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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 1. March 2, 1959

Remodelling of China

Remodelling of China

The conscious remodelling of China geography by 650 million people takes many forms; I can give here only a few examples.

The Chinese living space has been occupied by man for many thousands of years. Over the centuries the natural vegetation of the plains has been cleared to make; way for cropland; the forests on the upland areas have been relentlessly destroyed as a result of! the increasing quest for fuel.

Today only one-tenth of the! country is forested. Deforestation has caused a shortage of fuel and constructional timber; even more important has been its effect on the country's river regimes. A forest cover reduces rates of run-off and regularizes river flow; deforestation means rapid run-off and violent flooding of the rivers after heavy rain. Because of the obvious benefits of afforestation there has been a vigorous programme of tree planting. Some 28 million acres were afforested under the first Five Year Plan.

The hills of Southern and Central China are being reclothed in forests and, on the desert margins of China, the bare and sun scorched hills are carefully terraced and planted with young trees. The North China Plain is gridded with young shelter belts, and along the margins of the Gobi a new Great Wall of trees, one thousand miles long and a mile wide, is arresting the drift of sand and the scorching winds from the interior. Around the villages and along the roads and railways literally thousands of millions of trees have been planted; 8000 million in the first three months of 1958 alone. The vegetation map is being completely transformed and in less than a decade the ravages of centuries made good.

Secret of American Diplomacy

Secret of American Diplomacy

Some of the most striking achievements have been In the field of flood control. Drought and flood were the twin ravages of much of China; only under a strong and efficient government could any attempt be made to overcome these hazards. Water conservancy projects have taken several forms. There has been a great proliferation of small scale projects—sinking of wells, construction of small page 7 scale dams and storage ponds—which gain in effectiveness if planned and co-ordinated over a wide area. There are medium scale projects such as the Tao Canal system near Lanchow, which benefits 30,000 square miles, with a population of 41/2 million. Finally, there are the major schemes such as the schemes for controlling the Hwai River and the Yellow River.

These are multipurpose schemes, involving flood control, water storage and irrigation and power generation; the most ambitious scheme involves the diversion of surplus water from the Yangtse north into the basin of the Yellow River. By 1960 the danger of flood and drought will have been eliminated and virtually all cultivated land will be irrigated. Meanwhile, last year alone 80 million acres of land were brought under irrigation. In the field, too, millions of peasants are now consciously remodelling nature and creating a world from which some of the old causes of famine have been banished.

Afforestation, the planting of shelter belts, and water conservation schemes have in turn provided a basis for the great expansion of agricultural productivity achieved during the last year or so. Together with more efficient types of agricultural organisation—the co-operative and the commune—and new cropping techniques, such as deep plowing, closer planting, use of better seeds and tenfold increase in the application of manures, they made possible a doubling of the grain yield in a single year.

The yields achieved on trial plots seem fantastic by Western standards; yields of up to 60 tons of rice to the acre have been achieved and it is confiently claimed that "the land will yield as much as man dares to make it." It is, I think, difficult to overemphasize the importance of the commune in these dramatic developments; it is large enough to be a workable unit for purposes of flood control or other major development projects, and it provides an institutional framework within which improved agricultural techniques can be applied with maximum advantage.

The wider implications of these changes hardly need stressing. The Chinese peasantry, one-quarter of humanity, are emerging from the corroding poverty of their past. Bowed down for centuries in backbreaking toil, prisoners of a stagnating agricultural system, they are now lifting up their heads and asserting their capacity to dominate their environment, to bend it to their needs.