LAND OF FAMINE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 49, 19 August 1911, Page 8

LAND OF FAMINE.

«* SITFEIUNd OF TWO MILLION'S. A terrible picture of China as a land of perpetual famine is furnished by n Shanghai correspondent. The famine he speaks of affects two millions of people, and has been raging in the provinces of Kangsu and Anhwei since last autumn. The spring wheat harvest, which was eagerly looked forward to for alleviating the distress, has largely suffered from late storms. In some places nearly half the new crop has been destroyed.

Thus writes the Shanghai correspondent of the London Daily News:—''Close your eyes over the hundred miles of railway north of Nanking, the Yangtze port, and you will awake with staring, hungry faces pering into yours. Eyes, big and glistening, in faces of a deathly palor, drawn by the hunger of months, seem to look through you, and sometimes gnaws as your heart. They do not complain or cry out, these bitterly starving people. It is the silence of their suffering ■stare, their meek and patient gentleness, that are unbearable.

"The faces of two women stand out in my mind before hundreds I have seen. * They were evidently sisters, and women of good birth. A crowd of a hundred of more once honest farm people, now in the most beggarly rags, are gathered in the village street before one of the foreigners of the Relief Committee, and among them are these sisters. They keep on the edge of the crowd, but they are a part of it, for it might mean food. Mutely, neither hopefully nor despairingly, they keep their eyes on the foreigner, and obediently go where the village elder bids them. Their faces are white, and seem to be fading into their great long-suffering eyes. It does not seem that they could live a week, yet the distribution of rice, for which the enumeration is being taken, is still ten days off. Death is stalking in every village here over a tract of country 200 miles long and more than a hundred broad. It contains about four and a half million of people, of whom the famine holds its grip from two to three millions.

''Flood upon flood has ravaged this district. The rivers in the autumn, and now again this spring, have washed over the land, destroying in some places as much as 40 per cent, of the spring crops. At Lin Hwai Kuan, ninety miles north of Nanking—the junction of the railway with the Hwai river—the river is 10ft above its usual height, flooding upon the wheat; and to the north there are submerged stretches in some places, according to report, twenty miles long. "At Lin Rwai Kuan I walked along a ridge wide enough for a single line of mud houses, extending from the dry fields out to the water. In front of the first house, that nearest the good land, an old man, shrivelled until one would think the spring wind might blow him to dust, was carrying in an armful of the bark of trees and their roots—not his firewood, but his food. It is not a question to the relief workers as to who is hungry and who is not, but one of deciding a race with death. The problem is which of the people can possibly last until the harvest, forty days off, without help, and which must surely die unless help is given. This old man could last! He did not have the yellow in his skin or the pallor that warns of death's approach. "A woman in the next hut was preparing bark for eating. She had boiled it after grinding it to a pulpy flour, so that now it was a brown, fibrous, gluelike stuff. Every hut had a small bunch of weeds for food, water-weeds dired in the sun, looking like black excelsior. JTot a kernel of grain was visible. There is a little nourishment in these weeds if mixed with some rice, but eaten alone and constantly they bring on a swelling of the abdomen and body that results in death.

"As we got further along the ridgeway from the high lands towards the wheat fields now covered by water, the extremity of the people becomes more intense. The trees had been cut down and sold as firewood in a last effort to raise money —the bark having been stripped off first. Wood, always comparatively scarce in China, is this year in this district half its usual value, there being a good supply and few to purchase it. Roots of houses here had disappeared, the straw and reed thatch sold for food money. Typhus, which witn an intermittent fever, prevails, was among these people. "The last dwells on the ridge were a family of three—a father, mother and son. Their hut was a hole in the

ground, covered with a ragged part of a sail, patched with straw; their food, nothing that could be seen; their field, the boy pointed to the water at the foot of the ridge. The father lay partly inside his hut, his head in the sun at the low entrance way. He was suffering from typhus. He did not move, not even to open his eyes, thougth it had been noised abroad that the foreigner was around, and such news brings the hope of food. Later he did painfully crawl to a changed position, when the bones of his back fairly protruded through the skin. He could eat the weeds no longer; he was beyond this. "The mother was told by her wizened son—a gentle-eyed boy of comely face, unutterably sad —that the foreigner was before her. She was not blind, but she could not see, for her long starvation and the eating of weeds had swollen her eyelids until they closed. Her whole face was likewise painfully puffed out. Kneeling to us, she bowed her head to the ground, but said not a word; then sat quietly before us as though she knew that her visible suffering was her best appeal.

"It is terribly saddening to turn away , from these people without immediately helping them. The dibao (local district father) is talking to them back behind you a few yards. You can hear him saying that you have come to see their pitiable position, and possibly write their names on the list of those who will receive grain which may come within a week. They must not beseech you, they must not hang upon you and hold yoii back; for you know their misery, he tells them; and you can see their suffering, and will send them help if you can. Such, in China, is called li (reason). The long enduremeiit of the Chinese to repeated years of suffering, and their long centuries of training in the doctrines of Confucious, have given them an iron-like power of control: and now thev sink their own terrible personal distress and bow to 'reason.' Such reason in our lands could not last long before rioting and pillage, fire find sword.

"The cause of the constantly recurring famines of Anhui and Kiangsu is the silting of the rivers, which have been permitted to (low uncontrolled for centuries, and have choked their outlets and raised the level of the beds. The Chinese in their ignorance and lack of forethought have depleted the natural forests of the country which should hold the snows. In China science is only beginning to find a place, and the so-call-ed paternal Oovernnient is only now waking to its responsibilities. "Hitherto the Chinese gentry have looked upon pestilence and famine as necessary evils of Nature, designed to reduce the surplus populations; but the present year is showing that the ideas of the West are at last making headway in this ancient empire."