Competing imperial banking : the Yokohama Specie Bank and HSBC in China : 1919 as a watershed?

Over the last three decades, a considerable body of English-language academic work has shed much light on Japan’s empire-building project in Greater China during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Japanese-language studies of the country’s pre-war financial history have also grown in leaps and bounds. Yet, to date, neither body of literature seems to have fully examined what might appear to the naked eye as one of the critical pre-war junctures: where Japanese financial history converged on imperial policy and Chinese nationalist responses thereto. This chapter will therefore aim to fill part of the gap by examining how the Yokohama Specie Bank (hereafter YSB), arguably the backbone of Japanese finance in China Proper, modelled itself on the British privately-run Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (hereafter HSBC, established in 1865), insofar as monetary emissions were concerned, and how both banks were affected by Chinese anti-foreign boycotts throughout the pre-war era (1842-1937).