The Networks

The turmoil that modern China underwent shaped Fan Xudong’s quest to save the country through industrialization. A native of Xiangyin, Hunan, he was the second son of a poor rural school teacher. After his father’s death, he lived in a charitable home for chaste widows with his mother before joining his elder brother Yuanlian (1876–1927) at the Hunan School of Current Affairs (Hunan shiwu xuetang) and followed Liang Qichao into exile after the failed Hundred Days Reform in 1898. With financial support from Liang, Xudong attended Okayama Number Six High School (Dairoku kōtō gakkō) and Kyoto Imperial University. After the 1911 Revolution, he hurried back to China to work as an assayer at the Bureau of Currency (Bizhiju), Ministry of Finance, where he soon became frustrated with the bureaucracy. He became involved in the salt industry when Zhou Xuexi, in preparation for reforms under the terms of the Reorganization Loan, dispatched him to Europe to study gabelle administration and salt refining in 1913–14.1 Hoping to practice what he had learned, Fan dropped his plan to pursue further studies in Europe and hurried home hoping to begin construction of the government-owned salt factory. The order, however, never came. With the prospect of reform dimming, he turned to private enterprise as instruments of change.