The Time of Calamity: Early Shanghai Stock Exchange Fiction

The first Chinese stock exchange was established in Beijing in 1918. Far from the northern government, in 1920 and 1921 Shanghai entrepreneurs quickly established a rash of exchanges, sheltered from Chinese government control in the foreign enclaves of their semicolonial city. Shanghai—a city associated with clocks, time-keeping, and speed—quickly became the nerve center for what was referred to as a “Trust and Exchange Storm.” More than 150 stock exchanges and some 12 associated trust companies were established in Shanghai in a single year, and some 50 exchanges in other Chinese cities. The sudden appearance of these Western- and Japanese-modeled exchanges on the streets of the city, and the fever of popular investment they incited (which drew women and even peasants from the countryside), stimulated the production of a largely unexplored subgenre of stock exchange fiction that was serialized in daily newspapers and journals alongside reportage on the rise and swift demise of the new financial institutions. These popular stories—the first Chinese literary depictions of the stock market—drew closely on news reportage and rumors associated with Shanghai’s exchanges. Newspapers also printed numerous cartoon depictions of the exchanges and of finance more broadly. This paper examines the depiction of time in one such serialized novel, Stock Exchanges Unmasked, in the context of newspaper reportage and graphic representations of the experience of speculation, market swings and financial trauma. In this early moment, immediately prior to the institutionalization of economics as a field of study in Chinese universities, the language of economics was unsettled, characterized by an uneasy admixture of neologisms, older terms, and a multitude of meanings. Read in concert with non-fiction documentation of the Shanghai bubble, this exchange fiction articulates economic and moral imaginaries of the early Chinese republic, in the context of rapid transactions and changing events.