The Federal Reserve Bank of China was not a central bank in any conventional sense — it was a Japanese-controlled institution established in 1938 to administer currency in the occupied northern Chinese territories, including Peking, Tientsin, and their hinterlands. Its notes and coins were instruments of economic occupation, deliberately designed to displace the legal tender of the Nationalist government and drain real resources from the region. Aluminium was chosen for subsidiary coinage because Japanese wartime procurement had stripped copper and other base metals from civilian use entirely.
The Federal Reserve Bank of China was not a central bank in any conventional sense — it was a Japanese-controlled institution established in 1938 to administer currency in the occupied northern Chinese territories, including Peking, Tientsin, and their hinterlands. Its notes and coins were instruments of economic occupation, deliberately designed to displace the legal tender of the Nationalist government and drain real resources from the region. Aluminium was chosen for subsidiary coinage because Japanese wartime procurement had stripped copper and other base metals from civilian use entirely.