Tsuyee Pei

Tsuyee Pei or Pei Tsu-yi (Chinese: 貝祖貽; 1893 – 27 December 1982) was a Chinese banker. Pei was a native of Wuxian, Jiangsu, born in 1893. He attended Shanghai's Chengzhong Middle School, founded by Ye Chengzhong, and completed his degree at Suzhou University in 1911. Aged 23, Pei began working for the Bank of China's Beijing office. After two years, he was transferred to the Guangzhou branch. While in Guangzhou, Pei refused to lend funds to forces allied with Sun Yat-sen. He soon fled the aftermath of the Second Revolution, to establish a branch of the Bank of China in Hong Kong. Pei returned to mainland China in 1927, based out of the Bank of China's Shanghai office. Having gained experience in arbitrage while in Hong Kong and learned about banking practices in England and the United States, Pei subsequently ordered Bank of China branches in commerce and treaty ports to engage in foreign exchange operations. This action ended the monopoly of foreign banks and financial brokers in the field of foreign remittances in China and led the Bank of China to establish several international branches. Between 1934 and 1935, Pei helped plan Chinese financial reform initiatives, such as the November 1935 introduction of the fabi, a paper currency which separated China's finance sector from the silver standard. He spent most of the Second Sino-Japanese War in Chongqing, where the Nationalist government was based. During the war, the Central Bank of China no longer accepted the exchange of local currency for foreign currencies. However, Pei and the Bank of China partnered with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation to provide currency exchange services at the then-current rate. Pei's actions helped the fabi avoid collapse, as did the 1939 establishment of the Sino-British Stabilization Board, of which Pei was a...