CHINESE FAMINES.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 April 1921, Page 12

CHINESE FAMINES.

AND THEIR CAUSE. TOO BIG A BIRTH RATE. ECONOMICS AND ANCESTORWORSHIP. It is difficult to face the facts which underlie the regular recurrence of devastating famines in China without exposing oneself to the charge of callousness and a lack of .proper Christian faith in Providence, writes Mr. J. O. P. Bland in the London Observer. Once again the harvest has failed throughout a densely-populated region and the bitter cry of starving multitudes goes up to Heaven. Common humanity forbids us to turn a deaf ear to their appeal, or to refuse to co-operate in such measures of genuine relief as the Chinese Government and foreign missionaries may endeavor to apply.

And yet, when everything possible has been done to save the lives and to mitigate the sufferings of the faminestricken, it is certain that millions are doomed to perish. It is. equally certain that Death will continue to reap these fearful harvests, in the future as in the past, at an appalling cost of human suffering, so long as the social system and the religion of the Chinese continue to encourage procreative recklessness in the masses as a matter of duty. Neither humanitarian schemes nor legislative devices can ever give permanent peace and plenty to a people which habitually breeds up to, and beyond, the maximum limits of its food supply. Periodically, either by civil strife, by pestilence, or by famine, the natural increase of a race which produces three generations to Europe’s two, must be reduced, to the level which the soil can support.

THE CHECKS ON POPULATION. If we look back over the history of China during the last century the picture which presents itself is ever the same; a redundant population, repeatedly decimated by cataclysms of terrible severity, and then, rapidly rising again to the danger point. During this comparatively brief period, in addition to the wholesale slaughter of the Taiping rebellion, wltieh, according to the estimates of Chinese recorders, carried off some fifty-four million people. So long as China maintains a birth-rate which is estimated at fifty-five per thousand or over, the only possible alternative to these periodical visitations would be emigration, and this would have to be on such a scale as would speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. To those who are unfamiliar with the facts of China’s case and with the working of the law oL population,, this statement may possibly seem overdrawn. It is, nevertheless, true, and its truth may easily be verified by a simple arithmetical calculation. Given sufficiency of food and elbow-room, the population of China, maintaining its present birthrate, would double itself by natural increase in about twenty years. In other words, by the end of the present century, it would amount to about 2,500 millions, that is to say, more than the present population of the globe, and far more than its soil can support. This natural increase of one of the strongest stocks of the human race has for centuries been kept in check within its own borders, and within the limits of its available food supply, by infanticide, by civil war, by pestilence and by famine.

RESULT OF MISSIONARY EFFORTS. The problem thus presented is one with which neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we fail to recognise and to attack the fundamental cause of these calamities. As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary societies to reduce the death-rate, by the prevention of infanticide and the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the pressure of population upon its food supply, and to increase the severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for the prevention, or at least the mitigation, of these scourges, is an organised educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and next, towards such a limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate to the standard of civilised countries. But so long as bishops ajnd well-meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage “the glorious fertility of the East,” there can be but little hope of minimising the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature’s law will therefore, continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings.

The Chinese, by nature a passive nonresisting race, are accustomed to accept floods, pestilence, and famine as the decree of Heaven, part of the natural; destiny of mankind, “born to sorrow as the sparks by upward.” It will require a long process of education to convince them that these calamities are. the direct result of their national creed, which makes it the bounden duty of every man, at all costs, to bring into this world as many little ancestor-wor-shippers as possible. Meanwhile, even it if were possible for Europe and America to come to the rescue and to provide food for China’s millions whenever the harvest fails over a wide area, it must be evident that one of the immediate results would be to diminish the reserves and to increase the price of the food available fur home consumption. RELIEF PROPOSALS.

China’s famines are especially distressing because of the very helplessness of the silently-suffeiing victims; but while we sympathise with this suffering, we must remember that a great proportion of Western Europe -stands also on the verge of the starvation line. It is a hard saying, but it is true, that we cannot possibly relieve the pressure of population upon food supply in Asia without increasing the same pressure ir Europe. Mr. Herbert Hoover, a competent authority. estimates that the [population of Europe is at least onf 'hundred millions more than can be sunported without food imports, ami throughout wide regions to-day the rate of infant mortality (first test and proof of its acute pressure) is appallingly high. • In other words, the world is confronted by inexorable economic facts against which neither political nor religious panaceas can avail us anything. To suggest, as has recently been done

that the Treaty Powers should avert the tragedy of the present famine ir China by agreeing to a. temporary in crease of the Customs duties, is verj typical of the kind of sentiment which the simolest dements of eciio

nics. According to the latest reports i there is some surplus millet in Man churia which might be brought into the I‘famine, area if all the a vailable means of transport were not monopolised by | rival military chieftains in theij sordic struggle for power; but this struggle is likely to be stimulated rather than checked by increasing the Customs duties. One might as well try to re lieve the sufferings of a sick man bj painting his house.

CORRUPTION OF OFFICIALS. r ! . I The immediate cause of the famine now raging in four provinces of North China is the failure of the harvest aftsr a long summer drought; but the Chinese Press has drawn attention to the fact that the reserves of rice in the Yangtze provinces, from which some relief might have been obtained, have been very seriously diminished, by reason of the secret and illegal export of large consignments to Japan by highly-placed Chinese officials. The Shanghai “Sinwan pao” asserts that General tseng, one of the chief men of the Anfu party (lately expelled from power by the Chihli faction), has amassed over three million dollars as the price of his illicit rice transactions with a military officer attached to the Japanese Legation at Peking; and it adds that the money thus made by Hsu “represents the lives and sufferings of our people.” There is no doubt that the keen demand for rice in Japan and the cupidity of officials -in China, have combined to raise the price of -food in the provinces adjoining the famine area, thus aggravating a situation already desperate. Whatever may have been. the actual amount of food thus illegally exported, it would never have sufficed for all the needs of the people in the stricken provinces, who must remain practically without hope of effective relief until next spring; but when such things are done and countenanced by the Chinese authorities, it is difficult to sympathise with the idea that any measure of relief is likely to result from increasing the Customs duties, or any other financial expedient which they may suggest.