From Casting To Flooding:The Study Of The Coin Crisis In The Late Qing Dynasty

Copper coin was a new thing in modern China,and it was introduced to solve the problem of lack of copper cash.In order to chase the surplus profits of copper coin,all provinces competed to cast.However,a few years later,the copper coin,which originally helped relieve the plight of currency,became the bad money.In the 1905,the copper coin crisis occurred.The Qing government soon implemented some measures,which aimed to limit the production and sales of copper coin in all provinces.After the restriction on production,the central government decided to merge the copper coin bureaus to reduce the waste of machinery and manpower.In order to promote the merger,Chen Bi was assigned to the south for supervisions,which enabled the central government to grasp the details of the copper coin bureaus among the provinces,and finally managed to promote the smooth completion of the merger.However,after the merger,the copper coin crisis became more and more intense,and resulted in many conflicts caused by the depreciation.Officials took many measures to control the crisis,but they were ineffective.In 1910,the Qing government had to formally rectify the currency system,and proposed some solutions to stop the crisis.However,the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911 led to the interruption of currency reform and the rectification of the copper coin crisis.The copper crisis was not caused by the large absolute quantity of copper coin,but the circulation.The copper coin bureaus and illegal merchants dumped copper coins into prosperous areas with convenient transportation,leading to the crisis.Central and local officials mainly imposed copper coin embargo when faced with the dumping.Such measure could curb the official dumping,but had a limited effect on smuggling by folk merchants.