CHINA: Again the Black Horseman

The Western year 1949, in China’s ancient lunar calendar, is a leap year, with two seventh months or a double July. The superstitious say a double July means a month more of rain and so a great flood.

Last week the great flood of 1949, the highest and most disastrous in 20 years, had passed its crest. As the waters subsided, the misery they had created grew. In the six southern provinces still under their sway, the Nationalists reported 10 million people in need of flood relief.

The plight of Farmer Ah Teng, a refugee from a village near Canton, was typical of China’s immemorial calamity. Even war had not been so dread a scourge as the flood. “When the Japs were here,” said Ah Teng, “the battle raged four times across our village. But through it all we lived in the same hut. Now the hut has been swept away. My only buffalo, the pigs and chickens—all we have is gone.”

Within Communist territory there were other millions like Ah Teng. Red leaders in Hankow proclaimed flood relief along the Yangtze as the party’s most urgent task. Red armies sloshed southward across swamped fields, heavy guns sinking into the mud. There were mass levies of peasants to shore up dikes and save the riceland. Seven women who each toted more than 70 crates of mud in a nightlong fight against the waters were acclaimed as “flood labor heroes.”

The fight against the flood was also a fight against starvation riding its crest. The Yangtze basin had lost 40% of its rice crop. In the south the deficit was 50%. Surveying the figures, foreign experts foresaw another tragedy: the great flood might well plunge China into the century’s most terrible famine.