The quality of Chinese traditional peasant life is vividly depicted in the novels of Pearl Buck. Between population and food supply there was a delicate equilibrium—"an equilibrium measured to the limit of exactitude, poised on the knife edge of starvation." It was an equilibrium shattered easily by any one of the great natural calamities which ravaged China with monotonous and tragic regularity—by flood or by drought, by typhoon or locust plagues; shattered, too, by man-made calamities such as war or civil strife.

In the face of these calamities the peasant was helpless, stricken by a fatal resignation. In "The Good Earth," the father of Wang Lung sees his family starving, reduced to eating grass and bark, yet can still say "There have been worse days, there have been worse days. Once I saw men and women eating children."

Here was a society whose material poverty could scarcely be described; in which there was no standard of living in the western sense, in which mere existence was the standard. . . . The peasant was dumbly acquiescent in his [unclear: fate] and his evaluation of the situation was shared by most western scientists. It's true the fatalism of the scientists expressed itself in differents terms; it invoked shortage of arable land, overpopulation, the "procreative recklessness" of the peasants, as root causes of the situation. But both peasant and scientist accepted the inevitability of hunger, the helplessness of man confronted with a task beyond his power.

China Looks Forward