SHOVELS FOR THE DYKES OF CHINA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 339, 21 December 1945, Page 6

SHOVELS FOR THE DYKES

OF CHINA

| A "Listener" Interview

S guarded on Chinese Government policy as one would expect, the Senior Secretary of the Chinese Ministry of Economic Affairs to be, Dr. A. C. Hou, interviewed by The Listener, spoke freely. on the mission which brought him last week to New Zealand. "We need right away ten million tons of supplies-say £800,000,000 worthto start rehabilitating China. Two-thirds we are determined somehow to raise ourselves. But for the other third we have to look to UNRRA. New Zealand can supply only a drop in the bucket, of course, but a particular drop that we cannot do without." "To get that drop is why you are here, I take it,’#said The Listener representative. "Only I canfhot see what it can be." "Tt is two things," said Dr. Hou. "Tools and people. The tools are just ordinary farm and garden ones-I’ve ordered 170,000 shovels, for instance, and lots of hoes and light ploughs-but the people have to be experts. You may have noticed that one New Zealand doctor and two highly-skilled railwaymen have joined UNRRA in China." "You want the doctors, I suppose, to stop epidemics, the tools to start up farming again, and the railways to carry your tefugees back home." Thirty Millions on the Move "Well, actually, we’d be even more glad to find some way to stop our refu-_ gees from going home. The trouble is that about 30,000,000 of them started evacuating themselves the moment the war ended. Imagine them now on the roads-or where the roads used to be before we destroyed them in order to bog the mechanised Japanese down in the fields. They are swagging their way in families and droves, tramping. barefoot and in rags through winter weather, begging food as they go (and not always getting it), and just spreading disease from one end of China to the other. We have never had enough doctors and those ‘we have are rusty after eight years shut away from the world. Eight hundred foreign doctors are needed right away to give these men refresher courses or take charge in liberated cities and towns. Fortunately, we fall heir to very much of the U.S. Eastern Armies’ medical supplies, but they are still using their doctors in occupying Japan or in demobbing. When New Zealand can Spare us more doctors China will be very grateful indeed." : Transport Above Everything | "So health measures come first on you programme?" ; "T would not say that, certain though epidemics are to spread. Transport is what China needs above everything else --because everything else depends on Transport. The roads and railways are left in Europe-they just have holes in them. But China’s foads and railways have disappeared-destroved first by our -retreating armies, then by guerrillas bit by bit as the Japanese rebuilt them bit

by bit, and finally (in some cases) by the Japanese themselves when they found them useless except as scrap-iron. For the Japanese stripped China bare of metal for their foundries, even tools from the fields and door knobs from the houses. Until we can restore a skeleton of communications we can restore nothing else." "Cannot you use the rivers?" "We are using them. But the whole of free China had, when I left, only 17 ships fit to run to Chungking on the Yangtse. We have bought Liberty Ships -but need many more than we can get! And we are building ships-but can do it only slowly. Actually our rivers are at present more liability than asset." "How is that?" "Well, to begin with, the Yellow River to-day has no mouth. War operations and wartime neglect breached the dykes-you know how in places the bed was up to 40 feet higher than the surrounding country-and instead of flowing north to the sea has poured south into the interior of the. country. In one place a huge lake stands13,000 square miles of water where formerly were fertile farms. And then the water, flowing further, has backed up into other rivers, breaking their dykes

and forming more lakes. Our first job after controlling epidemics and after building railways and roads and buying waggons and lorries to run on them, is to restore the main river dykes. That is why we want your shovels-to do work equivalent to building a wall from here to Australia 20 feet high and 50 feet across. It will maintain our homeless millions (for we are determined to have no ‘dole’ in China) and it will make homes, too, for many millions of them." "We Are Truly Grateful" ‘But how will you feed and clothe these people meanwhile?" "It can only be on imported food, I am afraid. Pre-war China imported two million tons every year, mainly rice and wheat. We are not asking more than this from UNRRA-in fact we have asked only a quarter of it so far. But obviously, if we need food from overseas when China was a going concern, we certainly cannot get on without it now that she is a wreck. As for clothes -well, if every third factory in the world worked on nothing but Chinese clothes for a whole year it would not reclothe China. All the same, lend us only some engineers and some key machinery and we’ll build up our factories

again-the Japanese took 98 per cent. of them-and reclothe ourselves. "For China is not asking for world charity. To support 400 million would break even the world bank, I guess. We just need the push off that will start transport and farming and industry all going again, and then we'll look after ourselves. For New Zealand’s share in that push-off-what we've had already and what is to come-believe me we are truly grateful." Blas 2S Oe eee eerste