ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the decisive influence of the Qing’s accelerated fiscal centralization exerted over piaohao’s gradual retreat from the market of government remittances after 1895. In public finance, modern Western-style Chinese banks and the first-ever central bank of China eventually replaced the role of piaohao as unwarranted tax transmitters. In private finance, the standardization of silver currency and issuance of state fiduciary banknotes also made piaohao’s private credit instruments less profitable and eventually obsolete. Nonetheless, the merchant-bankers of piaohao remained unpoliticized over the course of the Qing’s accelerated transformation into an expansionist modern fiscal state, which counters the simple identification of democracy with market subsumed under the totalizing logic of market liberalism in the West.
