FAMINE IN CHINA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5431, 31 May 1929, Page 2

FAMINE IN CHINA.

DEATH FROM STARVATION.

MEALS OF HUMAN FLESH. Conditions in famine-stricken China, where 16,000,000 are reported to have already perished, and millions of others are starving or suffering from under-nourishment, were related by the Rev. J. R. Blanchard at a gathering of the Wellington Rotary Club on Tuesday. “In a great part of China,” said Mr Blanchard, “a country two and a half times the size of our own, with a population of 54,000,000, a great number of people are suffering from famine conditions. Failures of crop through drought, a plague of locusts, and the ravages of brigands have reduced thousands to starvation and under-nourishment.”

Mr Blanchard said that many in China had tried to subsist on grass, leaves, bark, or any old scorched seed scraped out of the earth. In fact, a cablegram published a few.days ago stated that some of the sufferers had been reduced to trying to exist on human flesh. “That is a terrible state of affairs,” he said. “It is a horrible thing that anywhere in the world today men and women, human beings like ourselves, through force of circumstances, should be reduced to so great an extremity.” China was not an overpopulated part of the world, he said. Its soil was not infertile; in fact, it was exceedingly fruitful, and given rainfall and freedom from pests, husbandmen could look for - three crops a year, but when the rain failed and the drought and locusts came there was famine. China had no irrigation system to withstand the absence of rain, and not the knowledge to combat locusts. In West Australia the ravages of drought had been minimised by a drought-resisting grain, and locusts could be faced without fear. They owed it to the people in China to help them with hteir increased knowledge in a time of distress. “In thinking of China,” proceeded Mr Blanchard, “we must think of a place torn with all sorts of internal strife. China, in awakening, is trying to get out of where we were a century ago, and endeavouring to get into something like an organised nation. That accounts for the strife and war in China.” “Mr Blanchard said he had heard it said that relief sent to China would be used to carry on the war within China. The International Commission for Relief of Famine in China was a body that could be trusted to be above the abuse of such funds. That commission was the one that handled large sums of money 'sent from abroad to relieve China in its famine in 1920. On that occasion no money was passed from the commission into Chinese hands. All moneys were spent by the commission on foodstuffs and in dispatching them to cases in need of assistance. The supervision of the distribution of the foodstuffs was carried out by the missionaries of the Christian Church, Protestant and Roman Catholic. The books of the commission were audited by a firm of chartered accountants.