The Famine-Makers
CHU, VALENTIN
The Famine-Makers a report on why china is starving By Valentin Chu In the third century ß. c. the ruler of a Chinese kingdom suffering from a severe famine sought advice from the sage...
...The original Great Vision Program—no longer mentioned today—consisted of a number of bold forestation projects, which included two "Green Great Walls...
...don't know how much is stored in the granaries...
...One million people were killed in the 1887 flood alone...
...Almost 70 per cent of its land is over 3,000 feet above sea level, and only 15 per cent is under 1,600 feet...
...it is the year.' What difference is this from stabbing a man to death and saying: ? am not responsible...
...In China a year without natural calamities is indeed a year for thanksgiving...
...It is a nation-wide exhaustion of the land and the people, the cumulative result of 12 years of abusing nature and human nature...
...But such practices demand discretion and careful coordination with fertilization...
...The foolish squandering of resources and manpower on big, haphazard projects before 1958, and the wanton canal digging since then, has deteriorated the water and soil in China's richest farming regions...
...The U.S...
...The dam fiascoes touched off an orgy of canaldigging in 1958-59...
...Attention was then turned to "semi-mechanization," which meant improved animal-powered farming implements...
...Another big pride of Communist China's hydraulic engineering is the much-ballyhooed Futseling Reservoir and Power Plant in Anhwei...
...Everywhere substitute materials and short cuts in construction have been favored—and praised as "technical innovations...
...One granary reported 10 per cent of its grain mildewed...
...It would be highly unrealistic to ignore the significant realignment of forces which has taken place in China during the past few years...
...The job would be easy: "If every one of the country's 500 million peasants plants two trees each year, we shall have one billion trees in a single year...
...For centuries wasting food was considered a sin in China...
...ignore subsidiary activities...
...During the 1958 steel-making campaign many mountains were stripped bare for fuel...
...Lately, the regime has been encouraging the use of small, handmade instruments...
...It is no coincidence that the worst droughts of the past four years have taken place in the very provinces where millions dug canals from 1957-59...
...They are pressed into a robot army and maneuvered with human-sea strategy and commando tactics...
...Many other rivers in North China have similar skyway river beds between precarious dykes, and floods in this area are the most destructive...
...But if overt resistance is not effective at the moment, the conditions breeding it are likely to persist and will probably get worse...
...that ke-shan (a disease caused by infected water) had erupted in Inner Mongolia...
...don't know how much is in the commune kitchen...
...Of this, 30 per cent is good soil, 40 per cent medium quality and the rest inferior...
...Except for those in the big cities, people have to depend on the traditional herb doctors, who are good at common ailments but have little knowledge of contagious diseases and surgery...
...The basic rule was sternly laid down by the People's Daily in late 1959: "The point of departure is production...
...But they were a flop...
...In 1960, the same paper again reported that saltpeter, which normally appears only in serious drought, had affected millions of acres of farmland...
...One was to be a 1,000-mile protective windbreaker, starting from the Chinese-Korean border, winding along the China Coast, and ending at the mouth of the Yangtze...
...The end result is debilitating famine...
...In Hunan, soldiers sent to pursue granary robbers deliberately let the thieving peasants escape...
...107 million in '59...
...Further damage was caused by the so-called Battle of Crops...
...Actual epidemic conditions have never been publicly reported...
...In many areas the weeds were taller than the crops...
...The answer to this riddle can only be understood after a long look at both China's traditional agricultural economy and the program of the present regime since its take-over in 1949...
...And Water Conservation and Power reported that a number of hydroelectric dams were leaking badly, that many reservoirs "look all right as long as water is not let in," and that on some projects equipment was installed but no power could be produced...
...Similar disruption was caused by plowing too deeply, sowing too closely, planting too early, using the wrong crops or wrong seeds, employing too much or too little or inadequate fertilizer, and not fallowing fields that should have been fallowed...
...In December 1960, workers at the Anshan steel mills and the Fushun coal mines, China's biggest steel and coal centers, staged a strike demanding food and cotton as wages...
...A sizeable portion of the floods and droughts which China has suffered during the past few years have been aggravated, and at times directly caused, by a decade of pseudo-scientific methods in farming, irrigation and soil treatment...
...A nurse from Peking said 10 per cent of her colleagues were hospitalized...
...And a strong, well-organized underground movement is making its presence felt repeatedly in Shanghai, where most of modern China's revolutions have begun...
...In the winter of 1958 the plan was revised: Small canals already dug were abandoned or filled up...
...The regime claims that during the first 10 years of its rule the nation's irrigated area increased from 40 million to 180 million acres...
...Many babies are born dead...
...By the fall of 1960 weeds were reported in at least 13 provinces, from northern Manchuria to Kiangsu, and covered 20 per cent of China's farmland...
...don't know how much is eaten...
...they were also badly manufactured, with many brand-new plows missing parts...
...This term was coined by the Communists to denote fields left unplanted or unattended which subsequently were found covered with weeds...
...During the first few years of Communist rule, a real attempt was made to improve health...
...But too little arable land and too large a population are not the only problems...
...Many of these expensive projects were either ill-planned or badly executed...
...Add to all this frequent dust storms in the arid northwest, typhoons along the coast, insect pests everywhere, rare but severe earthquakes, and it can be seen that the lot of the Chinese peasant has been tied to natural calamities...
...Like most Asian countries, China has always had major public health problems...
...Communist China has unwittingly changed nature...
...Beggars openly wait by restaurant tables for leftover food, often grabbing food from the patrons...
...The result was a reduction in the food crop...
...In the winter of 1955, many millions were "volunteered" into constructing dams and dykes...
...Why make the fuss now...
...The little British colony now has more than 1,000 firms specializing in sending food parcels to China...
...It requires detailed study, careful surveys and coordinated planning...
...During two summer weeks in 1959, 367,000 peasants collapsed and 29,000 died in the fields of Honan...
...From mythical times there have been attempts to tame the Yellow River, known as "China's Sorrow...
...Moreover, after many centuries of exploitation by a vast farming population, China has very little natural vegetation left...
...medium and large canals were dug at relocated sites...
...Peasants from 6-80 were pressed into the fight...
...According to recent refugee information, one out of three or four peasants have dropsy...
...Some 2.2 billion sparrows were systematically exterminated as predatory birds in a nation-wide campaign...
...Now living in New York, Chu is writing a book on Communist China...
...Many Westerners tend to appraise the Communist regime by simply gawking at its production statistics, or weighing its military equipment, or guessing what is up its diplomatic sleeves...
...It was to start from the vicinity of the Old Silk Road in Kansu, cut across the sand dunes of the Alashan Desert and the Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia, and end at the great bend of the Yellow River...
...But after months of confused experience, the small canals proved inadequate...
...But the present famine is due not so much to sudden dramatic blows from nature as to the grave errors of a bureaucracy highly efficient in control but childishly lacking in common sense...
...Thus the monolithic picture could be deceptive...
...Manure^ green compost and garbage are handled with bare hands during the fertilizer drives...
...Soon peasants all over the country refused to use what they called the "Sleeping Plow...
...One year an investigation revealed serious conditions in grain storage in seven provinces...
...continuously shrinking and alkalized soil spreading...
...For during the decade 1949-59 Communist China's food increase was seven times its population increase...
...Medium and small works, by Peking's own admission, have fared even worse...
...In early April of that year, peasants in Honan discovered some young locusts and reported their find to the commune's kanpu...
...At present, a great number of Chinese peasants, who must put in 14-18 hours of hard labor a day, receive less than 1,000 calories...
...By 1959, the People's Daily sensed something was wrong: "During the past one or two years, the alkalization of much soil in many irrigated areas in the North has spread...
...When the plan was announced, millions of peasants had already been digging for months...
...During the past two winters, each province sent from a half a million to 3 million peasants and city dwellers to forage for wild plants in the hills...
...Anormal man in the Far East, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, requires a minimum of 2,300 calories of food daily...
...According to refugees, cholera killed 30,000-50,000 in Kwangtung last year alone...
...But the bulk of the population has fared well, perhaps because of strong immunities and wise eating habits...
...It has replaced militiamen in strategic areas with regular troops, and steadily moved stored grain from the communes to bigger granaries near cities, which are easier to guard...
...The planners must have intimate knowledge of river flow, flood history, silt content, topography, soil characteristics, water tables, weather patterns and the needs of surrounding areas...
...The dam was planned, model-tested and supervised by Russian technicians...
...A single breach can empty the entire river on to the flat, densely populated Yellow Plain for as far as the eye can see, sometimes inundating the region for as long as a year...
...He wondered why...
...Forests make up only one-tenth of its total area (about 80th down the list among the world's countries on a percentage area basis...
...Five years later the reservoir was still not functioning: The sluice gates had turned out to be heavier than designed, and it was feared that they would not open when the reservoir was filled with water...
...Peking believed that in 12 years it could change China's arid land, barren hills and deserts into 160 million acres of sylvan delight...
...When the project was initiated Peking proudly announced that the Yellow River, perhaps the world's most unmanageable body of water, would not only be tamed forever but that by 1961 its lower reaches would be "crystal clear...
...The more the peasants work under the Party's blundering policy, of course, the less they produce...
...And in China drought occurs oftener than floods, is even more destructive and more extensive in area, and lasts longer...
...Eggs, poultry and fish have virtually disappeared...
...When too much water goes to one place, there is bound to be too little elsewhere...
...it is the weapon?' " Twenty-two centuries later Mao Tse-tung, the ruler of another Chinese empire suffering from famine, is energetically moving his people and his resources all over the country in a similar effort to govern effectively...
...These grisly first-hand accounts are supported by the official press in its guarded but still revealing stories...
...in their land it is easier to breed than to feed...
...In agricultural China each valley and plain has its own special combination of soil, climate and economic requirements...
...But the fact is that China's water conservation efforts have done more harm than good...
...Instead, the small implements are "lost, wasted or destroyed left scattered in the open air in the fields where rains and winds ruined them...
...The population daily returns to the earth, in the form of manure, more than 700 tons of phosphorus, 1,200 tons of potassium and a large amount of nitrogen...
...In Kwangsi, for example, of the 740,000 tons of grain inspected, 83 per cent was spoiled by worms...
...Each winter since 1957 tens of millions of peasants and city residents have been taking part in fertilizer marches...
...It was discovered that no one had been ordered to build water conveyance systems for the reservoirs —no sluice gates, no canals, no ditches...
...After a year's work on it, construction had to be halted in 1954 because it was discovered that the structure "had the consistency of rubber...
...Rice straw, soaked in lime solution, dried, ground into powder and mixed with flour, is made into cakes and served in restaurants upon surrender of ration coupons...
...By the fall of 1959 Peking conceded: "What we gained was not up to what we lost...
...The peasants always worked hard...
...Other press reports reveal that during similar periods 7,000 peasants died in the fields in Kiangsi, 8,000 in Kiangsu and 13,000 in Chekiang...
...But the canal digging went on...
...The morale of the regular troops will become an increasingly significant factor if peasant livelihood is not improved...
...The blackmarket is growing, supplied by corrupt Communists controlling food supply centers...
...Given China's limited means, water conservation seems the only practical means of improving the country's agriculture...
...Families of people who die have to make reservations at the busy crematoriums...
...Their families, who formerly received special privileges, are now living the same hard life as other peasants...
...Arable land on the mainland amounts to 264 million acres, or only one-tenth the total area...
...and that there was largescale chemical poisoning in industrial cities...
...The Yellow River, the world's siltiest, deposits enough sediment on its delta to fill up one-and-a-half Empire State Buildings daily...
...Soon after the Huai River overflowed its banks and inundated the entire plain the reservoir was supposed to protect...
...But Peking has never had any overall water conservation plan...
...Floods have also been disastrous...
...A former Government technician from Nanchang has reported that in his bureau 20 per cent of the civil servants had liver inflammation or infectious hepatitis...
...In some areas where the water table was near the surface, excessively deep canals drained the land, creating an artificial drought where none had existed...
...The following summer, when it was found that subsidiary farm work had slumped to half its normal amount, they were shunted back to the fields...
...It launched a national campaign to weigh the stored grain, explaining: "We shall only know the real situation if we weigh and clearly account for the food grain collected...
...Yet the nation failed to prosper...
...Forty per cent of the land in Hopei province that needed sowing was left untended...
...In a country like China, where the water balance has already been upset by centuries of intensive cultivation and population weight, the best place to store water is not behind big dams or in sloppy canals, but underground near where it falls...
...Because the peasants obtain threequarters of their food directly from their own land, when famine strikes it always means hunger and often means starvation...
...Sweet potatoes, turnips and other vegetables grown in city suburbs must be guarded throughout the night, or they will be stolen by city people who raid the fields and sometimes eat the loot on the spot...
...In certain rural areas diseases like schistosomiasis (a chronic intestinal malady involving enlargement of the liver and spleen), hookworm and beriberi have always been common...
...So millions of school children were ordered to plant trees all over the country...
...In 1958 some 60 million people, most of them peasants, were told to make village steel, creating a labor shortage on the farms...
...While food coming out of the earth is decreasing, crops already harvested are increasingly spoiled or wasted...
...Furthermore, among the peasants and water conservation workers there are 10 million demobilized soldiers...
...During three days in midJune, 1.3 million peasants were hurled into a sea of locusts for an epic extermination battle...
...The glamour star of "semi-mechanization" was the Double-Wheel Double-Share Plow, an ordinary allmetal plow pulled by animals...
...Similar demonstrations broke out in Szechwan cities...
...To maintain a subsistence level four-fifths of China's population has to toil on onetenth of its land...
...After the plague spread to Hong Kong, Macao, Indonesia and North Borneo, Peking finally admitted the outbreak of cholera to the Geneva Red Cross...
...Yet human and animal excrement, green compost and river mud have been used by Chinese farmers for 40 centuries...
...78 million in '58...
...Today a hoe often does not last one season, especially when it is made of the "steel" from the backyard furnaces...
...has 5 million tractors, the USSR 1.7 million...
...This 2,900-mile river, with a basin equal in area to Italy, Switzerland and Norway combined, devastated its plain 1,500 times in 3,000 years, and made nine major changes of its course, swinging its mouth in wild arcs up to 500 miles long...
...Peking's search for a breakthrough in agriculture has resulted in a breakdown...
...Communist China is estimated to have 2.5 million regular troops and 20 million militiamen...
...Moreover, the Minister of Health, Li Te-ch'uan, recently admitted that in 1959 a total of 70 million cases of schistosomiasis, filariasis (parasitic worms in the blood), hookworm and malaria were treated...
...One imagines millions of Chinese peasants, ant-like and faceless, digging and hauling all over the land, disciplining the savage rivers and salving the fields with gentle moisture...
...Since the 1958 Great Leap, the Chinese have been too busy making steel, digging canals and fighting calamities to worry about reforestation...
...Not surprisingly, Peking has also had insanely grandiose forestation plans...
...The trouble with the Chinese is that the fecundity of their soil can never match the fecundity of their loins...
...They can only be gathered from press reports about large numbers of public health teams rushing madly from cities to unnamed rural areas at short notice...
...Newspapers often praise fertilizer heroes who, after handling manure, refuse to wash their hands as a patriotic gesture...
...The largest and most important project was a TVA-like system to regulate the Yellow River and its tributaries...
...Tens of thousands of peasants have deserted famine-stricken northern Kiangsu and converged on once-prosperous Shanghai, searching for food...
...In August of that year, the Party Central Committee announced a stupendous project: a network of canals which would criss-cross the entire area of the China Plains and link the three great rivers—the Yellow, the Yangtze and the Huai...
...But the spraying, done with frenzy and inexperience, killed 100,000 farm animals...
...Meanwhile, the half-finished dams and dykes they had left were damaged by floods...
...it needs at least 10 times that amount...
...In Soviet Russia, half of the population works on one-eleventh of the land to provide a meager standard of living...
...The work, according to Peking, consisted of building or repairing some 60 large reservoirs, 1,000 medium ones, 4 million small reservoirs and canals, 74,600 miles of dykes, 15 million farm weirs and 10 million wells...
...More recently, the peasants have been recruited to fight flood and drought...
...The regime then reversed its policy: Concentrate on food crops...
...We have no oil, too few animals...
...Mechanization having failed as a panacea, Peking has been trying its luck with fertilizer...
...In its early stages, this involved an ambitious simultaneous assault on agriculture, fishing, animal husbandry and forestry...
...Because of structural defects, its design and construction had to be altered time and again...
...China is more mountainous than the U.S., the USSR or India...
...For three consecutive winters, up to 70 million peasants were commandeered to dig canals...
...each knew what to do and how to do it with the limited means available...
...In food-short India, according to a United Nations survey, the daily average intake is 2,000 calories...
...By 1956 half of the high dams were completed...
...While forestation surged up and died off, deforestation seemed to progress systematically...
...Steel is expensive...
...The Famine-Makers a report on why china is starving By Valentin Chu In the third century ß. c. the ruler of a Chinese kingdom suffering from a severe famine sought advice from the sage Mencius...
...It must be our unwavering determination in fighting pests and extinguishing diseases that this work shall be subservient to production...
...The number of calamity-fighters now exceeds 10 million in each seriously affected province...
...Tuberculosis is also spreading widely, but sufferers are not even treated because TB is less alarming than other prevalent diseases...
...In some provinces the Party ordered up to 40 per cent of the peasants to stick to subsidiary farm work, although drought was spreading...
...The regime is worried not so much about the people's suffering, however, as it is about the loss of manpower...
...Everything is used, nothing wasted...
...He, too, must wonder why hunger remains the plague of his people...
...In the summer of that year, 110,000 were sent to villages in Szechwan, 60,000 to Hunan, and 2,000 to Fukien...
...They were too numerous, creating problems for future farm mechanization...
...But the kanpu scolded the peasants: "The com and soybean have just sprouted and the wheat will ripen soon...
...In other areas, mainly in dry North China, where the water table was low and the soil unleached, water leaking from the canals raised the water table, thus accentuating capillary action through the lime-rich earth...
...China's streets and villages, formerly cluttered with friendly dogs and cats, are now empty of domestic animals...
...Newspapers praised the high nutritive value of wild plants and recommended recipes for these and other novel foods...
...Peking recently resuscitated the regional political bureaus to tighten its control over the provinces...
...So the Party kanpu (cadre) had hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton, hemp, tea, mulberry, peaches, oranges, lychees and bamboo razed and turned into unstable, unfit, ill-conditioned fields for wet rice, wheat and potatoes...
...The real situation, apparently, is now known...
...If close-knit nets are not cast in the pools and ponds, the fish and turtles will be more than you can eat...
...When a government fails to fill its people's stomachs, it finds it even harder to wash their brains...
...In early 1956, a campaign to "green up China in 12 years" was begun...
...Escapees report that food riots occurred throughout South China in 1960 and '61, with many killed...
...You saw an insect and you bring us a heap of blind words...
...During the dry season, fields in many areas could not get a single drop of water even though the reservoirs were full...
...In 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, it turned its attention from big dams to regional irrigation projects of medium and small dams, wells and, especially, canals...
...Policemen merely shrug at such petty crimes...
...Drinking water in the communes is no longer boiled because of fuel shortage, although in many villages water is often taken from polluted creeks and ponds...
...For smaller ones, only earth and stone have been used because of shortages...
...In the summer of 1958, after it took over direct control of agriculture, the Party ordered nearly half of the crop land deep-plowed and close-sown...
...Hospitals in all cities are full of patients suffering from hepatitis and other diseases, but only serious cases are admitted...
...And in April 1961 the Kuang Ming Daily noted that "arable land is...
...Official figures speak of 40 billion man-days used to dig 105 billion cubic yards of earth (equivalent to 450 Panama Canals, or a wall 3.3 feet high and wide girdling the earth 2,000 times...
...In the Spring of 1960, some 500,000 city people from eight provinces were sent to the countryside to enforce emergency public health measures...
...In a silk-producing area near Canton, for example, the peasants engage in fish culture as a sideline...
...For large projects, there has never been enough steel and cement available...
...by the time the river passed the vicinity of Kaifeng and reached the flat Yellow Plain, its flow was to be controlled...
...Nearly 90 per cent of the regular troops are recruited from the peasantry...
...In sheer quantity, China has plenty of water, but its distribution is lopsided...
...Some 800,000 lost their lives in the great earthquake of 1556, and another 246,000 perished in a similar disaster in 1920...
...Water conservation is a complicated science...
...Another, in Shensi, had 30 per cent mildewed and 40 per cent sprouting...
...And the less they produce, the more they have to work...
...It is safe to assume that the 1961 total, although never officially announced, was probably at least as large as 1960's...
...The peasant in the commune receives much less—usually two bowls of semiliquid gruel or paste, made from bad cereals, gritty flour or sweet potatoes, for each meal...
...Public health as a purpose in itself—a bourgeois way of thinking— should not be permitted...
...We shall have an insect-destroying campaign some day anyway...
...They have been repeatedly blamed by Peking for being "afraid of the peasants" and for their "misguided sentimentality...
...Despite a Chinese specialist's warning to re-examine the whole plan, the Sanmen Gorge Dam, with a onemillion kilowatt power plant, was started in 1957...
...Impulsive demonstrations and spontaneous food riots are no match against a monolithic regime with a powerful secret police and armed forces...
...No one realizes this more than the Chinese Communists themselves...
...others are created from decrepit temples or ancestral shrines...
...In Shansi, half of the total farm labor was used...
...And it is something to wonder about...
...The frenzied canal digging created problems undreamed of in the Communist philosophy: The canals took away much valuable farmland...
...The Huai River, draining an area six times the size of the Netherlands but without a mouth of its own, flooded its valley 979 times in 2,200 years...
...In the United States, oneeighth of the population farms one-fifth of the land to create a national overweight problem and pile up great surpluses...
...This project was completed with Russian aid in 1954...
...Not long ago, Hong Kong Communist newspapers eagerly quoted a Japanese visitor to China who said, "I did not see any hunger in Peking...
...At first the press was able to cover up the situation, but during the past two years there have been partial admissions and reports of "seasonal contagious diseases...
...The locusts next invaded the neighboring provinces of Anhwei, Kiangsu and Shantung, damaging nearly five million acres of farmland in 179 counties...
...Valentin Chu, born and educated in China, was until 1949 a reporter for the Shanghai English-language daily, China Press...
...Communist China produces less than 3 million tons of chemical fertilizer a year...
...China's history records 1,397 serious droughts since Christ was born...
...True, Peking has publicized the natural causes and played down other factors...
...Of course, only last month 70,000 from Kwangtung sought refuge across the border in Hong Kong...
...To further complicate matters, the village kanpu in charge of digging were unclear about the various canal measurements, and they varied greatly...
...In October 1957 the People's Daily, Peking's official organ, finally had to admit: "It is too early to talk about general mechanization...
...In Hopei, 6 million were mobilized...
...Timber industries in forest areas, led by quota-conscious kanpu, competed with each other in cutting down big and small trees without replanting...
...Two months later the crops in two counties were eaten up by locusts in one night...
...Even saplings were not left to protect the soil, which soon became barren...
...On the same pages where this story appeared were advertisements of firms offering to deliver food parcels to China, with such screaming titles as "Fast, Fast, Fast...
...Under the Communists a good deal of food is unnecessarily spoiled...
...The 1959 locust disaster is another enlightening example of the Party bureaucrats' knack for worsening natural calamities...
...Common birds such as sparrows, pigeons, crows and cuckoos are also gone...
...The efficiency of China's farm labor, low in the old days because of inadequate equipment, has been lowered even further by Peking's administrative epilepsy...
...Epidemics have been developing in China for four years, though their full extent is not known...
...Since 1959, Communist China has officially ordered the eating of rice husks, bean waste, potato leaves, pumpkin flowers, wild plants and algae...
...They were again pushed aside: "Little ghost and big fright...
...In Liaoning, two-thirds of the students and civil servants from the cities were diverted to the countryside...
...And collective working and living without adequate sanitary precautions has resulted in widespread food poisoning and epidemics...
...To protect it, 59 high dams were to be constructed in the upper river...
...Until 1957, Peking concentrated its energies on big, hydroelectrically oriented dams...
...The peasants then appealed to the county Party commissar...
...In April 1960, too, the People's Congress revealed that kalaazar (infection of the liver, spleen and bone marrow, especially prevalent among children) was spreading...
...in Shantung, more than 7 million...
...In the same summer 60,000 peasants collapsed after six days and nights of flood-fighting with little sleep or rest...
...Three-quarters of this water, however, is in the Yangtze valley and south of it...
...Some of the mistakes are almost unbelievable...
...With great fanfare, Peking turned out 3.5 million Double Plows in 1956 and 6 million in '57...
...In most cases the entire program consisted of digging holes, inserting cuttings or saplings, and watering them for a few days...
...Immediately the provincial Party secretary pushed the panic button and issued a set of "Regulations Pertaining to the Swift Extermination of Locusts...
...and 148 million in '60...
...Peking cannot afford to build enough modern fertilizer plants or to import fertilizer from abroad, and China must still depend largely on compost...
...Other groups are moving from Chekiang into Fukien...
...those who supply firewood get priority...
...When the mulberry trees in a village near Canton were razed by zealous Party robots to plant rice, the entire cycle of agricultural economy was upset...
...Artificial deforestation has also been on the increase, especially since 1958...
...Another major cause is the breaching of dykes...
...The Party kanpu in charge of food supply in the communes are nicknamed by the peasants: "The Five Don't Knows": They don't know how much grain is harvested...
...They would serve as inland waterways, as a gigantic reservoir, and as a water-regulating system to bring water from South to North China...
...By then, however, it was too late...
...After the hosannas came the flood, inundating 7 million acres and washing away 2.6 million houses...
...The waterholding capacity of the soil is therefore extremely poor, and excessive run-off is a major cause of floods...
...Quality has always been less important than quantity and speed...
...When there was a coal shortage, 20 million were sent to the hills to dig for dubious fuel...
...But your dogs and swine eat the food of men, and you curb them not...
...A recent People's Daily editorial recalled wistfully the days of the pre-Communist peasant, when "a hoe would last three generations the property of the man who used it, repaired it and cared for it...
...Since historically China is a land of catastrophes, it is tempting to conclude that the current famine is just one of those things...
...In North China cotton and potato picking were not done on time...
...Most of the farmland consists of cut up wet paddies or terraced hillside plots where modern tractors are of no use...
...The madcap use of farm labor is responsible for at least one unnatural disaster, the "weed calamity...
...A similar fate befell the Yungting Reservoir Tunnel near Peking, which was also opened with a loud blast of propaganda...
...But six months later the production of a new, lighter model was announced...
...The militia is no longer trusted because it is part of the local peasantry...
...Nor does the peasant own it, repair it or care for it...
...The entire hydrologic cycle in China is now upset by faulty water conservation and deforestation...
...Indeed, they are an important factor in the current famine...
...How can we divert labor for insect pests...
...When famine became acute late in 1960, a People's Daily editorial revealed that the total amount of grain stored in Communist China was unknown...
...The quality of the newly made small implements, however, leaves much to be desired...
...Peking finally realized that the much-vaunted huge projects, which had so impressed foreign visitors, often turned out to be mere monuments to stupidity...
...They seldom try to probe into the cross-currents of China's complex economy, or the subtle psychological undertow of its silent millions...
...For hundreds of miles it flows between dykes on a river bed high above the surrounding countryside, with the silt raising the bottom continuously...
...Over the centuries, the peasants have learned which crops are the best and the most profitable...
...Since 1961, Peking has imported grain...
...They leaked badly (in many cases 60 per cent of the water escaped...
...The campaign ended when a sizeable increase in predatory insects was noted...
...In July 1959 the Honan Peasant's Daily, a provincial paper not even allowed outside Honan, divulged that many peasants were dying from malnutrition and overwork...
...When the fertilizer drive was on, 80 million had to forage for manure...
...Today, they are told how to plow, when to sow and what to plant...
...The cost of machinery is prohibitive...
...Immediately after the restrictions were lifted, the tiny Hong Kong post office was buried under a daily avalanche of 50,000 food parcels from frantic relatives...
...The country's peasants have always been at the mercy of their eroded mountains and capricious rivers...
...North China has less than 5 per cent...
...All this could be a mere straw in the wind...
...She has also admitted that influenza, measles, diphtheria and spinal meningitis are spreading at water conservation sites, in commune nurseries and primary schools...
...Even under the severest natural conditions, there should have been enough reserve to forestall a famine...
...The appearance of a wild rabbit or a crow in China today is an occasion for a mass hunt for extra food...
...But since the mid-1950s, and particularly since the Great Leap, conditions have changed drastically...
...When people die, you say: ? am not responsible...
...When this was discovered, the peasants were hurried back to plant more food crops...
...Farm cooperatives and communes have set their cattle to graze on saplings, and have chopped down roadside trees and whole forests for timber or to "open virgin land...
...Six months later, an emergency public health committee warned that careless handling of manure, garbage and dirty water had spread "all kinds of diseases: schistosomiasis, tapeworm, hookworm, diphtheria, typhus, liver inflammation and animal diseases...
...Many granaries are haphazardly built...
...They were also too small, providing little protection in times of flood or drought...
...In 1958 there was another flood, and this time 70 per cent of the swollen water came from below the Sanmen Gorge...
...Modern doctors number only one to every 10,000 people...
...These veterans are the bitterest and the most articulate complainers...
...In an Army barrack in Kiangsu, soldiers refused to get out of their beds for morning drills, protesting against short rations, which have now affected all the armed forces...
...During the next seven years, he served as Time-Life correspondent in Hong Kong...
...A great number of flood-prevention works which have to be renewed yearly were not renewed, or, if they were started, were not finished...
...In prewar China it was 2,234 calories...
...The weed calamity first came to light in 1959...
...Elsewhere 650,000 tons of tobacco leaves were plucked but unsorted, and the damp leaves began to spoil...
...Not only were they too heavy for China's wet paddies and terraced fields...
...At present, an ordinary resident in show cities like Peking and Shanghai receives a small ration of inferior rice or flour, plus a monthly allotment of about half a pound of pork, three ounces of sugar and three ounces of edible oil...
...38 million in '56...
...What China is now facing is no common natural disturbance, affecting a few provinces for a short time...
...This is not so...
...Notable were the campaigns of fly-swatting, rat-exterminating and street-sweeping, all amply reported by foreign visitors...
...This is food for thought for the free world...
...Peking accused the peasants of "hostility toward innovations" and "backward conservatism...
...The mighty Yangtze River, the world's third longest, in whose valley nearly half the population lives, had 242 floods and droughts in 265 years...
...But unlike either the Soviet Union or the United States, both of which have vast plains that are thinly settled, China's huge population is extremely dense wherever the land is arable...
...People are starving by the wayside, and you open not your granaries...
...For all its bizarreness, the fertilizer drive is intended to make up for a real agricultural deficiency...
...Each year since the Communists came to power in 1949, the total area of farmland affected by natural calamities has risen steadily: It was only 13 million acres in 1950...
...Except for fresh fruits, the Chinese have never eaten uncooked food or unboiled water...
...The other, equally long, was to be a forest shield against the sand from Outer Mongolia...
...Blackmarket rings sometimes have their own sampans and armed escorts...
...The regime acted indiscriminately, with the result that many plants either weakened or died, and much soil was debilitated...
...This brought up harmful salts and alkali from the subsoil and formed a crust on the surface after evaporation, spoiling formerly dry but good farmland...
...Thus, the fertilizer drive has not really increased fertilizing strength, even though mixing compost with adulterating ingredients has increased the total tonnage...
...Peasants, city people, students, civil servants and even soldiers were ordered to forsake whatever they were doing and hand-pluck weeds from the fields...
...Forest fires and the incidence of tree diseases have increased...
...Left unharvested, much rice and sweet potatoes were damaged by the drought...
...In wooden buckets, bamboo baskets, tin cans and earthern pots slung from bamboo poles, or in makeshift carts pulled by children, the brigades carry the excrement of China's 700 million human beings and 265 million farm animals, plus sewage silt, garbage, river mud, peat, green meal, fumigated earth, chimney ashes, brackish water and industrial waste...
...And most Chinese food is eaten piping hot...
...Later, in Sian, students of 38 colleges and high schools turned a memorial meeting into an "anti-hunger demonstration...
...The same year, floods destroyed or silted up almost all of them...
...Is it any wonder that China has registered such spectacular water conservation failures...
...With this image in mind, it is even possible to rationalize that the misery of millions forced to labor today might bring some good to additional millions who will inherit the land tomorrow...
...at present, more than 200,000 parcels are sent daily...
...An official technical journal, Water Conservation and Power, then admitted this proved that even after the completion of the project, major floods could not be prevented...
...In Shantung one-third of the farmland was covered by weeds, which at places grew so thick that a "man was unable to walk into the fields.' Soon the Ministry of Agriculture sounded another alarm, this time to fight weeds...
...The key to the Yellow River system was to be the mammoth Sanmen Gorge Dam, at a point just before the river leaves the mountains...
...For a small quantity of vegetables, he has to line up as early as 3 a.m...
...In many areas fertilizer was not put into the fields and rice was not harvested in time...
...Since 1958, a vast number of low-level kanpu, who have been sent to the countryside to live, work and eat with the peasants, have been "infected...
...Technical direction often has not matched actual working conditions...
...But deforestation is continuing at an even faster pace, reducing the already poor moisture-capturing capacity of the soil, extending the erosion area, heightening excessive run-off of rain water, and insuring severer damage from floods and droughts for generations to come...
...It is not uncommon for laborers working in the fields to collapse and drop dead suddenly...
...Then the human sea surged in other directions, for other campaigns, and the trees were left to die of thirst...
...Crops, grass and tree leaves on a million acres in 48 counties in Honan were stripped clean...
...All these mistakes dealt the harvests a severe blow...
...They use the waste from the silkworms to feed the fish, then dig up the fertile mud from the fish ponds to fertilize mulberry trees, the leaves of which are fed to the silkworms...
...In the beginning, the Chinese Communists attempted to implement a titanic program of farm mechanization on the Russian or American scale...
...In June 1959, the People's Daily summed up the results of many of the large-scale projects: "There are reservoirs without water, reservoirs with water but without aquaduets...
...The official statistics are impressive...
...and "Rocket Speed...
...Every year 668 cubic miles of water flow over the mainland's 3.6 million square miles of land, averaging 12 tons of water for each person daily...
...still others are without doors and windows—though all have fences or walls to prevent theft...
...China has fewer than 33,500 tractors, with some 6,700 in disrepair, but despite their limited usefulness this is less than 4 per cent of the number required as estimated by the regime...
...Its climate varies from sub-tropic summer to Siberian winter...
...The King had been energetically shifting his people and his resources about the country in an all-out effort to alleviate the starvation and to govern effectively...
...We must take care of urgent business first...
...29 million in '54...
...and don't know how long the store will last...
...By Peking's own estimate, insect pests damage 10 per cent of the country's grain, 20 per cent of the cotton and 40 per cent of the fruits every year...
...With gongs clanging, drums beating and red pennants fluttering in the scented breezes, these brigades, singing and moving in military formation, transport their precious commodity to the fields...
...The canals were to be of five sizes, ranging from small irrigation ditches to large ones accommodating 3,000-ton ships...
...By early 1960 half of the canals in some provinces were completed...
...Airplanes were used to spray insecticide...
...Then there is the incident of the Tahuofang Dam, the country's second biggest reservoir, near Fushun in Manchuria...
...If axes enter the hills and forests only at the proper time, the wood will be more than you can use...
...A commune in Kwangtung close-shaved 13 forestcovered hills in one swoop...
...The land of China, slightly larger in area than the United States, is hardly ideal for agriculture...
...We don't even have enough people for weeding and fertilizing...
...Mencius told the King: "If the seasons of cultivation are not interfered with, the grain will be more than you can eat...
...Until late 1960, Communist China limited food parcels from Hong Kong and Macao...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 12
