CHINA: Act of God

The “heaviest rainfall in a hundred years,” proclaimed Peking Radio. An act of God had struck Communist China (though it was not recognized in those terms), and last week, through heavy censorship, some of its dimensions could be measured. The 3,4OO-mile Yangtze and the 600-mile Hwai were at record levels, were spilling out across a region more than twice the size of Texas, where 160 millions dwell and half of China’s rice crop is grown. Peking admitted that the floods surpassed China’s Yangtze tragedy of 1931, when 140,000 were drowned and 10 million made homeless.

Human Wall. The great flood began late last spring, when a Siberian cold front collided with a moisture-laden warm-air mass moving inland from the Southeast Pacific. Red China, anxious to maintain its pose of bland invincibility before the world at Geneva, said nothing about its flood so long as it could conceal it. and later tried to minimize it.

Mainland papers recently smuggled out to Hong Kong indicated, however, that several million farmland acres were flood ed along the central Yangtze valley, that the 98-ft. dikes at Wuhan (pop. 1,000,-000), the tri-city of Hankow, Hanyang-and Wuchang, were under heavy pressure. Last month the Communists finally admitted that 600,000 “flood fighters” had been rounded up to work on the Yangtze dikes—more than 100,000 of them inside Hankow, where Red loudspeakers blared stirring martial music and Communist propaganda pep talks.

In Hupeh province, the Communists acknowledged that 106,000 volunteers had been called out to strengthen an “impregnable” water-retention project. At one Yangtze point, according to Radio Peking, 200 soldiers and 10,000 peasants formed a great human wall with mats on their backs, and managed to stand off the torrent for three hours. “People are confident,” cried Peking’s New China News Agency nervously, “that everything has been foreseen. There will be no panic, no hunger, nothing like the bad old days when there was no help from above …”

Lethargic Thoughts. The Communists stoutly insisted that their dikes and dams had “victoriously passed the test of the year’s first heavy onslaught,” but the Yangtze went right on swelling—up to the 96-ft. mark at Wuhan, and higher. Red China desperately called upon its people to fight “wavering and lethargic thoughts or exhausted and pessimistic feelings,” and turned angrily against “counterrevolutionary saboteurs,” as if they—not nature—were responsible for China’s floods. Tragedy such as the floods had now brought to millions of peasants was an old story to China, familiar under despots and benevolent rulers alike. Insofar as it was in the power of human beings to compound the misery, the responsibility lay not with saboteurs but with the Communists, who, by liquidation of recalcitrants and forced seizure of crops, had left the peasants more helpless in the face of catastrophe.

One of six Americans whose release had been arranged at Geneva, Father Linus Lombard of Ipswich, Mass, arrived in Hong Kong from Red China last week. His train had been detoured for four days to get around the floods. He had been told that 40,000 Chinese had been drowned or killed by high water in the Tungting Lake region. Father Lombard, who spent 24 years in China, is convinced that “everybody would go right with them” if Nationalist troops invaded the mainland: “They are just living in hope that something happens.”