Elya Jun Zhang

This project is the first systematic effort to examine China’s foreign borrowing from the Opium War to the communist takeover. It surveys the amounts and terms of hundreds of individual loans, and makes these details accessible to readers via chronological and thematic orders. Second, it adopts a country-by-country approach in chapter organization to best explain China’s separate lending path with each of the seven creditor countries. Lastly, it presents biographies of a dozen financiers and diplomats who made the transactions possible and thus plunged into the conflict between imperialism and nationalism that would define modern China.