Life in rural China
changing to carts
from shoulder poles
By DAVID LOUIE
Special to the Los Angeles Times
(A June graduate of Occidental College,
David Louie is employed in a bank in South
Pasadena.)
The Chinese boy taunted me as he
balanced the bamboo pole on his shoulder,
a full basket of rice at each end, and
headed for the village. “Hey!” he shouted.
“See if you can carry as much as I can.”
He looked only 12 or 13 years old. He was
at least a head shorter than I. Amused at
the contest, Chinese men and women
twisted under their 100-pound loads to
watch their foreign visitor try this ancient
carrying method.
I bait under the pole, and straightened
up, the heavy baskets swaying. My first
few halting, uncertain steps sent the
Chinese into laughter. Unpracticed in the
rhythmic, hip-swiveling gait that keeps the
flexing pole steady, I could hardly keep up
with youngsters half my size.
There were many things to learn during
the two and a half months I spent among
my relatives on the big river commune, 65
miles from Canton in southeastern China.
The commune includes the village where
my grandfather grew up before he
emigrated to the United States. My stay
there was a high point of my 4Mrmonth
visit to China on an international
fellowship for independent study abroad,
provided by Occidental College, where I
was a student.
Shoulder poles are a common sight in the
Chinese countryside, where people used
them for carrying rice, wood, water,
bricks and other goods along roads and
narrow paths.
But carrying heavy loads with them is
hard even when you are accustomed to it.
Once, as I sat drinking tea with several
cadres (Political leaders; from the area, I
was told that they had asked the people at
district-wide meetings to name the hardest
part of their work. Carrying things by
shoulder pole, the peasants had answered
unanimously, and so the cadres had
decided to encourage the construction of
hand carts to take over some of the
hauling. Eventually, they hope to have
enough carts to be able to dispense with
shoulder poles.
French leader notes
Chinese independence
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
PARIS — China has deliberately chosen
a plodding pace of economic development,
former French Premier Jacques Chaban
Delmas reported this month after a rare
5,000-mile trip through that country as a
guest of the government.
China’s motive is to avoid depending on
foreigners in any way, Chaban-Delmas
wrote in an article entitled “The Price of
Independence”, published in the Paris
newspaper “Le Monde”.
So strong is the desire for complete
independence that the Chinese govern
ment refuses to buy machinery on credit
like other countries, he explained The
Chinese take only as much as they can pay
cash for.
China expelled thousands of Soviet in
dustrial advisers in 1961, the article
recalled, “because Chinese leaders felt
that Moscow’s behavior tended to assure
Soviet control at China, a historical habit
that Peking attributes unhesitatingly to
the Russians.”
The Russian exodus left many factories
half built, and hurt China’s industrial
development. The Chinese don’t want to
run that risk again, the French visitor
said. They only envisage using foreigners’
technological lead.
The thing that amazed me most about
China was how rapidly things are ac
complished. A couple of months after this
conversation, when the rice harvest was
over, we turned to the problem of the
carts. I went with several of the
mechanically-inclined young men from
house to house to examine the old carts
that some people had, to see if they could
be rehabilitated and then purchased by the
village. Finding most of these carts is sad
disrepair, the villagers decided to build
some. The young men and I went out
behind the village to fell trees. We dug
around the trees with a pick, cut the roots
and with a great heave pushed them down.
We carried them to the front of the village
where they were cut into boards. Car
penters from a neighboring village came
and set to work constructing the carts
from the wood. We laughed and joked as
we put together the seven sets of recently
purchased wheels from Canton. Then, with
the spirit of self-reliance, we gathered
around a bellows and an urn full of glowing
charcoal, fashioning discarded metal into
the fittings needed to hold the carts
together. It took us only 2Vt weeks after the
decision to construct the carts. The task of
moving great amounts of straw fell to us
with our handcarts, since motor vehicles,
which are owned by the state, were rare in
the countryside. I hardly ever saw trucks
as I worked in the fields. The commune
owned several tractors, and the production
brigade had only recently purchased one.
But these were needed for hauling more
important materials and supplies. Now
and then they were used for plowing, but
Tobacco, cotton sales may signal
breakthrough in U. S. -China trade
(From UPI dispatches)
Major sales of tobacco and cotton to the
People’s Republic of China by United
States companies were announced this
month.
The sale of $55,000 worth of U.S. tobacco
“may represent a breakthrough” toward
reviving the once-substantial American
tobacco trade with China, the Agriculture
Department said.
The Foreign Agricultural Service was
not aware of the sale, negotiated through a
Hong Kong trading firm, until the U.S.
Liaison Office in Peking was informed on
June 15. About 200 metric tons of tobacco,
worth over half a million dollars, was
reportedly sold.
The final shipment of a 400,000-bale
cotton contract between the Plains Cotton
Cooperative Association of Lubback, Tex.,
and the Chinese government was
scheduled to arrive in Shanghai last week.
The sale, negotiated last December,
marks the first time U.S. cotton has ent
tered China in 20 years.
Cotton officials said China may be the
largest buyer of their product in the world
today. Reports indicate that the cotton the
nation has purchased totals more than 1.6
billion bales from worldwide sources this
year.
The PCCA transaction is believed to be
the largest single sale of cotton by one
organization to a single buyer in modem
history. The value of the sale is estimated
at $60 million.
Chinese purchases of more than four
million tons of U.S. grains and soybeans
for the past two years have been more
widely publicized than either the tobacco
or the cotton deal.
Before World War II, China was the
second largest importer of U.S. tobacco.
But even before U.S.-Chinese trade halted
when Communist forces took control after
the war, China was gradually increasing
its own production and reducing imports.
China now ranks as the world’s second
largest producer of tobacco, trailing only
the United States, officiate noted. Ac
cording to the U.S. Foreign Agricultural
Service, it seems likely that China will be
interested in selling to U.S. firms the
cheaper grades of flue-cured tobacco
raised in that country, in exchange for the
higher quality tobacco raised here.
Millions take to water to fete Mao’s swim
By RENE FL1PO
AGENCE FRANCE-PKE88E
PEKING — Millions of Chinese, more
than a million in Peking alone, celebrated
the seventh anniversary of Mao Tse
Tung’s Yangtse swim July 17 by swim
ming in rivers, lakes and swimming pools
near ineir nomes. ine New umna mews
Agency reported the demonstrations but
without specifically mentioning that the
demonstrations commemorated Chair
man Mao's July 16, 1966 exploit of
swimming about 10 miles of the river at
Wuhan in 65 minutes.
He was 73 years old at the time.
the lay of the land, with its terraces and
small rice paddies, will have to undergo
great transformation before tractors can
be used extensively for cultivation.
Bicycles are the most common vehicles.
Privately owned, they are the main form
of transportation. My relatives owned a
bicycle,which my cousin took with him
while he was living away from home at
tending high school. When he was on
vacation, we would ride it to the market
place early each morning to do the daily
shopping.
People in Jung Seh rose each morning
usually before sunrise, to do their
daily chores. There were clothes to be
washed, a private vegetable garden to be
tended, children to be sent off to school,
clothes to be mended, wood to be chopped,
and food to be bought. All of these had to be
done before 7 o’clock, when the workday
began.
Before each session of work, we would
gather under the big tree by the fish pond
in front of the village, and sit on hewn
stone benches while one of the team
leaders called the roll. It was up to the
individual whether he wanted to work. Of
course, if one didn’t work, one got no pay.
We usually began working at 7 a.m., but
there was no problem with punctuality.
The rural atmosphere was easygoing. If
somebody didn’t appear until after the
rollcall, he had only to tell the team leader.
It was whether he worked that was im
portant.
Before we went into the fields, my
relatives would say to me, “You don’t
want to work now. It’s too hot out there,
you’ll get all sweaty and dirty. You should
rest and relax.” But I wouldn’t let them
treat me as a guest. I went out with the rest
of the young men to harvest rice, plant
vegetables and dig canals, sharing the 8
hour workday. The people seemed to
appreciate this, and spent much time
explaining their lives to me.
Life at Big River commune is not easy.
It is filled with work, physical labor,
struggle, often without the help of complex
machines and technology.
Yet, the times are changing, and the
story of their carts is an example of this.
Of course, shoulder poles are a well
established method of transport, still used
for much of the hauling, and it will take
more than seven carts to lift the loads off
the shoulders of the people. But those few
carts are a step.
And that small change will be repeated
over and over—until eventually there will
be enough carts to make shoulder poles
unnecessary. Then the quality of life will
be improved at Big River commune and its
counterparts throughout China, and on a
return visit I will be spared the em
barrassment of little boys challenging me
to shoulder-pole contests they will always
win.
Early harvests up
despite drought, hail
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
HONG KONG — China, fighting hard to
beat a drought, has scored initial success
by reaping good early wheat harvests this
year in three key regions of the country,
Radio Peking reports.
Despite drought, hail-storm and insects,
communes in the Wenchiang region of
southwest Szechwan province, the Shih
chiachuang region of Hopei province, and
the Uuncheng region of Shansi province in
the north reported a 10 per cent rise in
wheat output over 1972.
Earlier, Premier Chou En-lai had
disclosed that China’s grain production for
1972 fell by 10 million metric tons, or about
four per cent from the 246 million metric
tons of 1971 because of inclement weather.
As a result, China had to import wheat
from Canada, Australia and America to
cope with the demand.
In all cases, commune members ex
tended wheat acreages by either im
proving the soil, increasing the frequen
cies of irrigation or use of un
derground water, the broadcast said.
Whether China has won the battle against
the unprecedented drought remains to be
seen when reports from other parts of
Chinese grain-producing areas pour in to
make the picture more complete.