CHINA: The Rice of Szechwcm

The Rice of Szechwan

All through Szechwan Province last week the squealing of unoiled wheelbarrows made sensitive eardrums quiver. Rice was wheeling in—tons of rice in dust-coated, round, bulging sacks. In the ears of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek the sound was a screech of victory. It meant that Szechwan, Chungking’s Province, at last was his.

Conquest of a Province. For a generation before the war Szechwan, richest, largest, most populous province of China, lived by itself. Warlords dominated it. They lived in great palaces equipped with foreign-style, pink, green and lavender-tiled bathrooms pleasing to their many concubines. The streets of their cities stank with opium. Szechwan was a pus-pocket in the nation from which poison seeped through all China. While Chiang built a modern central Government in the lower Yangtze Valley, the Szechwanese went their way almost untouched.

When Hankow fell three years ago the warlords grudgingly permitted Chiang Kai-shek to establish his national capital at Chungking in their Province. Chungking’s first big bombing in May 1939 gave Chiang an excuse to establish control of that city and eastern Szechwan. Gradually he brought his own armies into the Province, thrust his appointees into provincial posts. He forced the warlords to send troops to the front, while his own men cracked down on opium bootlegging, main source of the corrupt warlords’ revenue. By last year Chiang was so firmly in control that he could install as Governor his own man, stocky General Chang Chun.

But the warlords still opposed Chiang. During their 30 years of rule they had seized and bought the best lands. As landlords they controlled the marketable rice on which the cities and armies of Chiang Kai-shek depended. They collected their rents in rice, but paid land taxes in inflated money. They hoarded the rice, which helped to force prices higher while men went hungry.

Last spring Chiang made his decision. He would nationalize the land tax. Landowners would pay taxes, not to provincial governments, but to the central Government. More important yet, they would pay, not in paper money, but in kind: in rice, wheat, hard grain. With the collected foodstuffs the Government would feed its armies and civilian employes. Inflation and hoarding would be struck a blow at the same time, especially in Szechwan.

Daddy’s Job. To collect, store and distribute millions of tons of grain was a job for a big man. Chiang turned it over to the big man who does most of his big jobs: his moon-faced brother-in-law, H. H. (“Daddy”) Kung, Finance Minister and Vice Premier. In June Dr. Kung, who dearly loves to address conferences, herded together an earnest conclave of 250 local officials from all over China, fed his sweltering delegates lemon pop, tea, cake, pastry, explained the law, sent them home. All summer from dawn to midnight, in Chungking’s offices and dugouts, Kung’s bomb-battered underlings pieced together the machinery of China’s greatest reform in centuries. Chiang Kai-shek quietly increased the local gendarmes all through Szechwan, just in case there was trouble.

By October every third village in Free China had a collecting station, no farmer was farther than ten miles from such a station. Millions of well-drilled school children had sickened their parents with rice-raising slogans. Newspapers, party workers, sour-faced officials had explained every detail. Collection began the first week of the month. Hundreds of thou sands of blue-gowned farmers and landowners plodded into collecting stations; villages hummed with a bustling, boisterous festival air. In cotton bags, gunny sacks and willow baskets the brown, un-hulled rice piled up. Grey-uniformed officials weighed it, checked it, stored it in musty, shadowy Confucian and Taoist temples, in incense-fragrant ancestral halls, in any available building. The new-formed Ministry of Food was to haul grain from those places to secret permanent storage points.

By last week the collection was well into high, was even greater than had been anticipated. Szechwan alone was expected to contribute almost a million tons of grain. Chiang could turn his mind to other more pressing worries (see p. 2g). Szechwan was now irrevocably part of new China.