CHINESE FAMINE HORROR

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2077, 11 May 1907, Page 4

CHINESE FAMINE HORROR

TERRIBLE REPORTS FROM THE STRICKEN DISTRICT. Tho famine-stricken area in Southern China continues to extend, riots are reported, and the situation thieatens to become serious. Much depends on the measures adopted b.v the local authorities. Missionaries describe harrowing scones of misery, hundreds of people perishing daily with hunger and cold. Father Leopold Csain (S.J.) writes from Tsin-chon-fu to the North China Daily News at the beginning of October, giving the following account of tlio grievous famine that is now afflicting the province of Iviang-tse. It will be remembered that cablegrams from Shanghai recently stated that ten millions of people in this part of China were on the verge of starvation. Father Csain says:—The north of our provinco is suffering from a terrible famine. The floods caused by the recent rains (such fioods surpassing all former records), far from being on the wane, are increasing daily. The old-fashioned system of dykes, more or less parallel, constructed to check the overflowing of the Hoang-ho, has turned the country into so many basins, as it were, with no outlet, which have become lakes. The five broad roads which furrowed the plain in every direction havo disappeared under water. The carmen are starving, and tho peasants are selling their oxen and mules to the inhabitants of Chi-li and the environs. Empty granaries, fields under water, houses in ruins—wliat is to be dono? Those who have a little grain or money in reserve try to struggle on. They remain and build part of their hovels, buoying up their hopes for a better spring. Whether they stay or whether they go, it all comes to the same thing, they are already too weak to resist tho tortures of hunger. The young and tho strong gather their little all, and pilo it on a 'wliooubarrow, generally a straw mat, a saucepan, a basket, and a few rags. Tho father pushes the wheelbarrow ; the eldest son, emaciate, and scarcely clothed, pulls in front ; behind comes tho mother with a nursling in her arms, and two or three other children dragging in the rear, crying or amusing themselves, as the case may be. And it is by hundreds that I meet such on the roads of Hsin-clion-fu.

And all this time, in presence of so terrible a situation, what are the mandarins doing? Their first and greatest occupation is to collect taxes, That is the surest part of thoir revenue, and in canvassing for their lucrative positions the possible taxes, with their future percentage, was all they thought or cared about. To any authority coming to tell them that the harvests have been exceptionally had, or altogether lost, they turn a deaf ear, and answer by assuring them that the preceding harvest was a good one, that at least a. third or fourth part of the bad harvest was saved, etc., etc. However, there are some few mandarins who are good and kindly disposed, and they are foreseeing troubles of another kind. Already many armed bands are overrunning the country, borrowing or taking whatever comes in their way, from live cattle to old clothes. This is our pn-esent situation, which is far fiom being comfortable. About a dozen Roman Catholic missionaries, with twenty thousand or more Christians, are struggling against tho scourge. It is not only for thoir own flock that they wish to avert' the danger, but for thousands of human beings threatened with death from hunger and cold during the approaching winter, which promises to be far from mild.