Ch'en Chin-t'ao 陳錦濤 Ch'en Chin-t'ao (1870 - June 1939) held numerous public finance posts under the Ch'ing government and under both the northern and southern governments of the early republican period, including the positions of financial commissioner in London and minister of finance. He ended his career as minister of finance (1938-39) in the Japanese-sponsored regime at Nanking.
A native of the Nanhai (Namhoi) district of Kwangtung, Ch'en Chin-t'ao, after receiving his early education, went to the British colony of Hong Kong, where he began an English education at Queen's College. After graduation he joined the staff there. In the 1890's he went to Tientsin to teach at Peiyang College, the institution founded by Sheng Hsuan-huai (q.v.). In 1901 Ch'en Chin-t'ao, with Chinese government assistance, went to the United States for advanced study. He enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied mathematics and received the M.S. degree in 1902. He then went to New Haven, where he entered the graduate school of Yale University to study political economy. Ch'en wrote a dissertation entitled "Societary Circulation" and, in 1906, became one of the first Chinese to receive a Ph.D. from Yale. On his return to China, he took the examinations which the Ch'ing court had established for Chinese students returning from abroad after the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905. Ch'en took first place in the examination, was awarded the degree of chin-shih and was appointed a Hanlin scholar by the court, although these distinctions were viewed with condescension, if not contempt by the Chinese chin-shih who had taken their degrees in the traditional and more difficult fashion. Because he took first place, Ch'en was sometimes referred to by the Cantonese as the yang chuan-yuan [foreign first scholar]. During the last five years of the Ch'ing dynasty, Ch'en Chin-t'ao served the imperial government in a variety of posts. He was appointed an educational inspector at Canton and then transferred to a similar post in Peking. Subsequent assignments introduced him to the practical problems of public finance. He worked for a time as an inspector for the Ta Ch'ing government bank and then was assigned to the Board of Finance at Peking, serving as head of its budget and statistics bureaus. In 1908, after he had been appointed deputy director of the bureau of printing and engraving, the imperial government sent Ch'en on a mission to investigate the manufacture of postage stamps in the United States, England, France, and Germany to ascertain what production system was least subject to counterfeiting. Ch'en decided that the methods used in the United States were best and invited two American experts to come to serve in the bureau of printing and engraving at Peking. The two were William A. Grant, who was then in charge of the engraving department at the American Bank Note Company in New York, and Lorenzo J. Hatch.
After his brief excursion into the field of philately, Ch'en Chin-t'ao headed the currency reform commission and served as deputy governor of the Ta Ch'ing Bank. By the time of the Wuchang revolt in October 1911, Ch'en had been named a member of the tzu-cheng-yuan [provisional parliament] which the Manchu court had finally convened. When Yuan Shih-k'ai emerged from retirement in November to head a new government, he offered Ch'en the post of vice president of the Board of Finance, but Ch'en declined the appointment. When the provisional government of the republic of China was proclaimed at Nanking in January 1912, Sun Yat-sen, respecting Ch'en Chin-t'ao's training and competence, named him minister of finance. After the transfer of the seat of governmental power from Nanking to Peking in March, Ch'en was named vice minister of finance; he did not take up the post. Ch'en was abroad during much of the year 1912, serving as China's delegate to an international conference on bills of exchange at The Hague and to an international meeting of chambers of commerce at Boston. He also attended the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco. He returned to Peking in September 1912 and was appointed director of the central audit office in the government there. In the early years of the republican period, Ch'en Chin-t'ao continued to hold official positions at Peking under Yuan Shih-k'ai, although he was viewed as being neutral by the generals and politicians then scrambling for power. Late in 1913 he went to Europe to serve as Chinese financial commissioner, with headquarters at London, after which he returned to Peking to serve as a counselor in the President's office. The public criticism of Yuan Shih-k'ai's monarchical attempt in 1916 did not affect Ch'en's reputation.
After the death of Yuan Shih-k'ai in June 1916, Li Yuan-hung (q.v.) succeeded to Yuan's position as president of the Chinese republic. Actually, much of the power formerly held by Yuan passed into the hands of Tuan Ch'i-jui (q.v.). Tuan named Ch'en Chin-t'ao to the important post of minister of finance in his cabinet. Ch'en also served as interim foreign minister at Peking, from the summer of 1916 until October 1917, when Wu T'ing-fang (q.v.) was appointed.
Because of his education in the United States and his experience as financial commissioner in London, Ch'en was respected by Western diplomats in China. For example, Paul Reinsch, then the United States representative at Peking, described him as being "one of the few men in Chinese official life familiar with Western finance and banking—a scholarly man, slow and somewhat heavy in speech and manner, studious, and desirous of carrying modern methods of efficiency and careful audit into all branches of the administration," and added that "everyone met him with confidence." As finance minister, Ch'en also held the post of director general of the salt administration, a rich domain of public revenue which was coveted by Chinese bureaucrats. In May 1917 Ch'en was removed from the finance ministry and charged with embezzlement. That action was reportedly due to the machinations of the socalled communications faction (see Liang Shih-i) at Peking. Ch'en was put under arrest, imprisoned, and formally prosecuted. The litigation dragged on for several months, though few facts were revealed to the public. He was finally exonerated in February 1918 by a special presidential mandate issued by Feng Kuochang. In late 1920, the southern military government at Canton, headed by Sun Yat-sen, again appointed Ch'en to be finance minister. However, Ch'en remained in the north to recuperate from his political wounds while T'ang Shao-yi and Wu T'ing-fang took charge of the duties which he had been invited to assume at Canton. Not until 1924 did he return to public life, appearing at the same time that Tuan Ch'i-jui came out from retirement in November 1924 to take over authority as head of the Peking government. Ch'en was again named director general of the salt administration in 1925 and later became minister of finance, when Hsu Shih-ying was appointed premier in Peking. When the Nationalist forces in south China launched the Northern Expedition in mid- 1926, Ch'en Chin-t'ao left the finance ministry in Peking and moved to Shanghai to observe the situation. When the Northern Expedition reached the Yangtze, a serious split developed between the two centers of Kuomintang authority, one at Wuhan, the other at Nanking. In the spring of 1927, the Nanking authorities broke the alliance with the Communists and with the Kuomintang authorities at Wuhan. Ch'en Chin-t'ao was arrested in the Hangchow area in Chekiang and imprisoned for a time, allegedly because Nanking suspected him of collusion with the Wuhan regime.
Ch'en Chin-t'ao returned to north China after his release and turned to scholarly pursuits. In the autumn of 1929 he was appointed professor of economics at Tsinghua University in Peking. He remained at Tsinghua in the early 1930's, and then he temporarily retired to Tientsin. Early in 1935, he was called to public service at Nanking, where Wang Ching-wei was then serving as president of the Executive Yuan and foreign minister. H. H. K'ung (q.v.), who at that time was serving as vice presiaent of the Executive Yuan and minister of finance, invited Ch'en to become chairman of the currency research committee. Although Ch'en went to Nanking to serve the National Government of China, he ended his career by serving the Japanese-sponsored government there. That regime, established at Nanking in March 1938 with jurisdiction over the Japanese-occupied areas of Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhwei, was headed by Liang Hung-chih (q.v.). Ch'en Chin-t'ao was persuaded to serve as its minister of finance and he held that post until his death in June 1939.
The motivations underlying Ch'en Chin-t'ao's public actions remain elusive. Generally speaking, he was thought of in China as a scholar rather than as an effective bureaucrat. Ch'en's technical contributions to the bureau of printing and engraving were not insignificant. China's budgetary and currency reform efforts in the early republican period may also be credited to him. And he was one of the few experts in public finance in the Chinese government at Peking before 1928 who was technically competent by Western standards. Unfortunately, the highly partisan politics characteristic of China during much of the republican period brought to waste Ch'en Chin-t'ao's education and frustrated his abilities.
