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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Eidolon, post: 25716916, member: 102103&quot;]I don&#039;t know, but I don&#039;t believe China had much domestic silver production.&nbsp; China was on a silver standard (unlike most of the world, which had adopted a gold standard in the late 19th-early 20th century).&nbsp; So China imported much of the silver it would have used for domestic coinage.&nbsp; It appears that much of China&#039;s silver was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries" rel="nofollow">produced in Spanish America</a>.&nbsp; Not sure if that had shifted by the early 20th Century.&nbsp; China relied on an export-driven economy with goods like silk and porcelain providing for silver imports.&nbsp; This was a cause of much friction with the West, and was one of the causes of the Opium War.&nbsp; China also had an easier time than most</p><p>countries during the Great Depression.&nbsp; The price of silver fell compared to gold in </p><p>the early 1930s and provided a loose monetary policy which propped up the Chinese</p><p>economy while the rest of the world economy was contracting.&nbsp; Unfortunately, later </p><p>US efforts to raise the price of silver to please silver producers in the Western </p><p>states caused a sharp deflation in China.&nbsp; This produced a fiscal crisis which made </p><p>Chang Kia-shek ill prepared to rest Imperial Japan&#039;s invasions.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175386/the-story-of-silver" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175386/the-story-of-silver" rel="nofollow">The Story of Silver</a> (2019) by William Silber has a lot of useful details on this period and is quite accessible to a reader (like me) without an economics background.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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