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Over the last half a century or so, economic and business historians interested in China have been studying Chinese economic behaviour in relation to other parts of the world. From the rural to the urban sector, from silk, cotton-textiles, to sugar and banking, various case studies on individual industries or different regions have been put forward. However, only a few have attempted to test at the macro-level. Dr. Shiroyama's book is the most recent one.
Her story sets upon the question of how the Chinese economy came to the stage of "depression" under the impact of the "Great Depression", and what role the Chinese (Nationalist) government played in reaction to the "depression". It begins with the adoption of silver as a means of payment in China long before the nineteenth century. It goes on to discuss the development of bank credit through land mortgage in Shanghai to finance the blooming cotton-textiles and silk reeling industries in the Yangzi Delta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All these developments are treated as a framework for understanding China's "depression" in the 1930s.
Chapters that follow delineate the process of the "great depression" in China. Firstly, the terms of trade between the rural economy and the urban sector worsened due to the sharp decline in exports of silk products and the cuts of credit among the rural population. Secondly, the urban, industrial sector, especially silk and cotton, slumped during the world's "Great Depression", the abandonment of the international gold standard by gold-using countries, and...