Hard Year

"Natural adversities without parallel in the past 100 years," said the Red Chinese last week, are to blame for China's serious food shortages. But just how serious is only slowly becoming known. Last week Radio Peking reported that a total of 148 million acres, or more than half Red China's cultivated land, had been affected to some degree. For 40 days the lower stream of the great Yellow River itself was dried up almost completely. Because of the drought, four provinces in the Yellow River valley were virtually without water for periods ranging from seven to twelve months. In some areas the harvests failed totally.

Six million city workers, most of them students, were sent to work on China's farms. Irrigation ditches and wells were being dug, and cadres were hard at work trying to plant winter vegetables and fast-ripening varieties of wheat. Said Radio Peking: "Sowing had to be carried out a second, or even a fifth or sixth time to wrest a harvest when the shoots were killed by scorching sun or floods." Reported one refugee from Kwangtung province: "Everybody is half dead in my village. They work from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. and all they get is seven ounces of rice and a few sticks of vegetables a day."

Not all Western observers are convinced that drought and floods can be blamed for the shortages. They point out that Japanese weather reports show little unusual weather over China during the year, suspect that the "natural calamities" may have been invented or exaggerated by Red propagandists to account for a shortage of food really attributable to the Communist regime's drive to siphon off food for export abroad to pay for the machines and supplies needed to build up Red China's industry. One U.S. expert said the 1960 crop may actually have been "a little bit ahead" of the poor crop year 1959. Whether due to natural calamity or governmental squeeze, it has obviously been a hard year for China's peasants.

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