CHINESE MILLIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 4 December 1929, Page 2

CHINESE MILLIONS

0 YE R RIJ NX IX G V FA XCIIU R A. (SIR PERCEVAL PHILLIPS in the “Daily Mail.”) DAIREN, Manchuria. A ramshackle little steam vessel with rusty hull and scarred upper works, crawls alongside the pier at Darien. Her decks are packed with Chinese of the poorest class: old men, women, boys, and babies, all ragged and incredibly dirty, with a look of bewilderment on their stupid faces. They are sifted ashore by ]P 01 't doetors like so many animals and herded in a shed. Presently they emerge, some to open railway trucks into which they crowd with their unsavoury bundles and insanitary quilts. Others, who have not even the pittance required to pay for such mean transport, shoulder their belongings; the women carry cooking-pots and babies, the men are laden with more than don itful luggage corded in bits of cloth, anil they start off, a dilapidated and pitiful procession, along the railway line, towards infmitv. It is the beginning of their trek on foot to the promised land, which is Northern Manchuria. They are participating in the greatest migration in the world. Exhausted by civil war, bandits, and the rapacitv of fluctuating War Lords, these pilgrims have left their poor farms in the provinces of .Shantung and Chili and are seeking anew life in the wilderness that lies close to Siberia. Nothing like this .wholesale exodus of a people lias been witnessed in model'll times. They are pouring out of the oppressed provinces of North-Western ('kina at the rate of a million a year. Many simply abandon their small holdings and leave their old homes

derelict, without even attempting to soil them. It has become a custom for these voluntary exiles on forsaking the homes of their forefathers to put a scrap of paper in one of the empty rooms or under a stone in an abandoned field bearing an inscription like this:

,T .May he who takes up liis abode here prosper where we have starved.” ihe Japanese-owned South Manchurian railway facilitates as far as possible this Hood of new settlers. Special fourth-class fares are granted them, and only the very pooiest are forced to walk. Yet walk they do, every loot of the 600-miles journey to Haroin and thence into the thinly populated tracts of Heilungkiang province. Southern Manchuria is full. They cannot stop there.

All along the railway one sess the family camps of immigrants. A blanket or a mat on three sticks gives shelter little better than a dog kennel. The pilgrims live on what they can beg or pick up. Babies are born, and not a few die before the goal is reached. Hardships are great. Yet they show courage and a tenacity of purpose which is little short of amazing. So eager are these refugees to escape from China that they Ttoss to Manchuria in every conceivable way—by junk, open sailing boat, railway from Slianliaikwan, and steamer direct to 'Dairen. Even in winter, when the soil is frozen and cultivation impossible, they press northward, preferring death there to death at home. Chinese guilds and other charitable organisations help many on their way. The goal is fertile agricultural land adjoining the newly-opened railways in North, Hast, and West Manchuria. The immigrants are given seed and a very small sum to keep them alive until the first harvest. The usual agreement with the landowner is on a crop-shar-ing basis. Even well-to-do and educated Chinese have joined in the exodus from Shantung and Chili provinces, rather than endure further tlie uncertain and often dangerous existence of vassals under a local War Cord.