So far
as I could see, there are not more than two or three factory chimneys in
the whole town. Apart from begging, trading, thieving and Government
employment, people live by handicrafts. The products are exquisite and
the work less monotonous than machine-minding, but the hours are long
and the pay infinitesimal.
Seventy or eighty per cent. of the population of China are engaged in
agriculture. Rice and tea are the chief products of the south, while
wheat and other kinds of grain form the staple crops in the north.[34]
The rainfall is very great in the south, but in the north it is only
just sufficient to prevent the land from being a desert. When I arrived
in China, in the autumn of 1920, a large area in the north, owing to
drought, was afflicted with a terrible famine, nearly as bad, probably,
as the famine in Russia in 1921. As the Bolsheviks were not concerned,
foreigners had no hesitation in trying to bring relief. As for the
Chinese, they regarded it passively as a stroke of fate, and even those
who died of it shared this view.
Most of the land is in the hands of peasant proprietors, who divide
their holdings among their sons, so that each man's share becomes barely
sufficient to support himself and his family. Consequently, when the
rainfall is less than usual, immense numbers perish of starvation. It
would of course be possible, for a time, to prevent famines by more
scientific methods of agriculture, and to prevent droughts and floods by
afforestation.
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