OCR Text |
Show 1921 THE OUTLOOK 305 pointed out how even to this day Chinese in distant places express their heart-felt appreciation of the help Great Britain and British subjects rendered famished China forty-three years ago. America has gained much from the return of the Boxer Indemnity funds for educational purposes to China, and today the work we are doing in connection with this famine is bound to make an everlasting impression on the hearts and minds of the Chinese. As I pointed out in the beginning, China is inured to natural catastrophe, a training which has deeply affected the psychology of the people. But, on the other hand, it has made her ready to accept the friendship of aliens with childlike simplicity, or to resent invasion with a ferocity that might even be called majestic. While, on the one hand, the Chinese plow their fields with the slow, plodding water-buffalo all day long, returning home to tinker on into the night at little jobs, living in little mud houses, making tasty food out of anything that happens to be around; on the other hand, their application makes of their land an enormously productive one. Just as they can turn anything to edible food, so can they manufacture things with little inventions that have not been excelled by the most modern of machines. As a race they are physically much more stalwart than the Orientals we are here accustomed to see, and require twice as much food as the Japanese, for instance. Imagine, then, what this famine must mean to an active, large-bodied people. Contrast, in your minds, the verdant, rolling plains during the fat years with the withered fields under these terribly lean ones. Let us contrast, further, even though it may seem a bit visionary, what the prospect is for China with Powers around her who, though impelled by self-interest to assist her development, realize that that very motive dictates a united and not an intriguing and divided Photograph from China Famine Fund TERRACED FIELDS ORDINARILY IRRIGATED, BUT NOW DRIED BY DROUGHT The man in the foreground is of considerable wealth, as is indicated by his being carried on the shoulders of four coolies self-interest. These same fields over which there are but few railways, and only footpaths, so to speak, where wide roads should be, can be made to yield treble what they have so far produced. Where now are only wells which periodically go dry there could be, and will be, tremendous reservoirs built with native labor, but with machines and knowledge from abroad. Vagrant rivers will be straightened to avoid the usual floods. Considerable reconstruction work is now being carried on with famine funds. Starving men are given work building roads. That is only a beginning. But with the famine bringing all foreign Powers into accord on at least one point, a nucleus might be formed for greater and greater international cooperation in China. The Red Cross should be urged to push the project long ago considered most advisable for the dredging of canals, the straightening of rivers, the surveying for railway beds. It is spending half a million dollars in Shantung for relief; millions more are being given from America through various agencies to succor the starving; Japan, Great Britain, France-all people who are vitally interested in China and who are making tremendous money every year in trade (America's trade alone amounted to $350,000,000 last year) -are seeing to it that these funds are being put to constructive work in China which shall be permanent, and not merely temporary, relief. It is a great lesson in co-operation for good, on almost altruistic lines, and leaves one with the hope that China is not forever going to be the teapot in the tempest of international greed. Photograph from China Famine Fund THE WHEAT LINE-CHINESE OBTAINING FOOD FROM THE AMERICAN RED CROSS |