After Taiping troops occupied Nanjing, various imperial armies marched southwards, requiring unprecedented financial resources. The old mechanism through which the Ministry of Revenue transferred military payments according particular needs was hardly efficient. Emperor Xianfeng ordered the commander of each army to negotiate for supplies of money through provincial liangtai, which then entered a period of self-management. During the war to suppress the Taiping Rebellion, the two liangtai of Jiangnan and Jiangbei were important bureaus for military fundraising and payments. However, they often completed and conflicted with each other about the resources to be taxed, the soldiers to be paid, the money to be transferred, and so forth. The General Bureau of Military Fundraising was established to coordinate the two liangtai. Although working efficiently at the beginning, it soon disappeared due to the intervention of military commanders and the corruption of officials. The conflicts and rivalry between the Jiangnan Liangtai and Jiangbei Liangtai reflected the inability of imperial court to adapt to the requirement of wartime military fundraising in authorizing and appointing the liangtai officials. That was the fatal flaw of the wartime financial system of the imperial court.

Japan emerged as a superpower in the early twentieth century after its wars with China and Russia. The image of Japan as an advanced country in the medical and pharmaceutical industry helped it promote its products in China. In its promotion campaigns in the Chinese newspapers, the focus was on advertising one product: the Human Elixir (jintan 仁丹). Jintan was produced by the Morishita pharmacy森下藥房, which took the opportunity to expand its business in China when that country’s demand for medicine was especially high. As a result, Morishita earned more revenue from China than Japan. In the meantime, the success of Jintan aroused the attention of Huang Chujiu 黃楚九, who made a similar product known as Rendan (人丹) in Chinese. Through aggressive advertising and promotion, Rendan successfully challenged the supremacy of Jintan in China. Based on government records, business archives, newspapers, old photos, and advertising pamphlets and leaflets, this article examines how Jintan gained its supremacy in China, and how later Rendan competed with it and finally surpassed it. To support this argument, this paper provides an analysis of trademark and advertisement strategies. I also discuss issues of commercial war, localization of markets, conceptions of foreign products, trademark infringement, and businesses in sales and advertising.

The Nationalist government was threatened by a surge in rice prices in interior China during the early 1940s. Chiang Kai-shek tried to control prices to solve this crisis. The National Food Administration was established in 1940 to manage markets and obtain the needed grains, but it did not achieve this goal satisfactorily. Therefore, Chiang decided to collect the land tax in kind and created the Ministry of Food to administer this new policy. The institution of food management in wartime meant that the government tried to build formal institutions, but this led to expansion of the bureaucracy. Using the state apparatus to contain market speculation also contributed to increasing the role of the state in local society. Chiang insisted on strict prohibitions against hoarding and profiteering as well as nationalizing the land tax, which naturally aroused opposition. This article analyzes how Chiang handled the hoarding cases of Yang Quanyu and Wu Zhaozhang and examines the mode of control exercised by the central authority over regional powers during the war, and further compares this to the Chinese Communist Party’s controls.