The National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated stations present The Pacific Story. In the mounting fury of world conflict, events in the Pacific are taking on ever greater importance. Here is the story of the Pacific and the millions of people who live around this greatest sea. The drama of the peoples whose destiny is at stake in the Pacific War. Here, as another public service, is the tale of the war in the Pacific and its meaning to us and to the generations to come. China's land problem. The plains of Sichuan were dry under the sun. The soil was thirsty and there was no cloud in the sky. There would be no crop. It was famine time again. Sichuan is the golden granary of China. So we said when the rains came down and when the Yangtze stayed within its banks, one-fourth of all the rice of China comes from Sichuan. The rice sprouted green and lush. We worked in the fields from dawn until dark. Sometimes my father would stop and straighten up and look out toward the mountains in the west. Those mountains give us our life way. He looked at them in awe. The snows melt on the mountains and the rivers bring the waters down to us. He looked down at the precious water around our feet. We are fortunate. Have you eaten my neighbors? This was our greeting one to the other when we met. Yes, Wang. Have you eaten? Yes. It is said that there is trouble. What trouble, Wang? Between Lu Wenhui of Xiongdu and Lu Xiang of Zhongqing. Lu Wenhui is the uncle of Lu Xiang, is he not? Yes. That is what makes it trouble of the worst kind. Family trouble. Each has an army and they are marching against each other. Will they come here? I do not know. If they come here, they will destroy our crop. Perhaps they will not come here. We worked on day by day and the rice grew strong and green. My father looked out toward the mountains in the west. At sunset, the mountains throw a shadow across us. I knew the meaning of his words. One day we heard the shooting. We worked harder and prayed that the shooting would go away. It came closer. We left our fields. We tried to find safety. Then the soldiers came. We destroyed our field. We stood there at the edge of the field looking. The battle had swept across it. They have trampled down our crop. There was hardly a plant standing. We helped bury the dead. Then we set to work preparing a land for another crop. Our rice was running low. We sold everything we could spare to buy food to tide us over. Once again, the tender rice sprouted out of the ground. Have you eaten, my neighbors? Yes, Wang, have you eaten? Lu Wenhui has gone from Zhejiang. Has he taken his soldiers with him? It is said that many of his soldiers have turned into bandits. Bandits? Yes, because they were defeated and had no place to go. Then they will come back here. We tended our crops day by day. And one day they came. They overran our fields. Where is your rice? We have only a few pounds. Bring it out. No, no, it is all we have. Bring it out or we'll take it. No, no, don't. Here, I will give it to you. It is all we have. They will kill you, my father. Sergeant, take this rice. And you old man are lucky you still have your life. All right, out. Everyone of you. Most of our crop was destroyed. All of our rice was gone. We sold some tools to buy more. We planted again. We worked from dawn till dark. Then one night the bandits came back. And before dawn the government troops came to crush the bandits. Our fields were trampled and laid as bare as if plagued by locusts. We ate the last of our planting seed. Then we went to a money lender. There we met Wang. They would lend me no money. Perhaps they will lend us some and we can help you. They said go to the bank. See if they will lend you money. Wait for us Wang. Come way. It will soon be our turn. We asked for a loan to help us through to the next harvest. What can you put up for security? Do you own your land? No, the landlord owns it. What do you own? We have sold most of what we have. But we are good workers and our land is good and we would pay the money back with all the interest. You have no security. We can lend you no money. We must have help. If you will step aside for the next one please. Come on my father. We must have help. Did they lend you any money? We have no security. What can we do? The landlords own our land. The merchants will trust us with nothing without money. And the money lenders will lend us no money. Must we starve? We have no food. We can get none. And now the summer sun beat down and our fields dried up. The wet soil at Tichuan became hard and dry. The skies were clear and blue and cloudless. We pounded the bark of trees into powder and baked it. We ate roots of trees and shrubs and dried grass. We ate kao yang husks and sweet potato vines. Where my son? You go. You can walk and find enough to eat to live. No, no my father. Both of us must go. No way. I am old. My time is done. We will walk together. I will help you. Come my father. Get up. It is no use my son. You must come with me. Come now. Put your arm around my shoulder. Oh I can hardly walk. We left our land behind and made our way out along the long, long road. That first day we found a baby abandoned at the roadside. Left to starve. We had nothing to feed it. We gave it some water. It died and we buried it. We walked on till nightfall. I said, let us stop at this pool. We can eat some of those water weeds. The pool was stagnant. I pulled some of the weeds out of the bottom and we sat down and ate them. After a time my father fell into his sleep. I lay there looking up at the stars thinking, could not food enough for all be raised on this great land? I wondered. I fell asleep. It was dawn and cold when I awaked. In the half light I looked over at my father. He was dead. I walked alone across the broad land. I had no full meal in months. I ate scraps of anything I could find to keep me alive. I saw thousands die. My people. I ask myself again and again, why must my people live in despair and want and die in misery? You must understand that four-fifths of China's 450 million people are dependent upon the land for their living. These were the words of a wise old man. China raises more rice than any other country on earth. Yet we do not raise enough to feed our own people. Each year we must bring in rice from Burma and in-north China. It seemed unbelievable. We raise more tea than any other country. Yet because of all the strife of these recent years, today India and Ceylon export more tea than we do. And once we had most of the export silk trade, we have it no more. We went out among the people. Enough food cannot be raised around this village to feed all these people? That's the trouble. Half of the people of China live in one quarter of the territory. Half the people in one quarter of the territory? Yes. In some village districts, nearly 7,000 people live on one square mile. Seven thousand? In many places there are not so many. The average is only a few hundred for each square mile. But in some places there are far more than the land can feed. How much land must there be for a family? It takes more than one acre and a half to feed one family. And most families have less than one acre and a half. Then even when there is good crop, there is not enough. That is right. Let us talk to this man here. Good man? You, you call me? Yes. You have had good crops on your land here? Some good crops, yes. And some bad ones. When you have a good crop, can you put some food by for the bad years? When we have a good crop, we eat a little better until it is gone, for we are hungry. You need more than you can raise year in and year out? That is not enough for my family. I must work now. You see, Wei? There are too many of us Chinese. A piece of land can only give so much food. When there are too many people on one piece of land, then some of them must go hungry. But so much of China is not fit to be tilled. I know. Perhaps if some of the people moved out of the crowded sections, out to the sections that do not have so many people, it would be better. That would help. But there is the problem of transportation. The food must be moved from where it is grown to the people who eat it. And China does not yet have an adequate transportation system. No. But there is something else, old one. Yes, Wei? We would live on the land, many of us, if we did not have to give so much of what we raise to the landlords. How much of your crop goes to your landlord? We give half our crop, and some must give even more. The landlords and the merchants and the money lenders work together to take advantage of us poor farmers. How can we ever have anything, or even raise enough to keep alive? The landlords own the land and profit by it, and we do not see them in years. Yes. In your province of Sichuan, most of the land is owned by landlords. When the communists came through Sichuan, many of our people were trampled down in the fighting. But the communists took some of the land away from the landlords and divided it among the farmers. Yes, yes, I know, Wei. But actually, no more land is controlled in China by landlords than in other countries. Today, the communists are cooperating with the landlords instead of taking their land, for they see, as we do, that we must fight our common enemy, Japan, and not among ourselves. These things I learned, and from them came deeper understanding. But there were other things, things I could see, the droughts and the floods. I had heard my father talk of droughts and floods all the years of his life, and I had seen them again and again as I grew up. They would always be with us, but must we always be their slaves? I stood out on our broad plains and watched the farmers working in the rain. If this rain does not stop, the dikes cannot hold the rising river. Oh, it is not only the rain. The snows in the mountains are leveling in, and the waters are flowing down into the rivers. But the dikes would hold if they had been kept in repair. I know, Ling, I know. We have been taxed and taxed so that dikes could be built. And what has happened to the money? We have been taxed so that railroads could be built too. And what has happened to this money? Yes. Is it all spent for the war, as they say? Look at the rivers swell. If the dike breaks, all our crop will be lost and everything else that we have. It must hold. If only the rain would stop. If only the rain would stop. As the rain fell, the farmers worked to patch the dikes. The river was rising. With baskets slung from bamboo poles, they slogged through the mud and built the dikes higher and higher. The river, the river is higher than our land below it. Yes, and still it is rising. The dikes are breaking! The dikes are breaking! The river is breaking through the dikes. Look out, the dike is soaking! The river broke through the dike like a beast to a wall. It raged across our land and swept all before it. My people, my poor people. It has happened again, Wei. Must my people forever be slaves to this? The losses and the destruction are great because most of China's people live on the Great Plains. But cannot the rivers be held in their beds? The rivers wander across our Great Plains with no real beds. The rushing waters that come down from the mountains carry millions and billions of tons of silt. Ah, it is that silt that fills up the rivers. Yes, it fills them up until the waters overflow the dikes. So that is the reason the rivers change their courses. Yes, the waters flow out over the plains and find new courses. Sometimes the farmlands are covered with the rich fertile silt, but many times the lands that are in the new part of the river are lost, and with them are lost the growing crops, and many times the people too. I have seen this again and again, and when the rain stopped and the swelling waters of the river went down, still the farmers could not go back to their land. We cannot start again until the water drains off. How can we ever go back until we have forced the river back into its channel? We have no tools to force the river back. Then we must wait. Yes, yes, we must wait. That means we will be late with our planting. Yes, and we shall be hungry. Music At last the waters drain away. Some of the farmlands were covered with the rich fertile silt, and on some the good topsoil that the farmers had worked so hard to fertilize was washed away. This has been happening again and again, Wade, a thousand times over in the ages that have passed. Can it never be stopped, old one? It must be stopped sometime, Wade, if China is to live. Music Again, the crops were planted in the moist earth. If we get some rain, this year we shall have a good crop. I feel in my bones that we will get rain. We worked day by day and watched the plants come up through the rich earth. Early and late we worked on the land, and the rice grew lush and green. The rains have favored us. We will have a good crop. And we shall eat well, at least for a time. The soil was warm under the sun. We worked with new hope. Our crop prospered. We stood in the field, bent over our work, when we first heard it. What is that? What? That humming noise. Hear it? Wade, can you hear it? I hear something. Do you hear a humming sound? Yes. I could not talk for the fear that was in my heart. Look. Look at that dark cloud. That is a cloud of locusts. Look, millions of them. Millions. It seemed that they covered the sky as they came toward us. Locusts. They will eat our crops. We must fight them. Fight them with everything we have. Beat them off. They're coming down. They're coming down upon us. Beat them off. Beat them with sticks or anything you have. Beat them off. Beat them off. They swarmed down over us, so many of them that they wore black on the ground. They piled upon each other and crawled over each other and over us and down into our clothes. We fought them with everything we had, with all our strength. But before their millions of chewing mouths, we were helpless. At last, they were gone. We stood there looking with empty eyes. Not one rice plant left. Not one blade of grass. Not one leaf left on the trees. Our crop was gone. We would starve again. But it was worse than that. Come, Way. Come with me. Lo is sick. Farm the water in the well? I think so. The well and the reservoir have been poisoned with the dead locusts. Lo died the next day. And we were sick. And before we could start to plant again, we had to clean out our well and our reservoir. Then we had no more water. The sun beeped down and the soil baked hard. Look, Way. The sun has scorched our crop to death. We must leave here, Way. Once again, we walked across the broad land. Again, we ate the bark of trees, blades of grass, sweet potato vines, kowloon husks. And everywhere we went, the earth was thirsty. The skies were clear and blue and the sun blazed down. Drought and death were upon us. The war came. And with it came the need to grow food, not only for the people of China, but also for our soldiers. I worked where I was best fitted to work, on the farm. I worked with the old ones and with all the others who understood what must be done. We must take steps to control our floods. The high ones among our people listen to the old ones. We cannot prevent the waters from coming down from the mountains and swelling our rivers. But we must take steps to keep the rivers within their courses. That will mean great expense and materials and labor. It will mean all that and more, but it must be done. And we must take steps to improve our irrigation. That is right. China is too dry for intensive farming without irrigation. Irrigation will not only give us better crops on the land we have, but will increase the area of cultivated land. And that is what we must do. But we have less land today in free China than ever before. The Japanese have driven us into the interior. All the more reason why we must develop more land for farming. That will mean we must build great dams and waterways. We must harness our great rivers, as America has harnessed some of her rivers. And we must reclaim our land. And we must reforest our barren hills and develop transportation and educate our people. We must do all of this. We must... I went back to the land in Sichuan. The land where I was born and where I grew up. The land where my father worked his heart out. The land that had been trampled under the feet of fighting soldiers. Where floods and drought and pestilence have brought us famine. Look at the water pouring across our dry landway. They say this irrigation system will keep our land well watered all through the season. Water brought right down to our crops. Yes. But will the river be kept in its beds so that we will not be washed out by a flood? We are working to control the river as we are working to provide irrigation water for your land. Yes, old one. Will the trees that are being planted help? When they have grown up they will help. Now we must work to keep the river from flooding. We must protect the young trees and one day these millions of trees that have been guarded will be like food in your hands. Food. Day by day we worked in the fields. We needed money for tools and for seed and for food to tide us over. And loans were made to us by the government cooperatives. We will help you as much as we can. How different this was from the moneylenders? How much money will you need? We went back to our land with hope within us. And experts came to our land to help us. The seed that we have brought you is improved seed. We of the government have worked long to develop it and it will give you better crops. They taught us better ways to irrigate and better ways to fertilize and better ways to fight the diseases and insects. China is growing more than ever before. Our crops have been good four out of the last seven years. In memory of the bad years steered within me. Today we have 250 million acres under cultivation. But that is not enough. We must have more. We must get sure our crops and better crops. We worked in our moist soil under the sun high in the sky. The lush young rice plants came up through the soil. And we worked among them as among jewels. Do you think we will harvest this crop way? If the river does not swell out of its banks and if the fighting does not overrun Sichuan and if... Will we ever be free of salmon way? The government is working to help us. But how can the government help 350 million farmers? I knew what he meant. He meant the overcrowding in the farming and the big city regions. And he meant the years that must pass before dams and dikes could be built to control the rivers. And he meant our great need of better ways to grow crops. And our need for ways to transport our goods without carrying every pound of it on our shoulders. And he wondered, as all of us Chinese have wondered, if ever we would be freed from the landlords and have our own land. We walked into the village. I feel light and sideways, for we have a crop coming up, a good crop. Do you think we will harvest it way? I think so. I think so. Oh, it should be a good crop. In the village, the farmers from all around gathered to ask advice of the old ones. Our crops are green, old one. But will there still be bad years ahead for us farmers? Yes, there will be bad years and famine. The task before us will take endless years. It will go on long after all of us are gone. But we have started. And we must go forward or die. For China's strength is in you, her farmers. At last it is you who must win our war and you who must be the backbone of the new China to come. You have been listening to the Pacific Story, presented by the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent station, as a public service to clarify events in the Pacific and to make understandable the cross-currents of life in the Pacific Basin. For a reprint of this Pacific Story program, send ten cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. To repeat, for a reprint of this Pacific Story program, send ten cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. The Pacific Story is written and directed by Arnold Marquis. The original musical score was composed and conducted by Thomas Paluso. The principal voice was that of Forrest Lewis. This program came to you from Hollywood. This is the National Broadcasting Company.
