Wetlands are highly productive ecosystems and provide people with both direct and indirect benefits,which are called ecosystem services.Despite of the high value of the ecosystem services that wetlands provide to us, these continue to be degraded or lost due to the effects of intensive agricultural practices, irrigations, water extraction for domestic and industrial uses, urbanization, infrastructure and industrial development and pollution. Wetland ecosystem services have not been fully recognized or adequately quantified during the past economic and social development.Hence, accurate understanding and reasonably valuating ecosystem services can provide a scientific basis for the rational development of wetland resources. A series of valuation techniques, such as replacement cost method, contingent valuation method, and travel cost method and so on, have been used extensively to evaluate the value of wetland ecosystem services. Although the number of applications for such techniques to wetland ecosystem services is rapidly growing, site specific estimates are often unavailable. Reasons include time and budget constraints as well as technical challenges of conducting research in areas where wetlands are located. Value transfer techniques are an attractive option for policy-maker facing time and budget constraints when reliable primary valuations are absent. Value transfer makes use of results from previous empirical valuation studies (often termed study sites) and applies their value estimations to the policy site in question. In order to reduce the error inherent in value transfer, meta-analysis is commonly used to provide a more thorough and statistically valid value estimation to use in value transfer. There appear a few published studies on value transfer of ecosystem services in China. This paper presents an empirical study of the meta-analytical value transfer performed to evaluate economic values of China's lakes and marshes ecosystem services. The meta-analysis relied on a database consisting of 281 values estimated from 52 empirical valuation studies on ecosystem services of China's lakes and marshes. In this paper, we divided the wetland ecosystem services into 8 categories on the basis of literature review, including aquatic production, raw materials production, recreation and tourism service, water conservation service, flood mitigation service, water purification service, carbon fixation service and oxygen release service. Our findings indicated that both flood mitigation service and water conservation service were the most highly valued wetland services in our sample, and water purification service had the lowest economic value. The meta-regression results revealed a number of important factors in explaining variation in value estimation of ecosystem services, notably the area of lakes and marshes, the number of beneficiaries around the wetland, the differences in economic values among ecosystem services and the differences in valuation methods. We also assessed the robustness of the meta-regression analysis model for out-of-sample value transfer by an n-1 data splitting technique. The transfer errors were from 0.09% to 234.61% and the average transfer error was 19.99%, which is within the acceptable error range of natural resources value transfer. It indicated that value transfer with meta-analysis would be a potentially effective tool for wetland ecosystem services valuation in China.