China: land of famine

Front matter

CHINA

LAND OF FAMINE

WALTER H. MALLORY

Foreword

There could be no better preface to this authoritative and interesting work on the Land of Famine than the pictures of country life in the interior of China from Count Keyserling’s “Travel Diary of a Philosopher,’ suggesting in one paragraph first how famine is being constantly fought by the yellow men in their blue jerkins, making the very hills which they cultivate to their summits fortresses of defense, and then how famine saps its way in through the ancestral graves and takes the living as prisoners by reason of their devotion to their dead and of their unwillingness to leave them in order to seek their livelihood and, so, fight famine in distant helds.

Every inch of soil is in cultivation, carefully manured, well and professionally tilled, right up to the highest tops of the hills, which, like the pyramids of Egypt, slope down in artificial terraces. The villages, built of clay and surrounded by clay walls, have the effect of natural forms in this landscape: they hardly stand out against the brown background. And wherever I cast my eyes, I see the peasants at work, methodically, thoughtfully, contentedly. It is they who everywhere give life to the wide plain. The blue of their jerkins is as much a part of the picture as the green of the tilled fields and the bright yellow of the dried-up river-beds. One cannot even imagine this flat land devoid of the enlivening presence of these yellow human beings. And it represents at the same time one great cemetery of immeasurable vastness. There is hardly a plot of ground which does not carry numerous grave mounds; again and again the plough must piously wend its way between the tombstones. There is no other peasantry in the world which gives such an impression of absolute genuineness and of belonging so much to the soil. Here the whole of life and the whole of death takes place on the inherited ground. Man belongs to the soil, not the soil to man: it will never let its children go. However much they may increase in number, they remain upon it, wringing from Nature her scanty eifts by ever more assiduous labour; and when they are dead, they return in child-like confidence to what is to them the real womb of their mother. And there they continue to live for evermore. The Chinese peasant, like the prehistoric Greek, believes in the life of what seems dead to us. The soil exhales the spirit of his ancestors, it is they who repay his labour and xi

Xi CHINA: LAND OF FAMINE who punish him for his omissions. Thus, the inherited fields are at the same time his history, his memory, his reminiscences: he can deny it as little as he can deny himself; for he is only a part of it.

“The plough among the tombstones” is the summarizing phrase describing China’s agriculture and ancestral worship— “the universal religion of the country.” Mr. Mallory, in speaking of the social causes of famine, says that the most thickly populated regions where the land is good and where it is most needed for agriculture are ‘‘just the districts where graves are most numerous.”’ This is the physical side of it, but deeper than that is the filial devotion which like a centripetal spiritual force holds the descendants to the tombs of those who have gone before. There are natural causes, economic causes, and political causes which Mr. Mallory presents, clearly and convincingly, but down at bottom is this profound social cause which he recognizes and which must be reckoned with in dealing with the things that are seen. |

As Keyserling suggests, the Chinese peasant and the early Greek have something in common, as this prayer of an ancient farmer preserved to us out of that time witnesses—the prayer of one who was held to his ancestral plot, inadequate though it was.

To Demeter of the winnowing fan and the Seasons whose feet are in the furrows, Heronax lays here from a poor little plough-land their share of ears from the threshing floor, and these mixed seeds of pulse on a slabbed table the least of a little; for no great inheritance is this he has gotten him here on barren hill.

The problem in China is due primarily to the fact that the ‘‘no great inheritance’’ grows less and less for the individual with the multiplying of the heritors; and the multiplying force is the necessity, felt by the worshipper of the past, of “providing sufficient male children so that, in spite of the ravages of disease, accident, wars, pestilence or famine [to which the multiplying contributes] at least one will survive to carry on the family name and perform the necessary duties required by ancestor worship.” The Manchurian wheat fields make vain permanent appeal to those who feel this

FOREWORD X1i1 filial and paternal obligation, even though they may go in numbers to help with a season’s harvest. There is a pioneer belt along the northern front of China in Manchuria and Mongolia which could accommodate millions upon millions of ill-fed or starving Chinese farther south. If such fields were open to settlement and cultivation in America, there would be such a rush as there was a few years ago to the last frontier lands in Oklahoma. The American settlers would not be burdened in their flight by their Lares and Penates, as was Aeneas of old, who not only bore them with him but carried his father on his shoulder. The Chinese peasant says, however, in the face of like allurement: ‘‘Who would take care of the graves of my ancestors?”’

Our own civilization, one of whose Ten Commandments enjoins parental reverence, but one of whose chief concerns now is the want of respect by youth for age, and by the present for the past, must find something to praise in a people who are willing to make sacrifices even to the point of starvation in order to honor not only their parents but their remote forbears. Our scientists are beginning to be concerned about spaces for libraries and cemeteries, but it is am economic anxiety. It ought not to be necessary to destroy this sense of spiritual continuity in order to fight famine in China, but it must be taken into account in all the plans for controlling floods, fighting pestilence, increasing soil fertility, improving methods of cultivation for the fields and conservation for the forests, using modern agricultural implements, making fuller use of time, avoiding waste effort, developing means of transportation and providing for credits. All these things seem to wait upon a better political organization and control, but, as Mr. Mallory urges, amelioration may be achieved even without a unified empire.

It is a shocking fact that with all the labor expended and virtues practiced, nearly a fourth of the people of the globe live in a land of famine—not of general famine at any one time nor of continuous famine in any one place, but of famine in one or another province or locality all the time. ‘There was a famine in the land”’ was a frequent phrase in ancient history.

It is somewhat discreditable to present world agriculture with its surplusage in some regions that other regions should be chronically in that condition. Mr. Mallory makes constructive suggestions, which need not be anticipated here, but it is well to give the reader who pauses to read this prefatory note the advice that one who enters the rather dark passages reciting the causes of famine in China need not abandon hope for China—for at the end one comes out into the light of day again with this assurance from the guide:

If history teaches us anything, she teaches that a race as numerous and as fundamentally sound as the Chinese, which has maintained its political and cultural solidarity for so many centuries, will not perish from the earth.

The American Geographical Society, which is interested in the whole earth, makes this sympathetic scientific contribution to the desired welfare of our antipodes, who are rich in natural resources and have almost unlimited human energy.

JouHN H. FINLEY