, or geographicallydelimited networks might hinder economic integration betweenregions.

In brief, this analysis shows the existence of twenty-four isolatedbanks; three very small, discrete, and regionally based groups; andone huge, diffuse, and weblike bank network that included virtuallyall Chinese bank assets and extended to most of China’s economi-cally developed regions. At the core of this network, large bankslinked densely to other large banks regardless of the geographic loca-tion of their head offices or the native places of their principals. Atthe same time, the core also included a number of very small start-upsassociated with prominent individuals, though the list of importantbankers needs to be expanded beyond the few “usual suspects” dis-cussed in previous studies. Diffuse connections also characterizednetworks of individual bankers, though identifiably linked sub-groups arose based on two kinds of very different shared attributes.Dense ties existed either among the most important bankers whoeach sat on numerous boards of directors (suggesting associationsbased on business ties, professional interests, and the importance ofbanks) or among individuals who shared common native place,defined at the level of adjacent counties (suggesting the simultaneousexistence of strong but very local guanxi ties). Native place (guanxi)played an important role in network formation, but native-place net-works were neither inclusive nor discrete from one another. Otherattributes such as political connections, personal history, and sharedprofessional interests played equally important roles in defining net-work shapes. In the end, bank networks arose as much from histori-cal contingency as from cultural predisposition.

Research Design

By 1936 China had a large and thriving financial industry composedof modern banks based on foreign designs and indigenous financial

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institutions called qianzhuang or yinhao.15 For analysis here, I willfocus on the modern banking sector, which had the vast majority ofChina’s financial assets. In this modern banking sector China had asmall number of very large banks—many with nationwide branch net-works—and a large number of very small banks (see appendix). Fourof the large modern banks—the Central Bank, the Bank of China, theBank of Communications, and the Farmers Bank of China—had closeassociation with the central government through historical ties andoutright ownership and control imposed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nation-alist government.16 Provincial and municipal governments also hadcaptive banks, but many other banks were privately owned.

In order to understand associational practices in this dynamic sec-tor, I will use network analysis, which examines actors and relations,rather than the conventional approach, which looks at actors andattributes.17 For business actors and relations, a corporate network is“an organizational form that has grown up ‘between’ markets andhierarchies and [that] possess a ‘structure’ just as markets andbureaucracies do.”18 The forms of linkages in networks can includecommercial relations, ownership, or connections among individualsinvolved in firms such as with interlocking directorships. Interlockingdirectorships, in particular, have been widely studied because infor-mation 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 thejoint-stock, limited liability form of organization; large, often nationwide, branchstructures; much larger customer bases; buildings that used foreign architecturalstyles; 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 thebanking industry, see also Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the ChineseBourgeoisie, 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 RepublicanChina (Hong Kong, forthcoming), especially the chapters by Chan, Cheng, Köll, Lee,and Mickey; and Zhaojin Ji, A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise andDecline of China’s Finance Capitalism (Armonk, N.Y., 2003) chaps. 4, 6.

16. I have rendered bank names into English according to the conventionsused 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 formedpart of bank names. Second, I have also used Hanyu Pinyin for banks that did notuse a standard transliteration at the time. Hanyu Pinyin for the Chinese names ofthe banks can be found in the appendix.

17. Robert A. Hanneman, “Introduction to Social Networks,” included withUCINET software, 2001, p. 3.

18. Paul Windolf, Corporate Networks in Europe and the United States(Oxford, U.K., 2002), 53.


ownership, and that is certainly true in the case of Republican-periodbanks in China. Interlocking directorships arise under three scenarios.First, interlocks can stem from relations between or among people thatthen extend to the corporations with which they are involved. Sec-ond, they arise from relations between or among firms that are thencemented by positions on boards. Third, parties unknown to the prin-cipals of firms, perhaps because of their political influence, are invited(or, where politics outweighs property rights, invite themselves) to siton the boards of directors of two or more firms. In this way they createa link where none existed previously. Regardless of how the relation-ships arise, the corporate network that results is more than the sum ofits parts. Interlocking directorships provide a direct line of communi-cation between two or more firms, providing each with information onthe other that would be otherwise unavailable.19 In addition, personalconnections might create or strengthen business ties or, conversely,business ties might create or enhance personal relations. One caveat isin order. The analysis of interlocking directorships shows structureand not behavior. It provides, in the words of Paul Windolf, a “map ofopportunities” but “does not provide us with an evaluation of theactual use of . . . power, only its potential.”20

For this analysis of the banking sector in early twentieth-centuryChina, I use data on interlocking directorships contained in the 1936All China Directory of Bank Employees, published by the Bank ofChina.21 Use of this source provides two major advantages. First,unlike many lists of directors, the directory includes information onnative 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 TheSociology 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 TwoHistorical Archive in Nanjing, the Shanghai Municipal Archive, and the TianjinMunicipal Archive, and published sources such as Fu Runhua, ed., Zhongguodangdai mingren zhuan [Biographies of Contemporary Chinese Figures] (Shanghai,1948); Han Min, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo renwu zhi [Gazetteer of ContemporaryChinese] (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., Zhongguojinxiandai renwu minghao da cidian [Great Dictionary of Names and Aliases ofContemporary and Modern China] (Hangzhou, 1993); and Zhejiang renwu jianzhi,xia [Brief Gazetteer of Zhejiang People, vol. 2] (Hangzhou, 1984).

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currently available sources, the directory provides a set of directors’names from the broadest population of modern banks. The 1937 BankAnnual lists a total of 164 modern Chinese banks in 1936 (see table 1).The Directory of Bank Employees includes information on directorsfor 122 of these banks, including the four central government banks,as well as many of the commercial and savings and specializedbanks. It also includes a handful of banks operated by provincial andlocal governments, but no overseas Chinese banks (see appendix).The 122 banks in the sample represent 74 percent of China’s banksand approximately 96.5 percent of the 7.3 billion yuan in assetsowned by all 164.23 Thus, the sample comprises a large majority ofthe banks and the vast majority of bank assets.

Although the 1936 directory has many advantages, it also presentscertain problems. Most important, it was published in 1936, after theevents of 1935 when the Nationalist government nationalizedChina’s two largest commercial banks, the Bank of China and theBank of Communications, as well as a few smaller ones like theNational Industrial Bank. In addition, by the mid-1930s, in part dueto the threatening Japanese presence in the Northeast, many northernbanks had moved their headquarters to Shanghai. The earlier patternwhere Shanghai was first among equals of China’s financial centershad shifted, and Shanghai’s dominance was firmly established.24 Theprimacy of Shanghai as a financial center is clear from the locationsof the headquarters of the banks in the sample. Almost half (57) hadtheir 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.

Table 1 Number of Modern Banks in 1936

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

Type of Bank Number of Banks in 1936

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


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 thanduring earlier periods.

Table 2 Locations of Headquarters of Banks in Sample

Source: Data presented in the appendix of this article.

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%

Figure 2 Geographic Nodes of Bank Headquarters, 1936.

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In order to analyze these networks, I will use three concepts fromsocial network analysis: connectedness, centrality, and density.‘Connectedness’ simply refers to links among banks. Any directorwho sits on more than one bank board creates a link between thosebanks. Banks need not be connected directly by sharing a commondirector 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 produceconnectedness. Banks or individuals with no connections to otherbanks are considered ‘isolates.’ ‘Centrality’ refers to the number ofconnections to any one member of a network. The higher the numberof connections or the greater the number of paths of connection thatcross in a given node, the greater the centrality of that node (such aswith 1, 2, F1, F2, and A in figure 1). These central nodes can play keyroles in lines of information exchange, patronage, business transac-tions, or capital flow. ‘Density’ refers to the number of actual connec-tions as a percentage of possible connections in any network.26 Highdensity among a particular group shows that its members are moreclosely 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 byindividuals who had seats on two or more bank boards. In this case,the banks comprise the nodes in network diagrams and the individu-als the connecting lines. On the other hand, the banks created linksamong a network of individuals. In this case, the nodes are people,and the lines are banks. I will begin from the standpoint of networksof banks, and then consider that of bankers as individuals.

Bank Networks

Previous work on Chinese banking history suggests three possibili-ties about the shape of bank networks. First, the existence of regionalnetworks, if reflected in interlocking directorships, should show upas discrete groups or subgroups. The most common examples of thissort 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 ofbanks – 1] / 2); see Scott, Social Network Analysis, chap. 4. Most density figuresand other network analysis measures were derived using S. P. Borgatti, M. G.Everett, and L. C. Freeman, UCINET for Windows: Software for Social NetworkAnalysis (Harvard, Mass.: Analytic Technologies, 2002).


and Shanghai Commercial and Savings).27 Yao Huiyuan takes thegeographic approach further by positing the existence of four regionalgroupings. In his scheme, there was a North China group centered onBeijing and Tianjin (including the Northern Four), a South Chinagroup centered on Guangzhou and Hong Kong, a West China groupcentered on Sichuan, and a Zhejiang-Jiangsu group centered onShanghai (including the Southern Three).28 Second, the banking coupof 1935 could have been a decisive influence, and government-affiliated banks might make up the network’s core(s). Third, thosebanks associated with high-profile bankers, the “usual suspects,”might play a salient role either separately, as centers of competingsubgroup “stars,” or together as a multicenter core for the entire net-work. None of these options, however, adequately explains the shapeof Chinese banking networks.

Of the 122 banks in the sample, 98 or 80.3 percent had at least oneinterlocking director relationship with another bank, leaving 24 banksas independent isolates with no interlocking directorships. This pro-portion represents a high level of inclusiveness, with less than one-fifthof the banks unconnected to any other bank.29 The ninety-eight con-nected banks broke down into four groups. Three of these were smallgroups that roughly corresponded with geographical division. In the farsouth in Guangdong province, two banks (Guangdong and CantonMunicipal 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 dis-crete network, though not in the same location as the northern networkin Beijing and Tianjin centered on the Northern Four, as posited by YaoHuiyuan. And in Zhejiang province in the lower Yangzi river deltaregion—in the middle of the most dense collection of interconnectedbanks in China—two banks in Sheng County made up their own net-work. The remaining ninety-one banks were connected, directly andindirectly, to each other in what I call the primary network.

The members of this primary network did not break into easilyidentifiable subgroups based on the location of their headquarters,either. In fact, the headquarters of the primary network banksstretched across all geographic regions, except for the far south inGuangdong province and the economically undeveloped southwestand northwest (see figure 2). Even the Sichuan banks in the west

27. The “Northern Four” was something of a misnomer since China and SouthSea had its headquarters in Shanghai from the beginning. On these two bankgroups see Cheng, Banking in Modern China, 46–52.

28. Yao, Jiangzhe, 7–8.29. On inclusiveness, see Scott, Social Network Analysis, 69.

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(Yao Huiyuan’s fourth geographical group) were connected to themain network, though the largest Sichuan bank, the Young BrothersBank, was an isolate connected neither to its Sichuan brethren nor toany other banks in China.

Likewise, government affiliation of some banks did not signifi-cantly affect the shape of the primary network. The four central gov-ernment banks were all very “central” (having a large number ofdirect connections), but they did not constitute the center of a starsystem, nor did they connect discrete cliques. As a test, I eliminatedthem from the sample and then tested the remaining banks for inclu-siveness and density. Elimination of these four banks did not signifi-cantly affect the shape of bank linkages, and only one small set ofthree, relatively unimportant banks broke off into a discrete group.The remaining eighty-four banks (ninety-one initial banks minusfour central government banks minus the three banks no longer con-nected) 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 shapeof the primary network, though with some surprises not anticipatedin the current literature. Some, but not all, banks that were closelyassociated with the prominent bankers well known from the currentliterature had a high level of centrality. Table 3 shows the twenty-five banks in the primary network with the most direct connectionsto other banks. Besides the four government banks, the other mostcentral banks are an eclectic mix. Zhejiang Industrial Bank, one ofthe Southern Three but not the largest of them, is present, as areContinental (the only member of the Northern Four with its head-quarters still in Tianjin and not the largest of the Northern Four), SinHua 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 ofthe remaining two banks of the Southern Three and the remainingthree of the Northern Four seems surprising. The managers of thesebanks (such as Chen Guangfu, Hu Bijiang, Wu Dingchang, and ZhouZuomin) are normally included among the small group of elite bank-ers at the center of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique. In contrast, the listdoes have some unexpected inclusions. Most surprising, half of thetwenty-five most connected banks are small newcomers such asChung Wai and Shanghai Silk Industry.30

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


The presence of so many small banks among the most centrallyconnected derives in part from their association with prominentbankers. New bank foundings increased dramatically in China in theperiod from 1928 to 1935.31 Not all were as highly connected as theones in table 3, but many were. Indeed, some of the biggest names inbanking circles appear on their boards. Tang Shoumin, president ofthe Bank of Communications, Chen Guangfu, president of ShanghaiCommercial and Savings Bank, and Qian Yongming, former presidentof the Bank of Communications, all appear on the boards of some ofthese small banks. Surprisingly, the prominent bankers usually associ-ated with the Zhejiang-Jiangsu financial clique were sometimes morelikely to come together on the boards of these small new banks than onthose of their larger and better-known enterprises. Just as notable, theinclusion of others of these small banks in table 3 is due to their

31. Ibid., A8.

Table 3 The Twenty-Five Most Central Banks

Sources: See footnote 22.

BankNumber of

Interlocking Banks% of Total 519 Connections

Rank of Total Assets

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

16 3.1% 66

466 SHEEHAN

association with equally important, though less well known figuressuch as Yu Zuoting, a prominent Ningbo financier, and Du Yuesheng,a famous gangster. In fact, Du appears on the boards of no fewer thanfour 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 identifiableregional subgroups, did not focus on government banks, and did notexactly replicate the population of the “usual suspects” of Zhejiangand Jiangsu bankers, what did it look like? Figure 3 shows a graphicrepresentation of the shape of the primary network. The fifteen circlesrepresent the fifteen largest banks by asset size. For clarity, ties amongthese fifteen banks and bank names are not shown. In the circle of larg-est banks, the four central government banks are arrayed across thetop. The Northern Four are on the right, and the Southern Three are onthe left. The remaining four largest banks are on the bottom. With theexception of the Sichuan banks, which constitute a virtually separategroup in the upper left-hand corner, there are no visible factions orsubsets. In acknowledging the existence of a “Sichuan group,” how-ever, it is also important to remember that the largest bank in Sichuanhad no interlocking ties with any other banks, and the remaining smallbanks there linked to the primary network. The shape of the primarynetwork is complex, but three organizing principles are evident.

First, connections among banks in the primary network werewidespread but not particularly dense. If all ninety-one banks haddirect links to all (ninety) other banks, then density would be 100percent. In reality, only 519 connections out of a possible 4,095existed, or about 12.7 percent. Comparison is difficult, but to put thisfigure in perspective it can be noted that studies of interlockingdirectorships among very large corporations in the 1970s showeddensities that ranged from a low of 6.7 percent in Great Britain to14.2 percent in the United States to a very high 66.7 percent in Belgium/Luxembourg.32 The relative low density of connections among thelarge number of connected banks in the Chinese case shows that mostconnections were indirect. Banks most often did not connect directlyto each other, but through mutual connections to other banks.

Second, although connections were relatively disbursed, theywere not distributed completely evenly. Some banks had more con-nections than others, and a closer look at table 3 shows that central-ity 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 inSociology of Elites, ed. Scott, 1: 3–38.

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468 SHEEHAN

twenty-five. The primary network then, had multiple core bankswith 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 net-work as a whole) were either association with prominent individuals orsize of assets. I have already discussed the former, so let me elucidate thelatter. Large banks preferred to establish links with other large banks.Density of connections among large banks is much greater than amongthe members of the primary network as a whole, and the density of con-nections generally decreases as ever smaller banks are added to the sam-ple. China’s seven largest banks from the primary network each had2 percent or more of total banking system assets: China (24.8 percent),Central (16.9 percent), Communications (12.5 percent), Farmers Bank ofChina (4.8 percent), Shanghai Commercial and Savings (3.6 percent),Kincheng (2.7 percent), and China and South Sea (2.1 percent). Theseseven banks include all four central government banks, one bank fromthe Southern Three, and two banks from the Northern Four. In spite ofthis diversity, these banks had very dense connections with each other;fifteen out of a possible twenty-one ties existed among these sevenbanks, for a density of 71.4 percent—many times the 12.7 percent den-sity for the primary network as a whole. Expanding the subset of largebanks to the fifteen banks with approximately 1 percent or more of assetsshows lower density, though it is still very high at 52.4 percent. The con-nections between these fifteen large banks have been left out of figure 3for clarity because if present, the center would appear virtually black.

Thus from the standpoint of banks, in 1936 one enormous, looselyconnected network of ninety-one banks accounted for virtually allbank assets, and the headquarters of these banks extended from thelower Yangzi region west to Sichuan and north to Beijing and Tianjin.This network does not fit with previous notions of organization bygeography or native place, and its shape is much more amorphousthan either the factional or star models would predict. The banks ofthe primary network were interwoven in a weblike structure that ismore dense in the center and less so in the periphery. It was morelike a nebula or a galaxy than a star.

Banker Networks

Making individuals the nodes of our network analysis, with thebanks as the connecting lines, creates a somewhat different picture ofbanking connections. This is partly because directors who sit on thesame bank board are already linked in a network of individuals, regard-less of interlocking directorships with other banks. For example, the


Bank of China had twenty-seven directors. Each one of them had a tieto the other twenty-six regardless of ties between the Bank of Chinaand other banks. Shifting the focus to bankers, then, increases thenumber of nodes in the network substantially and gives insight intonetworks within bank boards, as well as between them.

The existing literature plus the preceding analysis of bank networkssuggest four possible lines of inquiry to investigate the shape of net-works of bankers. First, the division of China’s banks into three smallregional groups and one huge primary network might correlate withthe native places of the directors of the banks involved. Second, theshape of the network of bank directors associated with primary net-work banks is likely to echo the shape of the primary network itself.On the one hand, this would indicate a broad set of highly disbursedconnections. On the other hand, it would also point to the presence ofa multiple-center core. Third, the individuals at the core of the pri-mary network may have included a clique of natives of Zhejiang andJiangsu provinces, though we need to be sure to look beyond the smalllist 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 (dongshizhang), assistant chairman (fu dongshi zhang), standing director(changwu dongshi), director (dongshi), or outside auditor (jiancharen).34 As expected, connections among directors were both highlyinclusive and very dispersed. Out of all 1,039 individuals, only 179, orabout 17 percent, sat on the boards of isolated banks. The remaining 860directors were part of multibank networks, 801 in the primary network,29 in the Shandong group, 15 in the Guangdong group, and another 15in the Sheng County group in Zhejiang. In all, only 1,363 connectionsexisted out of more than half a million possibilities for a density of lessthan 1 percent. Remarkably, only 161 people, about 15 percent of thetotal, held two or more directorships with an average of three seats each.

33. Mann Jones, “Ningpo Pang,” 73–96, emphasizes the need for traditional tiesto change; Bergère, “Shanghai Bankers’ Association,” 15–34, concludes that tradi-tional solidarities reinforced professional values; McElderry, “Confucian Capital-ism,” 401–16, McElderry, “Robber Barons,” 52–67, and Cheng, Banking in ModernChina, especially chap. 7, focus on shared values with less attention to native place.

34. I have included the position of outside auditor because these individualsattended board meetings and, theoretically, approved the reliability of financialstatements. Interviews with elderly retired bankers in Tianjin in 1995 indicate thatthe position was sometimes honorary, but nonetheless it represented important con-nections for the bank. For ease of reference, they will be referred to as ‘directors’ inthis article. It is possible that many of the directors linked these banks to other com-mercial or industrial networks, but that is beyond the scope of the present article.

470 SHEEHAN

Two of the three small regional bank networks correspond closelywith native place, but isolated banks drew their directors from a vari-ety of places. Almost all of the directors at the banks of the Qingdaonetwork were Shandong natives, and all the Sheng County network’sdirectors were from Zhejiang. There is too little information availableto make a conclusion about the Guangdong network. These regionalnetworks did not operate entirely exclusively, however, and theQingdao network also had one director from each of four other prov-inces: Anhui, Hebei, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. In addition, the 179directors at isolated banks came from at least eleven different prov-inces, with significant numbers from Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hebei,and Jiangsu (30, 26, 14, and 10, respectively).

Likewise, the primary network drew directors from a variety ofplaces, a total of eighteen different provinces, though both this diver-sity and its size make further investigation necessary. Native provinceis 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 representa-tion 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 signi-ficant. Did they constitute a clique? I tested various groups from thepopulation of primary network directors and discovered that therewere two kinds of subgroups in which the density of connections issignificantly greater than the group as a whole. Density rises amongdirectors who held seats on large numbers of banks (directors withhigher centrality, whom we might call ‘important’ bankers) and amongthose individuals who shared native place defined at the local level.

To begin with the former, I will use number of directorships as ameasure of importance; individuals who sat on the boards of threebanks were more important than those who sat on two, individualswith four directorships were more important still, and so forth. Mir-roring the shape of the primary network, the connectedness, or cen-trality, of directors decreased in increments, as shown in table 4.This table includes all nineteen directors with five or more seats, butthis same pattern continues for directors with fewer seats each. Noone banker or group of bankers was central to the network, but manybankers had gradually decreasing degrees of centrality. The level ofimportance of directors correlates positively with density of ties. The161 directors who had two or more seats had a density of connec-tions of 10.6 percent, the sixty-one individuals who held three ormore seats had density of 27.4 percent, and the nineteen directorsfrom table 4 who held five or more seats had very dense connections,almost 70 percent, thirty-one times the density of directors in the


primary network as a whole (2.2 percent). Clearly there existed a groupof important and densely connected individuals, numbering 161highly connected directors and from approximately twenty to sixtyextremely highly connected directors, at the core of the primary net-work of bankers. These important bankers did not constitute a dis-crete clique in themselves, nor did they act as links among discretefactions. The network of directors, like the banks they served, had amultiple-center core with higher density among directors with themost seats and lower density among directors who had fewer seats.

Native place stands out as the second salient shared attribute asso-ciated with increased density of ties among bank directors, thoughonly 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 Jiangsuprovinces was only slightly higher than that of the group of primarynetwork directors as a whole; however, dramatic pockets of denseconnections exist at the local level. Directors from groups of adjacentcounties, or prefectures, are much more densely connected thanindividuals who share common province.35 Density of ties amongdirectors from the six prefectures that supplied the most bank

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

Table 4 Directors with Five or More Seats


Name Number of Seats Native Province

Qian Yongming 13 ZhejiangChen Guangfu 11 JiangsuDu Yuesheng 11 JiangsuYu Zuoting 11 ZhejiangTang Shoumin 9 JiangsuHu Bijiang 7 JiangsuXu Chenmian 7 ZhejiangJin Boshun 6 ZhejiangQin Zuze 6 ZhejiangXu Boxiong 6 ZhejiangZhang Jia’ao 6 JiangsuFeng Gengguang 5 GuangdongFeng Songqing 5 ZhejiangLi Ming 5 ZhejiangLin Zujin 5 JiangsuSong Ziliang 5 GuangdongYe Yu 5 ZhejiangZhang Xiaolin 5 ZhejiangZhu Dechuan 5 Jiangsu

472 SHEEHAN

directors ranged from a low of 8.7 percent for Suzhou natives to a highof 50 percent for people from Zhenjiang. Even at the low end of therange, however, density of connections was more than twice that of theZhejiang-Jiangsu group as a whole. The map in figure 4 shows agraphic representation of the native-prefecture distribution of the manydirectors who came from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. Density ofconnections among bankers with shared native place reached levelscomparable to that of the ties among important bankers only when thatnative place was defined very locally at the prefectural level.

Cliques among bankers in the primary network arose, then, amongbankers from adjacent counties or among important, or elite, bankerswho each held seats on many different banks. The former suggestslocal kinds of connections, such as dialect, early schooling, and fam-ily. In addition, there might have been a certain kind of culturalaffinity that people from these local areas shared. For example, BianBaimei commented in his diary on the abilities of Lin Fengbao, anassistant manager who worked under Bian, by writing, “if he couldadd a generous disposition, he could have unlimited achievements.Unfortunately, his Wuxi attitude is too heavy, [he] pays attention tothe little and loses the big, [he’s] unavoidably selfish, and abuses oth-ers’ trust, having the tendency to have such a fault.”36 Bian, a nativeof Yangzhou in Jiangsu, clearly had embraced a stereotypical view of

36. Bian Baimei, “Diary,” 12 June 1927.

Table 5 Densities of Banker Networks


Number of Directors

Density of Connections

Population as a Whole 1,039 0.3%Primary Network Directors 801 2.2%

Importance and DensityBankers 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 PlaceZhejiang-Jiangsu Bankers 339 4.2%

Prefectural BreakdownsZhenjiang (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%


his Jiangsu brethren just down the Yangzi River in Wuxi, in Suzhouprefecture. This stereotype did not keep Lin from holding a veryresponsible position under Bian. In fact, Suzhou prefecture providedmany more bank directors than did Yangzhou (see figure 4). Republi-can period bankers such as Bian clearly had a mental map of nativeplace attributes that helped to inform their behaviors, but that mapwas defined very locally.

Connections among important bankers, in contrast, suggest sharedprofessional interests. Many of the names in table 4 are familiar to

Figure 4 Jiangsu and Zhejiang Prefectures with the Most Directors.

474 SHEEHAN

scholars of Republican-period banking. Chen Guangfu, Hu Bijiang, LiMing, Qian Yongming, Tang Shoumin, and Zhang Jia’ao comprisethe core members of what Bergère called the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique.Many of them studied together in Japan, and all considered them-selves professional bankers. Work by Bergère, McElderry, and Chenghas talked about shared values among these “usual suspects,” butwhat about the surprises among the list of important bankers? Atleast five names on this list stand out as unusual: Yu Zuoting, FengGengguang, Song Ziliang, Du Yuesheng, and Zhang Xiaolin. Theimportance of each in banking networks stems from historical con-tingencies, showing the serendipitous ways that networks reflectboth their past (what some might call path dependency) and theirpresent political and economic environment. In order to understandthe kinds of social capital accumulated by the surprises from table 4,I will discuss brief biographies of four bankers, including one mem-ber 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 provincein 1880. He began work fairly young in a customs brokerage in Hang-zhou in neighboring Zhejiang. By studying English at night, he wasable to pass the examination required to work in the postal service.He went to the United States as part of the Chinese delegation to theSaint Louis Exposition in 1904, and he stayed to study, eventuallyearning a degree in business from the Wharton School of Manage-ment at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to China in 1910and, among other jobs, worked as the general manager of the JiangsuBank. In 1915 he started the Shanghai Commercial and SavingsBank, which became one of the largest and most successful banksin China.37

Chen is the only one of the four individuals profiled here who isnormally mentioned in the literature as one of the “usual suspects”

37. In addition to the sources mentioned in footnote 22, biographical informa-tion 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 RepublicanChina, 4 vols. (New York, 1967–79), 192–96.


of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique. He shares many of the attributes ofthis cohort (which includes Zhang Jia’ao, Qian Yongming, ZhouZuomin, Wu Dingchang, Sun Yuanfang, and Li Ming). He was edu-cated in the modern school system that emerged in China at the begin-ning of the twentieth century, and then he studied abroad, though mostof these bankers studied in Japan rather than America. He worked forgovernment bureaus or government-sponsored banks at an early pointin his career. He was an early participant in the activities of the bank-ers’ associations that emerged in China in the 1910s. These experiencesand attributes provided the accumulated social capital that led elevenbanks to have Chen as a board member in 1936, and the story would besimilar for the other bankers usually mentioned together with Chen asthe core membership of the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique.

The On-the-Job Educated Professional

Yu Zuoting, no relation to his more famous Zhejiang compatriot YuXiaqing, generally has a lower profile in the literature than otherprofessional bankers of the Republican period, but he sat on as manyboards as Chen Guangfu (eleven). In addition, social network theoryhas a measure of centrality called ‘betweenness,’ which measures notjust the number of direct links to an individual, but “views an actoras being in a favored position to the extent that the actor falls on thegeodesic paths between other pairs of actors in the network.”38 Bythis measure Yu Zuoting was the most ‘between’ bank director in1936. In spite of this centrality, biographical information on Yu isvery scarce.39 Born in 1888, he was a native of Zhenhai County inNingbo prefecture. His father practiced Chinese medicine, but Yuhimself became an apprentice in a merchant shop after studying at atraditional-style school. At the age of twenty, he went to work for anindigenous bank and soon went to Shanghai. Throughout his life Yuheld a variety of positions in commercial and financial enterprisesnormally associated with Ningbo businessmen, as well as in theShanghai and Ningbo Chambers of Commerce. He moved easilybetween the indigenous and modern banking sectors and even spent ayear 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 inShanghai and Ningbo. Interestingly, his family did not migrate toShanghai, 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.

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Yu represents a very different set of life experiences than the elitebankers normally associated with the Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique, andyet 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-fivebank directors in 1936 known to be from Ningbo. Four isolated direc-tors 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 otherNingbo natives. In the upper right-hand corner there are five individ-uals of the surname Cai who all served on the board of an isolatedbank: Teng-Hsu Commercial and Savings Bank. Once again, in spiteof their native place, they had no interlocking connections with themain Ningbo network composed of the remaining twenty-six indi-viduals in the center of the diagram. Like bank and banker networks,the Ningbo network had a number of more centrally connected indi-viduals at its core and a periphery of somewhat less connected peo-ple. Centrally connected directors, such as Yu Zuoting, Qin Zuze,and Chen Shengwu, appear to be the center of “stars,” but they wereclosely connected stars rather than discrete factions. In sum, sharednative place facilitated but did not guarantee connectedness in thenetwork, and centrality apparently grew out of life experiences andsocial capital, such as that accumulated by Yu Zuoting. His socialcapital, however, came from very different sources than that of ChenGuangfu and his cohort.

The Politician Turned Banker

Like Yu Zuoting, Feng Gengguang is also overlooked in mostaccounts of Republican-period bank cliques, so his story adds inter-esting insights.40 Feng was one of only two Guangdong nativesamong the nineteen individuals with five or more directorships intable 4. The other Guangdong native, Song Ziliang, was brother to theformer Nationalist finance minister Song Ziwen, and his presence asa central figure grew out of his political connections. In contrast,Feng Gengguang had little connection with the Nationalist govern-ment of the 1930s, nor did he have a background in commerce likemany of the Guangdong natives who worked as compradors for for-eign 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 biographi-cal note in Yao Songling, Zhonghang fuwu ji [A Record of Service at the Bank ofChina] (Taipei, 1968), 114–15. See also Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times, 80, 102.

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Japan. Returning to China, he worked in a number of military andofficial positions across China, during which time he came to knowthe militarist, and later warlord, Feng Guozhang (no relation). WhenFeng Guozhang became acting president in 1918, his finance minis-ter and former head of the Bank of China, Wang Kemin, chose FengGengguang to be president of the Bank of China. Feng Gengguangremained with the Bank of China in various capacities for the nextforty-five years, outlasting both of his patrons, and surviving the shiftof the government south from Beijing to Nanjing in 1928.

It is hard to understand the basis for the social capital that Fenghad in the 1930s. Feng’s political connections obviously helped hisinitial entry into banking, but he was somehow able to outlast andmove beyond this patronage faction. His experience contrasts withthat of Wang Kemin, one of those patrons important in Feng’s earlycareer. Wang had also served as president of the Bank of China dur-ing the Warlord period, and in 1936 his political fortunes were onthe rise because he was appointed to the Hebei-Chahar PoliticalAffairs Commission, an important Nationalist government organ innorth China. In spite of this background, however, Wang did nothave the place in interlocking bank networks that Feng did. In 1936Wang served on the boards of two small banks located in Beijing andTianjin: the Commercial Guarantee Bank of Zhili and the FrontierBank. In contrast, Feng sat on the boards of five banks, the Bank ofChina, the Commercial Guarantee Bank of Zhili, the Agricultural andIndustrial Bank of China, Sin Hua Trust and Savings, and that bas-tion of Zhejiang-Jiangsu bankers, the Jiangsu Bank. (The JiangsuBank had eight directors whose native place is known. Five camefrom Jiangsu, two from Zhejiang, and only Feng came from else-where.) Unlike Chen Guangfu and Yu Zuoting, Feng had little profes-sional experience or education to bring to the banks he served, andhe had not engaged in the day-to-day management of operations as abranch manager or high-level executive. Even when he was presidentof the Bank of China, Zhang Jia’ao handled day-to-day operations asvice president. Feng was an early investor in Continental Bank, oneof the Northern Four, but he did not have a connection as directorwith this group of northern banks.41 In sum, his career appears moreserendipitous than that of either Chen Guangfu or Yu Zuoting. FengGengguang serves as proof of the flexibility and sometimes ad hocnature of Chinese networks.

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


The Gangster

Du Yuesheng had the most unusual career of all the bankers profiledhere.42 He was born in 1888 in Shanghai’s rural hinterland. Hereceived virtually no formal education but became an apprentice in ashop in Shanghai. Eventually, he found his calling in organizedcrime, and he worked his way up to become a leading member ofShanghai’s Green Gang. In that capacity, he formed a working rela-tionship with the Nationalist government, achieving a certain levelof legitimacy, at least on the surface. In spite of the fact that DuYuesheng sat on the boards of eleven banks—as many as both ChenGuangfu and Yu Zuoting—in 1936 he had had only a short history asa member of banking networks. His emergence onto the financialscene in the early 1930s derived from the new respectability pro-vided by his connections to the Nationalist government and themerging of gangster and respectable society. He played a particularlyimportant role in the “coup” of 1935, when the Nationalist govern-ment took over much of the banking system, by providing some ofthe coercive threat that made that coup possible.43 It is his presenceon the boards of a half a dozen small start-up banks that leads me toassume that such banks must have been immensely profitable totheir principals.

Du serves as the prime example of the outsider who achieves aprominent place within a network based on social capital indepen-dent of that network, though he was not the only gangster in the sam-ple. Du Yuesheng sat on a total of eleven bank boards, and anassociate of his, Zhang Xiaolin, sat on five boards, as seen in table 4,showing the “gangsterization” of certain aspects of Nationalist periodsociety that had begun in the early 1930s.44 Most accounts of banknetworks simply ignore Du and Zhang. It is true that they did not fitthe mold of the bankers normally considered in the literature, butthen neither did Yu Zuoting or Feng Gengguang. In fact, ZhangXiaolin had tight links to the network of Ningbo bankers, as shown infigure 5. In analyzing networks, it is important to maintain empiricalbreadth and inclusiveness. Focus on Chen Guangfu and his cohortprovides 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: Politicsand Organized Crime, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1996).

43. On the events of 1935, see Parks Coble, Shanghai Capitalists and theNationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 172–87; andSheehan, Trust in Troubled Times, chap. 6.

44. Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995),254–55.

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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 whatextent did operations and capital holding follow the structures ofinterlocking directorships? Cheng Linsun has partial evidence toshow that a number of private Shanghai banks purchased shares inthe Bank of China and the Bank of Communications during the late1910s and 1920s.45 I suspect that this pattern of capital holdinghelped determine the structure of the primary network. Very little isknown about the actual operations of banks, though, and much workneeds to be done on both large banks in the core and the smallerbanks in both the core and the periphery. An extension of this ques-tion would follow the structure of networks beyond the bankingsector. 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 theRepublican Chinese economy? Why did so many small banks exist ina financial system dominated by a small number of very large banks?Third, how did the structure of Chinese banking networks change overtime? Did discrete regional groups slowly merge into the primary net-work, or did the roots of the core exist from the beginning? How didZhejiang and Jiangsu natives come to be so dominant? Although lowerYangzi capital accumulation was important, that was not the wholeanswer. I have argued elsewhere that the Bank of China and the Bankof Communications provided an important training ground for profes-sional bankers who went on to work in other banks, but that still doesnot explain the dominance of Zhejiang and Jiangsu bankers.46 Fourth,and finally, the structure of the banking network outlined here showsdramatic interpenetration of political and economic power. Did thisrepresent power of the financial clique in government, power of thegovernment over the financial clique, or some third pattern?

In spite of these many unanswered questions, the analysis heredoes lead to several conclusions. Most important, current under-standings of regional groupings or a “Zhejiang-Jiangsu” clique aresimply inadequate to describe the reality of Republican-period finan-cial networks in 1936. This article has taken a more comprehensiveapproach 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.


bankers under study and by applying some of the techniques ofsocial network analysis. As a result, it is clear that previous assump-tions about native place and regional cohesion do not hold true.From the standpoint of banks, there were small regional groupings inGuangzhou, Qingdao, and Sheng County, Zhejiang. In addition, agroup of banks in Sichuan made up another cohesive, though not iso-lated, unit. These regional networks did not monopolize banking inany region; however, in each place other banks existed that did notjoin these networks. In fact, twenty-four banks remained indepen-dent 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 thatinterlinked in a complex, weblike fashion. Although some banks,especially large banks and some small banks linked to prominentindividuals, had denser connections to the network than others,neither the network as a whole, nor parts of it, can be described byfactional or star models. Instead, the primary network had a clusterof centrally connected banks, and centrality decreased incrementallyover a range of a large number of banks.

From the standpoint of bankers as individuals, there was—as withbanks—a large interconnected network with multiple centers, andcentrality decreased in increments over a large number of individu-als. Density of connections was greater among ‘important’ bankers(those with many seats on different banks) and among individualswho shared a common native place. Native-place subgroups, how-ever, only become apparent on the subprovincial level. Zhejiang andJiangsu bankers were not particularly closely connected. Only whenbankers were divided into subgroups based on groups of adjacentcounties did the density of connections rival that of the importantbankers. Rather than talk about a Zhejiang-Jiangsu clique, it wouldbe more accurate to note that individuals from southern Jiangsu andnorthern Zhejiang specialized in banking in disproportionate num-bers. A web of disbursed connections linked bank directors regard-less of their native place, and the density of this web increasedamong important bank directors (each holding many seats) andamong individuals from particular adjacent counties.

Brief profiles of some of the important bank directors show the var-ious kinds of social capital that resulted in seats on bank boards.Some, like Chen Guangfu and his cohort, are already familiar in theliterature. They were highly educated, usually abroad, and had lots ofprofessional experience. In fact, their shared experiences and valueswere possibly as important as native place in promoting cohesionamong them. Yu Zuoting is typical of a different path. Yu, like manyof 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, FengGengguang had little business education or experience. He became abanker through dint of his political connections. Although associatedwith a particular warlord faction of the 1910s and 1920s, he was ableto outlast this faction and remain tightly connected to banking circlesduring the Nationalist period. The gangsters Du Yuesheng and ZhangXiaolin also relied on political connections to enter the bankingworld, though their connections were tainted by illegal activity. Theyseem unusual in terms of their social capital, but they played majorroles 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 twokinds of networks: cliques—among bankers if not among banks—anddiffuse, weblike connections among both banks and bankers. On theone hand, cliques of densely linked bankers from certain adjacentcounties show the persistence of the importance of native-place tieswell into the twentieth century. Here my conclusions agree morewith Bryna Goodman’s view of Shanghai than William Rowe’s viewof nineteenth-century Hankou.47 On the other hand, the dual natureof bank networks demonstrates a flexibility in native-place affinitythat is discussed, but not emphasized, in the literature on Chineseassociational practices. Once again, this echoes Goodman, who con-cludes that “the transformation of urban identity was a process ofaccretion of identities, not the displacement of native-place identityfor newer, more ‘modern’ ones.”48 It appears, though, that nativeplace played a different role in the networks of bankers with differ-ent kinds of social capital. Native place was less important for bank-ers who had political connections, like Feng Gengguang, or sharedprofessional values obtained through business education abroad, likeChen Guangfu, while native place was more important to bankerslike Yu Zuoting, who worked their way up through the commercialranks. Without a doubt native place played a key role in the forma-tion of networks, but native place did not work in a vacuum, nor didit eliminate the effects of institutional processes, historical contin-gency, 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.


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 [GreatDictionary 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, andChinese 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 andIdentities in Shanghai, 1853–1937. Berkeley, Calif., 1995.

Han Min, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo renwu zhi [Gazetteer of ContemporaryChinese]. 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

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a Chinese City. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders. 4th ed., 4th ed. suppl.,

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Windolf, Paul. Corporate Networks in Europe and the United States. Oxford,U.K., 2002.

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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 ofChina’s Finance Capitalism. Armonk, N.Y., 2003.

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Articles and Essays

Bergère, Marie-Claire. “The Shanghai Bankers’ Association, 1915–1927:Modernization and the Institutionalization of Local Solidarities.” InShanghai 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: CriticalPerspectives 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’sLiterary 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 ofEmbeddedness.” 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. AmpalavanarBrown, vol. 2. London, 1996, pp. 321–38.

Mann Jones, Susan. “The Ningpo Pang [Ningbo Bang] and Financial Power atShanghai.” In The Chinese City between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin andG. William Skinner. Stanford, Calif., 1974, pp. 73–96.

McElderry, Andrea. “Confucian Capitalism? Corporate Values in RepublicanBanking.” 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 Quarterly53 (Jan.–March 1973): 34–66.


Numazaki, Ichiro. “The Role of Personal Networks in the Making of Taiwan’sguanxiqiye (Related Enterprises).” In Business Networks and EconomicDevelopment in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Gary G. Hamilton. HongKong, 1991, pp. 77–93. Reprinted in Chinese Business Enterprise: CriticalPerspectives on Business and Management, ed. R. Ampalavanar Brown,vol. 2. London, 1996, pp. 410–23.

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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 theRepublican and Post-Mao Periods.” Journal of Asian Business 14, no. 1(1998): 5–22.

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Tianjin, China.

Appe

ndix

Tabl

e A1

Bank

s an

d In

terlo

ckin

g D

irect

orsh

ips,

193

6

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Bank

s w

ith a

t Lea

st O

ne In

terlo

ckin

g D

irect

orsh

ipA

gric

ultu

ral a

nd In

dust

rial B

ank

of C

hina

(Zho

nggu

o no

nggo

ng)

59.2

0.81

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Shan

ghai

19P

Agr

icul

tura

l and

Indu

stria

l Ban

k of

the

City

of Q

ingd

ao

(Qin

gdao

shi

non

ggon

g)1.

00.

01%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Qin

gdao

9Q

Bank

of A

gric

ultu

re a

nd C

omm

erce

(Non

gsha

ng)

12.7

0.17

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Shan

ghai

16P

Bank

of A

sia (Y

azho

u)5.

60.

08%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Bank

of C

hina

(Zho

nggu

o)1,

803.

124

.78%

Cen

tral G

over

nmen

tSh

angh

ai27

PBa

nk o

f Com

mun

icat

ions

(Jia

oton

g)90

7.2

12.4

7%C

entra

l Gov

ernm

ent

Shan

ghai

27P

Bank

of G

reat

er A

sia (D

aya)

2.4

0.03

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai10

PC

anto

n M

unic

ipal

Ban

k (G

uang

zhou

shi

li)a

12.7

0.17

%Lo

cal G

over

nmen

tG

uang

zhou

7G

Cen

tral B

ank

of C

hina

(Zho

ngya

ng)

1,23

1.2

16.9

2%C

entra

l Gov

ernm

ent

Shan

ghai

21P

Che

h-Tu

ng C

omm

erci

al (Z

hedo

ng s

hang

ye)

2.0

0.03

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsN

ingb

o12

PC

heng

Lu

(Zho

nglu

)b4.

60.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Qin

gdao

16Q

Che

ng M

ing

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

(Zhe

ngm

ing)

4.4

0.06

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsH

angz

hou

11P

Chi

na a

nd S

outh

Sea

(Zho

ngna

n)14

9.2

2.05

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai5

PC

hina

Dev

elop

men

t (Zh

ongg

uo q

iye)

11.9

0.16

%Sp

ecia

lized

Shan

ghai

12P

Chi

na E

quita

ble

(Sha

ngha

i zhi

zhon

g)9.

70.

13%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

11P

Chi

na In

vest

men

t (G

uoxi

n)9.

70.

13%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

20P

Chi

na S

tate

Ban

k (G

uohu

a)65

.30.

90%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

14P

Chi

na U

nite

d C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (T

ongy

uan)

3.5

0.05

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai12

PC

hine

se In

dust

rial (

Zhon

ghua

qua

ngon

g)9.

80.

13%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orSh

angh

ai11

PC

hong

qing

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

24.1

0.33

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsC

hong

qing

13P

Tabl

e A1

(con

tinue

d)

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Chu

anka

ng z

hiye

16.7

0.23

%Sp

ecia

lized

Cho

ngqi

ng8

PC

hung

Foo

Uni

on (Z

hong

fu)

35.3

0.49

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai12

PC

hung

Hw

a C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (Z

hong

hua)

5.6

0.08

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai8

PC

hung

Wai

(Zho

nghu

i)32

.60.

45%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

16P

Chu

ng W

oo C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (Z

hong

he)

3.6

0.05

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai14

PC

ity B

ank

of G

reat

er S

hang

hai (

Shan

ghai

shi

)12

.20.

17%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Shan

ghai

8P

Com

mer

cial

Ban

k of

Chi

na (Z

hong

guo

tong

shan

g)b

93.6

1.29

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai15

PC

omm

erci

al G

uara

ntee

Ban

k of

Zhi

li (B

eiya

ng b

aosh

ang)

15.0

0.21

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsBe

ijing

6P

Con

tinen

tal (

Dal

u)12

9.2

1.78

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsTi

anjin

10P

Cul

tivat

ion

(Zhi

ye)a

3.2

0.04

%Sp

ecia

lized

Tian

jin9

PD

ah K

ong

Bank

(Da

kang

)4.

40.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

14P

Dah

Lai

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

(Dal

ai S

hang

ye C

huxu

)4.

70.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

11P

Dev

elop

men

t Ban

k of

Sic

huan

(Sic

huan

jian

she)

3.3

0.05

%Sp

ecia

lized

Cho

ngqi

ng11

PFa

rmer

s Ba

nk o

f Chi

na (Z

hong

guo

nong

min

)34

6.6

4.76

%C

entra

l Gov

ernm

ent

Han

kou

10P

Fron

tier (

Bian

ye)

2.4

0.03

%Sp

ecia

lized

Tian

jin9

PG

uang

dong

304.

34.

18%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Gua

ngzh

ou9

GG

uota

i Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

a1.

80.

02%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

13P

Hai

ning

Far

mer

s (H

aini

ng n

ongm

in)

0.3

0.00

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Hai

ning

9P

Han

gzho

u hu

idi

n/a

n/a

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Han

gzho

u10

PH

anko

u C

omm

erci

al (H

anko

u sh

angy

e)2.

90.

04%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Han

kou

12P

Hua

an C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsn/

an/

an/

aSh

angh

ai7

PH

ubei

Pro

vinc

ial (

Hub

ei s

heng

)39

.60.

54%

Loca

l gov

ernm

ent

Han

kou

9P

Jiadi

ng C

omm

erci

al (J

iadi

ng s

hang

ye)

1.8

0.02

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsJia

ding

11P

Jiang

feng

Agr

icul

tura

l and

Indu

stria

l (Jia

feng

non

ggon

g)2.

30.

03%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orSu

zhou

6P

(con

tinue

d)

Tabl

e A1

(con

tinue

d)

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Jiang

su F

arm

ers

(Jian

gsu

shen

g no

ngm

in)

37.8

0.52

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Zhen

jiang

9P

Jiang

su y

inha

ng47

.60.

65%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Shan

ghai

10P

Jianz

hong

Com

mer

cial

a1.

20.

02%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

10P

Kinc

heng

(Jin

chen

g)19

4.7

2.68

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai8

PLa

nd B

ank

of C

hina

(Zho

nggu

o ke

nye)

36.0

0.49

%Sp

ecia

lized

Shan

ghai

11P

Long

you

Loca

ln/

an/

an/

aLo

ngyo

u13

PM

anuf

actu

rers

Ban

k of

Chi

na (Z

hong

guo

guoh

uo)

65.5

0.90

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Shan

ghai

18P

Mer

cant

ile U

nion

(Jia

ngha

i)9.

20.

13%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Min

g Fo

Uni

on C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (M

infu

)1.

90.

03%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Nat

iona

l Com

mer

cial

(Zhe

jiang

xin

gye)

110.

01.

51%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Nat

iona

l Ind

ustr

ial B

ank

of C

hina

(Zho

nggu

o sh

iye)

b65

.50.

90%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orSh

angh

ai18

PN

ingb

o C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (S

imin

g)a

87.0

1.20

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai6

PPe

ople

’s B

ank

of C

hong

qing

(Cho

ngqi

ng p

ingm

in)

2.2

0.03

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsC

hong

qing

14P

Pudo

ng C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs4.

70.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

16P

Salt

Indu

stry

Ban

k of

Sic

huan

(Cho

ngqi

ng c

huan

yan)

28.3

0.39

%Sp

ecia

lized

Cho

ngqi

ng16

PSh

ants

o (S

hanz

uo)

2.0

0.03

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsQ

ingd

ao7

QSh

angh

ai C

oal M

erch

ants

(Sha

ngha

i mei

ye)

3.3

0.05

%Sp

ecia

lized

Shan

ghai

11P

Shan

ghai

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

259.

13.

56%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

19P

Shan

ghai

Gua

nghu

a C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs3.

40.

05%

n/a

Shan

ghai

12P

Shan

ghai

Guo

min

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

a1.

00.

01%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Shan

ghai

Mer

cant

ile (H

engl

i)4.

20.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

11P

Shan

ghai

Silk

Indu

stry

(Sha

ngha

i cho

uye)

12.3

0.17

%Sp

ecia

lized

Shan

ghai

16P

Shao

xing

Com

mer

cial

(Sha

oxin

g sh

angy

e)1.

30.

02%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shao

xing

11P

Shao

xing

Far

mer

s (S

haox

ing

nong

min

)0.

20.

00%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orSh

aoxi

ng11

P

Tabl

e A1

(con

tinue

d)

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Shen

g C

ount

y A

gric

ultu

ral a

nd In

dust

rial (

Shen

gxia

n no

nggo

ng)

1.1

0.02

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Shen

g9

ZSh

engx

in L

ocal

Sav

ings

(She

ngxi

n di

fang

chu

xu)

n/a

n/a

n/a

Shao

xing

10Z

Sich

uan

Com

mer

cial

17.4

0.24

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsC

hong

qing

7P

Sich

uan

Loca

l (Si

chua

n di

fang

)39

.50.

54%

n/a

Cho

ngqi

ng2

PSi

chua

n m

eife

ng37

.50.

52%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Cho

ngqi

ng6

PSi

n H

ua T

rust

and

Sav

ings

(Xin

hua

xint

uo c

huxu

)39

.10.

54%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12P

Sing

Tai

(Xin

tai)

3.7

0.05

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai10

PTa

Sun

(Das

heng

)6.

10.

08%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Tian

jin11

PTa

h C

hung

(Daz

hong

)35

.20.

48%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

13P

Taip

ing

2.5

0.03

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai11

PTu

ng L

ai (D

ongl

ai)

26.2

0.36

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai13

PU

nion

Com

mer

cial

(Sha

ngha

i Ton

ghe)

8.3

0.11

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai14

PW

ai C

hung

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

(Hui

zhon

g)3.

20.

04%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

13P

Wen

zhou

Indu

stria

l (O

uhai

shi

ye)

0.9

0.01

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Jiaxi

ng

(Ouh

ai)

13P

Wom

an’s

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

(Sha

ngha

i nüz

i)7.

10.

10%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

14P

Wuj

in C

omm

erci

al4.

20.

06%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Wuj

in10

PW

uxia

n tia

nye

2.2

0.03

%Sp

ecia

lized

Suzh

ou (W

u)13

PXi

nfu

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

2.6

0.04

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSu

zhou

9P

Xuzh

ou N

atio

nal (

Xuzh

ou g

uom

in)

5.5

0.08

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsXu

zhou

10P

Yado

ng C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsa

0.7

0.01

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai12

PYe

ong

Dah

(Yon

gda)

11.4

0.16

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai9

PYi

en Y

eh C

omm

erci

al (Y

anye

)13

2.8

1.83

%Sp

ecia

lized

Shan

ghai

9P

Yung

Hun

g (S

hang

hai y

ongh

eng)

6.5

0.09

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai13

PZh

ejia

ng C

hu F

ong

(Zhe

jiang

chu

feng

)1.

80.

02%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Han

gzho

u13

P

(con

tinue

d)

Tabl

e A1

(con

tinue

d)

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Zhej

iang

Com

mer

cial

(Lia

ngzh

e sh

angy

e)2.

90.

04%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Han

gzho

u16

PZh

ejia

ng C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs1.

40.

02%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Han

gzho

u23

PZh

ejia

ng C

onst

ruct

ion

(Zhe

jiang

jian

ye)

6.3

0.09

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsH

angz

hou

12P

Zhej

iang

Indu

stria

l (Zh

ejia

ng S

hiye

)65

.30.

90%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orSh

angh

ai18

PZh

ejia

ng P

rovi

ncia

l (Zh

ejia

ng d

ifang

)52

.20.

72%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Han

gzho

u9

PZh

ejia

ng T

ien

Yeh

(Zhe

jiang

dia

nye)

1.1

0.02

%Sp

ecia

lized

Han

gzho

u15

P

Subt

otal

6,89

3.8

94.7

5%1,

176

Bank

s w

ith N

o In

terlo

ckin

g D

irect

orsh

ips

Cho

ngde

Far

mer

s (C

hong

de n

ongm

in)

0.1

0.00

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Cho

ngde

8I

Chu

ng Y

uen

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

(Zho

ngyu

an)

1.2

0.02

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsTi

anjin

12I

City

Ban

k of

Nan

jing

(Nan

jing

shim

in)

2.9

0.04

%Lo

cal G

over

nmen

tN

anjin

g1

ID

a Fo

o C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (D

afu)

7.2

0.10

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsH

anko

u14

ID

ah D

ong

Com

mer

cial

(Dat

ong)

0.9

0.01

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsSh

angh

ai10

IH

ebei

Pro

vinc

ial (

Heb

ei s

heng

)n/

an/

aLo

cal G

over

nmen

tTi

anjin

1I

Jiash

an F

arm

ers

(Jias

han

nong

min

)0.

10.

00%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orJia

shan

5I

Jinw

uyon

g Lo

cal F

arm

ers

(Jinw

uyon

g di

fang

non

gmin

)0.

40.

01%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orJin

wuy

ong

9I

Nan

fang

Indu

stria

l Sav

ings

(Nan

fang

shi

ye c

huxu

)a0.

30.

00%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Gua

ngzh

ou7

IN

anto

ng C

omm

erci

al (H

uito

ng)

0.5

0.01

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsN

anto

ng2

IPi

ngya

ng F

arm

ers

(Pin

gyan

g no

ngm

in)

0.1

0.00

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Ping

yang

9I

Qu

Cou

nty

Farm

ers

(Qux

ian

nong

min

)0.

10.

00%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orQ

u6

ISh

aanx

i Pro

vinc

ial (

Shaa

nxi s

heng

)18

.30.

25%

Loca

l Gov

ernm

ent

Xi’a

n1

ISh

ando

ng M

in S

heng

(Sha

ndon

g sh

engm

insh

eng)

18.6

0.26

%Lo

cal G

over

nmen

tJin

an23

ISi

lk B

ank

(Siy

e)1.

10.

02%

Spec

ializ

edG

uang

zhou

10I

Taic

ang

0.5

0.01

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsTa

ican

g5

I

Not

es: A

bbre

viat

ion

s in

the

far-

righ

t co

lum

n i

nd

icat

e th

e fo

llow

ing:

P =

pri

mar

y n

etw

ork;

G =

Gu

angd

ong

net

wor

k; Q

= Q

ingd

ao n

etw

ork;

Z =

Zh

ejia

ng

Sh

eng

Cou

nty

net

wor

k,

I =

Iso

late

, no

inte

rloc

kin

g d

irec

tors

hip

s.S

ourc

e: Q

uan

guo

yin

han

g n

ian

jian

[B

ank

An

nu

al],

193

5, 1

936,

193

7; Q

uan

guo

yin

han

g zh

iyu

an z

hin

un

[A

ll C

hin

a D

irec

tory

of

Ban

k E

mp

loye

es],

193

6.a 19

35 f

igu

re.

b 1934

fig

ure

.

Tabl

e A1

(con

tinue

d)

Bank

Ass

ets

(Mill

ions

of

yua

n)Pe

rcen

tage

of

Tota

l Ass

ets

Type

Hea

dqua

rters

Lo

catio

nN

umbe

r of

Dire

ctor

sN

etw

ork

Taip

ein/

an/

an/

aSh

angh

ai1

ITe

ng-H

su C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gs (D

unxu

)2.

00.

03%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Shan

ghai

12I

Xing

zhon

g C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsn/

an/

an/

aG

uang

zhou

10I

Yido

ngpu

Loc

al F

arm

ers

(Yid

ongp

u di

fang

non

gmin

)0.

10.

00%

Agr

icul

ture

/Lab

orYi

dong

pu2

IYo

ngru

i Far

mer

s (Y

ongr

ui n

ongm

in)

0.2

0.00

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Yong

rui

12I

Youn

g Br

othe

rs (J

uxin

gche

ng)

69.4

0.95

%C

omm

erci

al a

nd S

avin

gsC

hong

qing

1I

Yu T

sin (Y

ujin

)2.

70.

04%

Com

mer

cial

and

Sav

ings

Tian

jin8

IYu

yao

Farm

ers

(Yuy

ao n

ongm

in)

0.2

0.00

%A

gric

ultu

re/L

abor

Yuya

o12

I

Subt

otal

126.

91.

74%

181

GRA

ND

TO

TAL

7,02

0.7

96.4

9%1,

357

Documents

Myth and Reality in Chinese Financial Cliques in 1936 History and Methodology,” in Chinese Business Enterprise, ed. Brown, 1: 12. Figure 1 Left: Hierarchical factions with two central