The Domestic Effects of Foreign Capital: Public Debt and Regional Inequalities in Late Qing China

This chapter examines how the imposition of modern public debt in late nineteenth-century China brought spatial and social reorientation of fiscal resources across the Qing empire. It contrasts the new debt regime with elements of active redistribution in established frameworks of pre-1850 public finance, emphasizes the role public debt played in reconfiguring governing priorities and power dynamics between post-1850s interest groups, and highlights a growing concentration of fiscal resources in southeastern coastal regions. In shifting from a spatial-based framework of inter-provincial fiscal transfers to a temporal-based framework of modern public debt, the Qing government faced an erosion of their traditional claims on political legitimacy through dynastic loyalties and benevolent governance, to be superseded by a liberal-nationalist discourse of efficiency in public debt usage and preserving national sovereignty. These competing discourses, this chapter suggests, shaped the contours of engagement with modern public debt in twentieth-century China.