Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 2. March 23, 1959

Population Doubled

Population Doubled

Lanchow doubled its population between 1953 and 1958 and will soon be a city of a million people. Its industries today include the processing of local agricultural raw materials, the manufacture of chemicals, machine tools and machinery, and the largest oil refinery in China.

Its development epitomises the recent industrial development of China as a whole—the almost feverish speed, the wide range of industries, the utilisation of formerly neglected or unsuspected resources, the swing of industry to the interior. And the splendid new buildings of the Academy of Sciences or of the Northwestern University serve to emphasise that this development is creating an unprecedented demand for technologists and that industrial advance is being matched by equally rapid and impressive advances in the fields of higher education and research.

Lanchow's former lack of industry was typical of interior China as a whole. As late as 1953 three-quarters of China's industry was concentrated in the coastal margins; elsewhere, there was little to relieve the drab and monotonous poverty of a stagnating rural economy. The description of old China as "a beggar's mantle fringed with gold" aptly characterises the situation.