Graduate Students

E-mail: lumanwan@usc.edu

B.A. History, Peking University, 07/2005
B.A. Economics, Peking University, 07/2005
M.A. History, National University of Singapore, 01/2008
Intensive Japanese Language Program East Asian Languages and Cultures, Middlebury College, 08/2009
M.A. History, University of Southern California, 12/2010

I have been reconstructing the history of Shanxi piaohao (remittance firms) since 2005. My dissertation entitled Money and Trade, Hinterland and Coast, Empire and Nation-state: An Unusual History of Shanxi Piaohao, 1820s-1930s is the first dissertation-length research in English that focuses entirely on such topic. I rescue the hundred-year native banking history of China after the 1820s from the hegemonic discourse of financial modernity/westernization. I also examine China’s early twentieth-century transformation from agrarian empire to modern nation-state through the prism of piaohao’s business interactions with the Qing empire. In addition, I tease out the complicated relationships between domestic financial firms such as piaohao and modern western-style banks such as HSBC in China after the 1840s.

Shanxi piaohao (Shanxi remittance firms),Late imperial China,Chinese business and economic history,Qing dynasty

China Times Cultural Foundation Young Scholar Award (declined) , 2012-2013
Dissertation Fellowship, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (American Region), 2012-2013
USC Center for Excellence in Teaching, Teaching Assistant Fellow (TAF), 2011-2012
AAS (Association for Asian Studies) CIAC Travel Grant, Spring 2011
Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, Middlebury College, 6/10/2009-8/15/2009
USC US-China Institute Graduate Summer Fieldwork Grant, Spring 2009