The Great Drought in China
By ELEANOR FRANKLIN EGAN
WHY millions of people in North China don't freeze to death in mid-winter instead of starving to death is more than I can understand. And of course many do freeze to death; but as conditions now exist one would expect to find frozen corpses lying about in heaps every morning. It is so bitterly cold. At this time of year one of the things you do when you get on the up side of the Yang-tse River is begin to put on more clothes, and by the time you arrive near the vicinity of Peking, where Mongolian winds come over the rimming snow-capped mountains and cut down across the limitless plains of the Chi-li, you have on everything you possess and are instinctively encouraging in your attitude toward the inevitable host of furriers who beset your path seeking to sell you more. You have visions of a great enveloping garment to go on over all other clothes and really keep you warm. And you will acquire such a garment too if the furrier promises to turn it out between sunrise and sunrise. No Chinese furrier ever hesitates to do this and usually can be depended upon to keep his word, though how he manages to do so is his own very private affair.
Selling furs to foreigners in North China during the months when foreign marrow is likely to congeal is an easy and profitable business; but when the foreigner, wrapped up within an inch of his life, fares forth to mingle with the populace he must reflect, if given to reflection, that he is not so hardy as he likes to boast of being. In the crowd he rubs shoulders with literally thousands of men who live and go their daily ways in a state of practical nudity. That is, he rubs shoulders with thousands of men whose only garments are loose suits of thin blue cotton, often as not hanging in rags, which expose to stinging winds large patches of complete nakedness. After which there are millions who have for winter wear nothing but padded cotton suits that look thick enough and as though they might suffice, but in which any one of us would suffer intense discomfort in even the mildest winter weather.
In the popular or popularized conception of the North China winter the average citizen is supposed to be rolled up in layer upon layer of padded cotton clothing until he looks as though he were protected from the cold to the point of suffocation; but the trouble is the very poor hardly ever get into popularized conceptions, and North China is filled with the very poor, who look upon their thickly upholstered Chinese brethren with no less envy and respect than upon the wool and fur clad foreigners. As for the rich and well-to-do in fur-lined robes of silk brocade—there are a good many such, but not so many as you might think. Indeed there are practically none at all outside of the cities. And as a class they are so loftily elevated above the lowly millions they seem sometimes to be a race apart. As a matter of fact they not unlikely regard themselves in some measure as a race apart, especially those who have been educated abroad. Among these are a chronically disgusted few who frequently are heard to refer to their less fortunate compatriots as "These Chinese." They are the forward-looking citizens right enough, but their connection with the great tragedy through which the country now is passing might be ignored altogether if it were not that this tragedy, or the example of the foreign attitude toward it, awakened in them human sympathy such as they never before have been known to display; a sympathy real enough to express itself in fine generosity on their part, which the old-timers of the foreign community will tell you is something new under the Chinese sun.
America China's Only Hope
THE United International Chinese Famine Relief Committee has made a map of the hunger regions, on which the degrees of distress are indicated by shadings. There are some broad white areas on the map, and a few white spots, and at a glance one might suppose these are meant to be regarded as areas and spots unaffected by the calamity that has befallen. But if the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, let us say, were in the grip of unprecedented famine, and 20 per cent of the population of Michigan and Indiana were in danger of starvation within three or four months, we would hardly paint the states of Michigan and Indiana white on our hunger map, would we? In the white regions of the Chinese hunger map there have been crops within the pact two years averaging 7 to 60 per cent yield, so starvation threatens only 20 per cent of these populations. The sections in which 20 to 40 per cent are affected are dotted on the map; horizontal lines are drawn across 40 to 60 per cent regions; and the 60 to 80 per cent areas are deeply shaded by vertical lines; while here and there counties or groups of counties called shens are painted dead black to indicate that within these borders literally nothing has been produced during the past two years; that all means of purchase from the outside are exhausted; that the total population is in the last extremity of distress, and that 90 to 100 per cent are likely to die unless relief reaches them from the world without. Vast numbers must die anyhow, no matter what measures shall be taken to save the situation, and the tragedy of North China will be cumulative until the offended gods get back on their jobs and in answer to universal prayer pour rain upon the seemingly barren earth, that it may yield once more sufficient harvest.
In connection with this famine are a number of ordinary economic problems, and I intend to try to write about them from a viewpoint influenced by nothing but economic and material considerations. But not now. While a conflagration is raging the fire department is not called into meeting to discuss origins and wherefores of the fire's progress. Just now I should feel I had lived to some purpose if I could convey to the minds of a few million Americans a picture that is not what has been or what may be.
You know we like the Chinese almost better than we like any other people in the world; or, should I say, like them with a different liking from that we bestow on other peoples? As a matter of fact all white peoples like the Chinese, though nobody has ever quite put a finger on the peculiarly Chinese characteristic or quality which inspires this universal regard. Though it may just be "an indefinable something" in their character, the truth remains that we Americans feel for them a great sympathy which is wholly spontaneous and related to absolutely nothing in the nature of self-interest. They know this. Every Chinese who knows anything about the world outside China knows it vaguely or very definitely by this time, and their response is beginning to take the form of a sometimes embarrassing discrimination between "foreigners" and "Americans."
They are wondering now if their great big powerful friend across the sea is really going to do for them the splendid thing promised. You see, announcement has been made out here that the people of the United States through individual benevolence will give twenty million dollars to be applied to relief in the famine-stricken provinces. I have no idea who made the announcement or whether or not it was authorized, but it was made, and the Chinese thought it very wonderful and have discussed it at great length and with most un-Chineselike animation and enthusiasm. As a contribution twenty million dollars hardly could be regarded as paltry, but to meet the necessities of a situation wherein some forty-five million people are involved in the inevitable conditions attending unparalleled famine, twenty million dollars could not be expected to do all that needs to be done. The Chinese do not believe we will contribute twenty millions, but if we make it ten millions we shall not "lose face" with China. By making it at least ten millions we shall make 50 per cent good on the boast, and that is as much as is necessary to secure us immunity from the variously expressed Chinese surprise.
But if we could only make it twenty millions, and then add another cipher to the sum! It is the opportunity of our national lifetime to instill the principles we preach into the very souls of benighted multitudes, and to brighten until it shines throughout the whole world's dark the light of altruism which we particularly among the peoples of the earth have lifted up and labeled the only light that can discover peace. It is my belief that we now have it in our power to do the greatest thing in our history, at a very small cost to ourselves. The great Chinese famine has been brought to our doors by smiling gods whose business it is to look after fool Americans; and by coming adequately to the rescue of China in her appalling distress—by coming to her rescue with constructive permanent measures of relief—we can speed up the regeneration of her people tremendously and advance her slow progress out of chaos.
Our reward would be her unanimous and enduring friendship, based on the profoundest gratitude; and this, it seems to me, would be a better thing to leave our children than the unimportant sum of money we should have to invest in it. Not that I have any conviction that we shall make this investment. The smiling gods that seek to serve us have occasion too often to smile with the other corner of their mouths. That it is our opportunity I think I am justified in emphasizing.
Nothing to Eat—Not Even Grass
I CAME to China for the sole purpose of having a look at conditions in the famine-stricken areas, and did so with visions in my mind of vast horror I had no wish to see. I went to Armenia in 1919 and saw there enough human misery and wholesale starvation to last me for all time, but I can say now that having crossed only the gray and white areas of China's hunger map, and having come up merely to the edges of the black regions, I am able to look back upon what I saw in Armenia as something quite closely resembling happiness and prosperity. The Armenians were eating grass, but at least they had grass to eat. There is no grass in North China. There are only broad flat yellow plains, bounded north and west by utterly naked mountains. To the southeastward in Shan-tung are crumbling yellow hills above which an occasional rugged peak lifts itself to a fine height and lends a certain grandeur to an otherwise ghastly landscape. There were no trees except a few that grew in the villages and towns, and even these have been cut down and used to meet human needs. The villages and towns are for the most part built of mud and walled with mud, and if it rains their populations wallow in mud. In these regions it has not rained for many months, and the villages and towns are deep in a fine yellow dust, which is blown about in clouds by bitter winter winds, to seep into one's clothing, get into one's eyes and throat, and fill one with considerable apprehension because the dust is mixed with filth from people who are strangers even to the first principles of sanitation.
But there is something more in the picture—the most important thing of all. Coming up through Shan-tung and across Eastern Chi-li one observes that every tiniest patch of possible earth is under cultivation. There is nothing growing now, though winter wheat should be green in the fields. It is all bare, unbelievably bare, but there is not an inch of ground either on the amazingly terraced hillsides or on the great plains that does not look as though it had been crumbled and smoothed into fineness by human hands. It is all like a tremendously beautiful garden prepared by unimaginable patience and toil for seedtime. Whether or not it will be planted depends on whether or not it rains. There have been just two light falls of snow on the winter wheat, and this is not enough. In Shan-tung I was told that unless the usual snows come soon—and there is hardly any hope of this—the winter-wheat crop will be once more a total failure. This will be the third year, and unless rains come to insure plentiful summer crops it will mean yet another year of famine.
The nearest the Chinese Government ever came to taking a census has been their compilation of facts regarding the conditions in the famine-stricken provinces. And since their figures have been checked by the local famine-relief organizations everywhere, and subsequently by the international committee, they are now accepted as being quite sufficiently accurate for all intents and purposes. My own observation is that they minimized rather than exaggerated, but that is because I am not in the habit of
