Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore
Yanjie Huang’s research centers on the history of modern Chinese society, state-building, and political economy. His first co-authored book, Market in State: The Political Economy of Domination in China, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), studies the origins of China’s contemporary state-dominated economy from the late imperial period to the reformist era. His second book, A Revolution Domesticated: Negotiating Family Life in Urban China, 1959-1984, traces “Xiaokang,” contemporary China’s ideology of de-politicized family-state synergy, to urban family life under the Maoist economic policy of revolutionary austerity.
He is currently working on two related projects on war and economy in modern China: Monetary Revolution traces the evolution of the RMB from a dozen war currencies to a full-fledged national currency in 1960s China, highlighting the roles of geopolitics and war economy in its operational logics; Reconstructions Derailed shows how Chinese economic development model between the Sino-Japanese War and the Great Leap Forward were fundamentally shaped by the tensions between rational planning and military mobilizations, rather than market capitalism or planning socialism.
Huang’s other long-term academic projects consider modern Chinese history from the perspectives of sacrifice, empire studies, grassroots sources, information management, and national identities. He is working with a multidisciplinary crew of scholars to build a global network of the grassroots approach to modern Chinese history.
Panel 1 | Global Regimes and 20th-century China
Towards a Chinese Monetary Revolution: Geopolitics, Global Monetary Regimes, and the Ideas of Non-convertible Paper Money in China, 1912–1945
Abstract
The transformation of the global monetary regime from the Gold Standard to the Bretton Woods system between the 1910s and the 1940s was underpinned by the worldwide rise of the fiscal-military states and the decline of the classical liberal world order embodied by the circulation of gold.
The triumph of a commodity-based RMB over the species and species-backed currencies was a much more radical Chinese version of the global story. But how exactly did this monetary revolution begin? This paper traces the rise of China’s non-convertible paper money as a solution to China’s economic and military weakness against the backdrop of geopolitical upheavals and the crisis of the global monetary regimes.
In particular, the paper focuses on the intellectual, geopolitical, and institutional contexts of Sun Yat-sen’s idea for new Chinese paper money backed by state control over strategic commodities as a tool for China’s military mobilisations. A visionary predecessor to the RMB, Sun and early KMT calls for monetary revolution were both a complex product of global circulations of ideas, institutions, and practices and a powerful response to the imperial power and networks behind such circulations.
