On Tackling of Tonghuai Mine Case by Qing Government

The Tonghuai mine case took place in 1902. The businessman RUAN Yu-chang changed the government-running mines like Tonghua and Huairen into merchant-running ones. Moreover, he absorbed capital stocks from Japan and Britain, and signed contracts privately with Japanese and English men. The Chinese stocks were in falsehood and could not play their roles, so the right of running these mines was very easy to lose. Afterward, RUAN applied to Qing Government to open these mines, attempting to get the running right of them. With the change of polices for the running of mines with foreign capital, the government paid more attention to the prevention of deception, and found the various drawbacks of these joint ventures together with local officials. Fortunately, these joint ventures were banned in time, which had crashed the Anglo-Japanese plot to grab these mines in the name of joint ventures.