1935-1936: Bank reserves

1935 - age 34 Part 3

In May, I went to Cangshu from Shanghai, passing by Suzhou and went to all these tourist spots. A branch manager came to pick me up. We rode in a boat through the water ways. We went to all the places I needed to survey. In the evening, they served a dinner with the famous dish Beggar's Chicken. The story goes that many years ago there was a beggar in Cangshu. One day, somehow he got a chicken but he had no way of cooking the chicken. So what he did was use a lot of mud and water to coat the chicken with the feathers on. He built a fire to cook it. After it was done, he peeled off the mud and the feathers came off with the mud so he could eat the meat and it was very delicious. After this incident was known, the restaurateurs copied this cooking method and called it beggar's chicken. This is the famous dish of this place, and I had the good chance to taste it. After several days of my survey, I wrote my report and gave it to the chairman of the board, Mr Fu. After a while, the branch manager came to the headquarters and proved the survey and my suggestions for improvement were accurate and feasible.

I was assigned to this currency improvement research committee to work and I also had a position in the Chinese Industry and Business Bank. So now I had two jobs. Also, every month, the Central Bank had an economic research publication. I was still in charge of reporting. When I was in college, my major was in currency and banking. At that time, there was a person Mr Ma. He was a very famous scholar in this area and he was once Beijing University's president. (Unfortunately, he changed allegiances to the Communist Party and was tortured to death by the Communist Party.) He wrote a lot of articles on the shortcomings of the Chinese financial systems and made proposals for improvement. He wrote a lot of theses. He usually said that Chinese commercial banks had too weak of funding. In the studying of the cash reserve ratios, he showed some are steady and others are imbalanced and predict bankrupcy. Mr Ma wrote a lot about and did a lot of research about this ratio. I was also involved in a lot of the research and wrote a lot about these studies. When I went to Taiwan, I brought all my writings from Shanghai. In 1980, I compiled all my writings into a book called Compilation of Articles about Currency and Banking. 


1936 - age 35

This year, Shudong turned two years old and Diqing became pregnant again. When she was six months pregnant, she ate water chestnuts. We found out later that pregnant women should not eat water chestnuts. But she had eaten them and had severe abdominal pain and could not move. She had to go to the hospital. We lived on the third floor. Usually, we just climbed up and down the stairs. But now, Diqing could not move, so I carried her downstairs. We went first to the famous Fuming Hospital and the head of the hospital was very nice and came to examine her himself and prescribed pain killer injections and said she should have surgery. But Diqing would not agree. They were at odds and couldn't compromise. After a long time, we went to a Chinese-medicine doctor Bao for help. Mr Bao is very good in his medical knowledge. After examining her, he said to take Chinese medicine and prescribed the medicine and we went to the pharmacy to get the medication and returned home. I carried her upstairs. Fortunately, after several days, just as Dr Bao predicted, she was fine. Since then, I don't negate the effectiveness of Chinese medicine. 

In the province of Zhejiang, there were some political changes. The central government appointed Mr Huang as governor of the province. He was from Guangxi and the military. He and Wu Tingyi were very good friends, as close as brothers. So, Mr Huang recommended Mr Wu as Secretary of Infrastructure. Mr Wu was in Liouzhou in charge of a project to test water usage and safety in agriculture. Three years earlier, he had invited me to work there and I didn't go, as previously stated. This time, Mr Wu came in person to Zhejiang and was determined to have a lot of projects in Zhejiang. He needed people to survey and plan. He originally knew I didn't go to Guangxi because I stayed at Shanghai Central Bank to work. And he was an old friend of Mr Fu, chairman of the board. So he asked Mr Fu to have part of my work be to help him in Hanzhou. Mr Fu, because I already had job in the China Business and Industry Bank, and didn't have a job at the Central Bank, approved Mr Hu's request. Because of this extra work, I needed to arrange my time. In order for my work and duties at home, I scheduled every Friday for going to Hangzhou, worked Saturday and Sunday in Zhejiang, and would come back to Shanghai on Monday. If there was a special request, I could stay there one more day and come back a day later. 

1935: No more poems

1935 - age 34 Part 2

With such condition of currency, establishing the industry and commerce of the country was impossible. So the government decided to overhaul. The first thing was to use the central bank and department of finance to establish an overhaul research committee on currency. Hired with top salaries was Mr Cen Jingtao as chairman. He was Cantonese and very famous and had a lot of accomplishments in this area. He has another name: Ren Sen. Everyone respectfully called him Ren Lao (elder Ren). This person was very thorough and had an accurate and broad view of the whole picture. His research work was also very accurate and to-the-point. They also invited advisers from the United State and United Kingdom. I was assigned to serve on this committee and benefited greatly from working there. Everything I learned at the commerce university in Japan was put to good use. My work earned approval and praise from Ren Lao and the foreign advisers. My actual work was to audit all the books and compile articles and documents. It was very hard work, but my program was put into actual practice; the government used what I proposed and it worked well and there was a good response from the field. Privately, I was delighted as a civilian to save the country in this way. 

The currency improvements mainly were collective preparation and uniform distribution. They set a date for the launch of the program so all the various little banks stopped printing their own currencies. They collected outstanding currency and only distributed central bank currency. In order to print money, there had to be some value backup stored. They put it all in the central bank. In this way, a lot of the little banks could not afford to print their own. Most of the little banks went bankrupt. Many of the people who worked in these soon-to-collapse banks left and went somewhere else to find new jobs. Even a very famous person of the big banks Mr. Liu, chairman of the board, had to quit and find a new job. 

The central bank, in order to seriously execute these currency improvements, specially hired Mr Fu. He was a director of the economic research institute and they wanted him to chair the new board of directors in the China Industry and Business Bank. Mr Zou was hired as Chief Executive. After Mr Fu went to serve as chairman of the board, they hired Mr Kong to be head of the research institute.

... [boring complicated banking stuff my mom skipped]

At this time, one of the heads recommended me for work at the China Industry and Business Bank. This bank had branches in Nanjing, Tianjing, Guangzhou, Hankou, Nancang, and Wuhu. Also, in a suburb of Shanghai, called Cangshu, was another branch and warehouses. Cangshu was supposed to be a fertile land with a lot of potential for development. Our chairman of the board valued Cangshu. He specially assigned me as envoy and I was glad to go because Cangshu has a lot of history. And on the mountain there are graves of the famous disciples of Confucius, Zilu and Yenyou. This is why it was a tourist attraction. More recently, there were legendary stories about Chen and Liou. There was a famous pagoda, Iron Harp and Bronze Sword. I could visit all these spots during my survey.