RED CHINA: Flood & Famine

Behind the great arc that stretches from Shantung province on the Yellow Sea to the southern coast of Kwangtung province on the Gulf of Tonkin, the vast heartland of China was once more beset by its most ancient of enemies—flood and famine. From Kwangtung alone, refugees streamed into the refugee-packed British Crown Colony of Hong Kong at an officially counted rate of 100 a day; how many others came across the Communist border uncounted, no one knew. In the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao, officials estimated that 20,000 Chinese refugees had fled their homeland in the past two months. Communist border guards, nominally under orders to shoot anyone attempting to flee Red China, now look the other way.

In Shantung the rivers I and Shu, tributaries of the great Yellow River, overflowed their banks, submerged millions of acres, destroyed the homes and farmlands of hundreds of thousands of peasants. Radio Peking, acknowledging the magnitude of the floods, said that 20,000 life-buoys and thousands of tons of food had been airdropped to marooned villages. In eastern Honan province two more tributaries of the Yellow River burst their dikes, bringing the total area devastated by flood to more than 7,400,000 acres.

Peking announced that 2,000,000 workers had been pressed into flood-fighting work, carefully refrained from reporting death tolls (estimated to run into scores of thousands), but eulogized nine party members killed while fighting flood waters in Kwangtung. In Shantung the rains fell steadily for a fortnight; in Kwangtung and Kwangsi, in South China, it rained for 22 days. Shanghai reported the worst rains in 80 years.