Famine

In Hong Kong these days, markets and bazaars are flooded with produce from Red China--white rice and spiced beef, ham from Yunnan, berries from Ningpo, litchi from Canton and dried melons from faraway Sinkiang. It might seem a land of plenty that can afford to export so many delicacies. But in Hong Kong one day last week, reported TIME Correspondent Val Chu, a four-year-old girl refugee from Red China sat down with her relatives for a meal of pork and rice. She picked up a piece of pork, licked it, put it down and began shoveling mouthfuls of rice. "What's the matter?" her relatives asked. "Don't you like pork?" "Oh yes!" the little girl replied, "I like pork. But we shouldn't eat it so quickly." The fact is that Red China is in the grip of famine. The dimensions of the trouble are impossible to measure because of Communist efforts to conceal the facts, and because of China's ancient indifference to statistics. But a careful culling of local newspapers shows the significant details of China's misery.

For Sale: Human Milk. The floods that devastated about one-tenth of Red China's farmland last year were the worst floods of the century; then, for central and southeast China, came the sharpest frost in 72 years, for south China the worst drought in 100 years. "The calamities were so serious," Red China's Agriculture Minister Liao Lu-yen reported to the Communist State Council, "that last year's food production was reduced by 25 billion catties [12.5 million tons]." Tientsin's Ta Kung Pao noted: "150 million peasants are short of food."

In south China, Canton's Nam Fong daily reported famine in 50 out of 98 counties in Kwangtung, 20 out of 74 in neighboring Kwangsi, where some of the people were down to eating tree bark, grass and domestic pets. In Canton, 4,000 peasants were arrested for petty thefts like grabbing grocery parcels from pedestrians; the city's milk powder for babies was considered so poor and unusable that human milk was getting onto the market.

In China's alluvial Yangtze plains, recent Communist newspapers describe how peasants are selling farm implements and animals, in Anhwei province even their own children, in exchange for a decent bite to eat. In the Tungting Lake region, badly ravaged by the floods, one in every two peasants was reported starving; in one town in Hunan, 527 out of 600 families were dependent on relief. Kiangsi daily admitted food riots in Sunwu county, where 20 peasants were killed or wounded when they tried to storm Communist storage granaries. The peasant resentment was so bad, People's Daily admitted, that "most party workers are either afraid of offending the masses, or were blamed by their own families . . . They are afraid of sarcasm and afraid to lead. They feel the work is so difficult that they develop weary sentiments."

Solution: Controls. Floods and famine have been China's hapless lot for centuries, but the ambitions and rigidities of Communism have aggravated the hardship. Red China's heavy accent on industrialization, its export of food to Russia (in payment for industrial goods) and to free-world showcases like Hong Kong have further diminished food stocks. Everywhere corruption is making things worse. Several government factories and a power plant in Shansi listed thousands of nonexistent workers to get extra rations; an antimony mine run by the government in Hunan got two extra tons of rice a day and sold it on the black market.

"The famine is spreading rapidly," warned the Communist governor of Kwangtung. The government recently decreed new fixed quotas and prices for food. Last month the State Council cut rations by 20% to 50% in the cities, then put its Communist policemen onto house-to-house searches in a new campaign against hoarding and waste. Red China's Minister of Agriculture briefed Party workers: "This problem cannot be solved in the short period of a few years. We must systematically explain to the masses of calamity-stricken areas that relief is limited."

At week's end, according to the Canton Southern Daily, persons were executed for spreading rumors, instigating peasants to oppose the state's grain policy and organizing an "underground counter-revolutionary force."

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