Witte system: the Russian-Chinese bank and Kyakhta merchantry (late 19th - early 20th centuries)

The article examines issues related to Russian economic expansion into China via the Russian-Chinese bank at the turn of the 20th century. Its ideologue and conductor was S.Yu. Witte - the initiator of numerous financial and economic reforms aimed to bringing Russia economically closer to the countries of Western Europe. These reforms were interrelated and became part of so-called Witte system. Its implementation in the Far East expressed in the creation of the Russian-Chinese Bank, the construction of the СER and the trading port in the Yellow Sea. The peculiarity of the Witte system was in the fact that it proposed modernization of the economy not at the expense of private joint-stock companies that had certain state privileges, but at the expense of the state budget. The eastern foreign policy vector has become part of this policy. The authors consider the place and role of the Kyakhta merchant class and the Kyakhta customs in the implementation of the eastern policy of the Russian empire.