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The story of Wang Yongjiang tells us things about warlord China that most people have overlooked. Wang Yongjiang (1872-1927) was born into a well-to-do family near Dalian, in south Manchuria. He received a traditional education and obtained a Tribute Student (gongsheng) degree in his early 20s. His adult career began in 1917 when the warlord Zhang Zuolin, who then controlled Manchuria, appointed Wang as Director of the Fengtian Provincial Bureau of Finance. At that time Fengtian (present-day Liaoning) province was facing low revenues and had to make regular payments for the numerous loans that provincial officials had borrowed from Japanese and domestic sources. Wang set about re-organizing the police offices, because the police kept census information used for taxing the public. He restructured the tax collection system to prevent public officials from siphoning off collected monies, so that increased revenues began to flow into the provincial treasuries. Wang then stabilized the official currency of the provincial government, the Fengtian dollar (Fengpiao) by fixing its value against other currencies. He advertised that it was backed by silver reserves in the provincial treasury and also announced that provincial officials would accept the note as payment...