If capitalism can be said ever to have taken root in China, it was in Shanghai in the early 1920s. Fertile ground for modern banks and for new industries of all sorts, the city was the center of a budding bourgeois way of life. And if anyone can be said to have tried to plant the seeds of capitalism wider in China, it was the old Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui).

Founded in the late Qing period, the Chamber of Commerce of the 1920s filled its ranks from the city's wealthiest and most prestigious Chinese guilds, trade associations, native-place associations, companies, and stores. The participation in its activities of such local luminaries as the comprador-merchant (and friend of Chiang Kai-shek) Yu Qiaqing, the highly respected banker and industrialist Fang Jiaobo, the political firebrand Feng Shaoshan, and the cagey tobacco tycoon Jian Zhaonan made it a power to be reckoned with, even by the French and British authorities in the great treaty port. Outspoken and public-spirited, it played a vital and controversial role in Shanghai's whirlwind politics of great anti-foreign boycotts and popular movements.

In a China being ravaged by war and revolution, the Chamber of Commerce made no secret of its bourgeois ideals. Between 1921 and 1927 it celebrated capitalism in its house organ: the Monthly Journal of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui yuebao) (hereafter referred to as the Journal).