Professor Huangfu Qiushi (Fudan University)
Huangfu Qiushi is an associate professor in the History Department of Fudan University. Her dissertation focused on the responses of China’s cigarette market to the Great Depression during the 1930s, from the perspectives of different market actors, and in both indigenous and international contexts. She is the author of the book The Choices in Crisis: The Chinese Cigarette Market during the Nanjing Decade (Shanghai Orient Publishing Center, 2014). Her current research interests include the economic intelligence activities of the U.S. Government and in Republican China, and the participation of U.S. capital in China’s post-war reconstruction.

Forming part of a book project that explores how American capital participated in China’s postwar economic reconstruction, this talk traces three different channels through which Chinese businessmen sought to bring foreign investment into postwar China. The International Business Conference in November 1944 first alerted the Chinese business community to the emerging possibility of mobilizing American capital to fuel China’s postwar rebuilding. While China Industries Company embodied the efforts of Chen Kwang Pu and other Chinese bankers to attract American private capital, leading industrialists such as Fan Hsu-tung and Lu Tso Fu successfully secured a US$16 million loan from the Export–Import Bank of the United States for Yongli Chemical Industries. Finally, Pei Tsuyee, former Governor of the Central Bank of China, led the Nationalist Government’s Technical Mission that helped catalyze the passage of the 1948 American Aid to China Act, ultimately negotiating economic assistance totaling US$338 million.

Revisiting these diverse initiatives to introduce American capital not only reveals the intricate relationships underpinning China’s postwar economic reconstruction between state and enterprise, foreign and domestic capital, and finance and industry, but also unveils the role of Chinese businessmen and their strategic engagement with foreign capital, thus nuancing the existing narrative of postwar China’s economy that focuses on American economic expansion and the Nationalist government’s command economy policies.