Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012 offers a groundbreaking interpretation of the Chinese monetary system, charting its evolution by examining key moments in history and placing them in international perspective. Expertly navigating primary sources in multiple languages and across three millennia, Niv Horesh explores the trajectory of Chinese currency from the birth of coinage to the current global financial crisis. His narrative highlights the way that Chinese money developed in relation to the currencies of other countries, paying special attention to the origins of paper money; the relationship between the West's ascendancy and its mineral riches; the linkages between pre-modern finance and political economy; and looking ahead to the possible globalization of the RMB, the currency of the People's Republic of China. This analysis casts new light on the legacy of China's financial system both retrospectively and at present—when China's global influence looms large.

China's currency, the renminbi, has taken the world by storm. This book documents the renminbi's impressive rise to global prominence in a short period but also shows how much further it has to go before becoming a major international currency. The hype about its inevitable ascendance to global dominance is overblown.

A thousand-year history of how China’s obsession with silver influenced the country’s financial well-being, global standing, and political stability This revelatory account of the ways silver shaped Chinese history shows how an obsession with “white metal” held China back from financial modernization. First used as currency during the Song dynasty in around 900 CE, silver gradually became central to China’s economic framework and was officially monetized in the middle of the Ming dynasty during the sixteenth century. However, due to the early adoption of paper money in China, silver was not formed into coins but became a cumbersome “weighing currency,” for which ingots had to be constantly examined for weight and purity—an unwieldy practice that lasted for centuries. While China’s interest in silver spurred new avenues of trade and helped increase the country’s global economic footprint, Jin Xu argues that, in the long run, silver played a key role in the struggles and entanglements that led to the decline of the Chinese empire.

Illustrated introductory guide to the history and use of coins and money in China

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.

The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture. Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.

Many of the world's major economies boast dominant international currencies. Not so for China. Its renminbi has lagged far behind the pound, the euro, and the dollar in global circulation—and for good reason. China has long privileged economic policies that have fueled development at the expense of the renminbi's growth, and it has become clear that the underpowered currency is threatening China's future. The nation's leaders now face the daunting task of strengthening the currency without losing control of the nation's economy or risking total collapse. How are they approaching this challenge? In The People's Money, Paola Subacchi introduces readers to China's monetary system, mapping its evolution over the past century and, particularly, its transformation since Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978. Subacchi revisits the policies that fostered the country's economic rise while at the same time purposefully creating a currency of little use beyond China's borders. She shows the key to understanding China's economic predicament lies in past and future strategies for the renminbi. The financial turbulence following the global crisis of 2008, coupled with China's ambitions as a global creditor and chief economic power, has forced the nation to reckon with the limited international circulation of the renminbi. Increasing the currency's reach will play a major role in securing China's future.

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.

After a meteoric rise, China's growth has come to a screeching halt. Salvatore Babones provides an up-to-date assessment of how China's economic problems are undermining its challenge to the Western-dominated world order. He tells how liberal individualism has become the leitmotif of American Tianxia.

At long last there is a collector's guide that provides a comprehensive overview of the complex, but fascinating world of Chinese cash coins. Covering more than 3,000 years of numismatic history, this long-awaited volume lists, illustrates and values in multiple condition grades a variety of monetary forms issued in Imperial China. Author David Jen is one of the leading experts in Chinese currency and is well respected in both the United States and Asia. His new work is by far the most complete volume available on the topic, offering history and production details for thousands of issues. In addition, the book includes many newly discovered varieties not listed in any other reference source.