Speaker: Bill Kelson, University of Georgia

Friday April 22, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM BJT

Zoom: 943 5837 7128, Passcode: 0422

Abstract

Historically speaking, China is no stranger to real estate bubbles. This talk will explore the history of China’s first such bubble, the outcome of debt-fueled property speculation in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the years before a Qing dynasty-wide financial crisis in 1883. Together with a stock market crash (also China’s first), the collapse of this mountain of real estate debt helped to bring the late-Qing economy to its knees. The history of the 1883 crash raises a complex set of issues worth delving into in this talk: What connection was there between Shanghai’s emergence as a financial center and China’s urban real estate market? How did that relationship compare to financially-driven property bubbles in emerging economies elsewhere and at other times? And what lessons, if any, does a nineteenth-century property collapse hold for the present day?

Bio

Bill Kelson is a late-stage PhD candidate at the University of Georgia (UGA) writing a history of China’s first major banking and financial crisis, a study tentatively titled Empire Unraveled: the Great Crash that Doomed China’s Last Dynasty. Educated at Boston College, UGA, and IUP Tsinghua, his committee includes Professors Stephen Mihm, Tonio Andrade (Emory), Madeleine Zelin (Columbia), Timothy Yang, and Scott Reynolds Nelson. He is currently in Taipei on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship finishing research for the project at the archives of Academia Sinica. He dearly misses Shanghai.