<正>On October 2^nd 2008,The Economist posted an article,"Echoes of the Depression:1929 and all that",questioning,"How today’s financial crisis resembles the one that happened three-quarters of a century ago,and how it does not." The question is widely shared.Since last September,the global economy has been threatened by the severe financial crisis.A number of banks in the United States and in Europe were about to fail,which the governments on both sides of the Atlantic were forced to take care of in order to avoid the global catastrophe.As the crisis is spreading from U.S.to the other parts of the world as well as out of the financial markets into the real economy,frequent reference comes to be made to the Great Depression.The severity and spread of the 1929 Great Depression reveals the integrity of the world economy in the early twentieth century.The parallels between those two crises in terms of causes,process,and remedies are not always complete.Still,a comparative study of the financial crises is helpful to reflect on the impact of the globalization of the economy on local economies from a long-tem perspective.This paper takes that task by focusing on the Chinese experience during the Great Depression. The paper has the three sections.In investigating the causes and the consequences of the Depression in China,an understanding of China’s special position in the international system is crucial.From the late nineteenth century to 1931,except during World War I and the early 1920s,the gold standard provided the framework for international monetary relations,but China used silver as the basis of its monetary system.Section 1 explains the workings of China’s silver-standard monetary system.Between 1873 and 1931,silver depreciated considerably relative to gold,which brought about gradual but continuous rise in prices in the silver-standard Chinese economy.Chinese entrepreneurs came to take the inflationary trend for granted and formed credit-loan relations with financial institutions.From September 1931 on,however, many governments abandoned the gold standard and devalued their currencies in an attempt to inflate their economies,which raised commodity prices including the price of silver.Section 2 demonstrates how the sudden fluctuations of the international price of silver during the Great Depression devastated Chinese economy.In search for recovery from the severe slump,China left the silver standard to a managed foreign exchange system in November 1935 which required committed government intervention unprecedented in Chinese history.Section 3 uncovers the politicization of Chinese economy as the consequence of the monetary change,while Conclusion evaluates its implication in terms of China’s linkages with the global economy and the long-term trajectory of the relationship between the state and the market.