[4] Shannon R. Brown of the University of Maryland Baltimore County argued that the work is "mildly revisionist" due to contradicting previous conventional wisdom.
[2] Parts of the book document how businesspeople at first found increasing influence at the start of the Republic and that Chiang's effort to nationalize beginning in 1934 changed those fortunes.
Nankai University Press published one, titled Zhejiang caifa yu minguo zhengfu, 1927-1937 (Chinese: 江浙财阀与国民政府, 1927-1937).
[11] Cochran praised how it dealt with the political realm but that the work "is less successful" in the economic sphere due to using inferences on why certain businesspeople took certain actions instead of finding hard evidence.
"[3] However, Hou argued that his conclusion could not be verified because his guiding explanation that the work examines was "much too loose" as the author fails to adequately put on proper definitions of key words.