GIVEN THAT CHINA'S early 20th century history is a litany of disaster and tragedy, it's perhaps no surprise that the Great Depression doesn't register as the sort of epoch-defining event for the Middle Kingdom as it does for the West. Not only was China of the 1930s on the peripheries of the global economy, but the sequence of invasion, natural disaster and civil war that framed the economicdownturn lays greater claim to shaping the country's trajectory. And whereas the Keynesianism which came to dominate mainstream Western economic thought for decades is deeply rooted in the experience of failed markets in the Depression, it's more difficult to find a similar link with the defining economic events for post-war China-communization, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
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