CHINA’S STARVING MILLIONS

Evening Star, Issue 20980, 19 December 1931, Page 23

CHINA’S STARVING MILLIONS

"GIVE US BREAD" GIRLS SELL THEMSELVES FOR FOOD “Unbelievable and inconceivable," was the reply Mr G. Findlay Andrew, the China Inland missionary, who knows more about North-western China than any other white man, gave to me when I asked him to give me some idea of the conditions in the Kansu area, where he has been at the head of the work carried out by the International China Famine Relict Commission. “ When, in 1929, my mission was asked to release me from my teaching work at Chefoo to travel 1,600 miles to Lanchow to investigate the stories of the awful ravages famine was making in North-west China, I was returning to an area I knew well,” Mr Andrew told me, “ for I had worked there from 1909 to 1925. As wc approached the area we got increasing evidence of the distress from the streams of refugees we mot. “ Among them wo came across strings of girls, the current price. of whom was 2s for each year of age, who ’ were being sold or were selling themselves for food. But the markets were soon glutted. The starving • people crowded round our carts and fought for bits of the animals’ fodder. “ Every tree was stripped of its bark, which had been ground down with meal for broad. Money became useless, and I shall never forget the tragic offering of first one dollar and then another to a poor woman with two children who wore stumbling along. She made no offer to take it. At last she said; ‘ Money no good hero. Give me bread.’ But we had none. The plight of the abandoned or orphaned children was beyond description. During the month of" May in the city of Lanchow alone two hundred bodies a day were thrown into the pits known as * the Graves for the Myriad.’ Dir Andrew showed me two photographs he took at' this time which would be too ghastly to publish. They showed one of his sanitary gangs col : lecting corpses by the wayside. Some were half eaten by dogs. Others wore unmistakable signs that the wretched survivors had not been _ able to resist cannibalism. An official who was ■going to make an example of any 'of these poor wretches was nonplussed by I the retort, “ Why shouldn’t I eat what the dogs are eating?” Such were the awful conditions under which Dir Andrew had to begin his relief work. To transport food from [ the nearest railhead, _ hundreds of i miles away, was impossible. “ But we ' found _wc could get some grain from 1 the Sining area,” Dir Andrew said. . “ We also put the people to work on ! the road and bridge-building, and paid ' them in food and grain.” I Eventually Mr Andrew was provid- ■ ing, through his relief schemes in the 1 Lanchow area, work for 20,000 and food for 10,000 women and children for weeks on end. The position was a little eased because of the death of so many thousands and a partially successful harvest. “ But,” he said, “ think of the circumstances—villages absolutely deserted, cities desolate, whole families wiped out and areas which had lost up to GO per cent, of their population. During the famine two million people, or a fifth of the province of Kansu aloue, perished.”