"Heaven, Observe!"

Two millions of dollars are being sought* as a first contribution to appease the Chinese dragon, Famine, now stalking in Shantung and Chihli provinces (TIME, Jan. 23). Up to the fall of the Manchu Empire in 1911, Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 rampages by the Famine Dragon since 108 B.C. in one province or another--an average of close to one famine per year. Amid the Chinese chaos since 1911 conditions operating to produce mass starvation have grown steadily worse. Doubtless, well fed U. S. citizens will again contribute toward filling empty Chinese stomachs; but the time draws near when they may wish to know why their largess will continue for many a long year. Last week, as purse strings loosened, alert minds sought famine facts:

Wet or Dry. This year the Famine Dragon is dry. He came last summer in the likeness of a burning drought and accompanied by a pest of locusts. Result: crop yields have fallen to 25% of normal in 65 of the 407 districts of Shantung. A similar dry famine in North China brought Death to 500,000 in 1920-21, and rendered 20,000,000 destitute.

Up to 1911 the Emperors of China sought to scotch the Dry Dragon by a moving and much ritualized form of prayer. Typical excerpt:

"Oh, alas! Imperial Heaven ... observe these things! ... I, the Minister of Heaven . . . am scorched with grief. . . . I am inexpressibly grieved, alarmed and frightened. . . . Knocking my head upon the Earth, I pray Imperial Heaven to hasten and confer gracious deliverance, a speedy and divinely beneficial rain. . . ."

Unfortunately, Imperial Heaven not seldom seems to reply to Chinese prayers by sending a wet dragon after a dry. Thus 2,000,000 Chinese perished through drowning and starvation after the crops in Honan province had been destroyed by the great, classic flood of 1887-1889. So recently as 1925, Shantung (parched last summer) was inundated by a relatively slight overflow of the great Hwang Ho ("Yellow River") which none the less washed away crops sufficient to feed millions for a year.

Self Help. Through more than two millenniums of alternate droughts and floods the Chinese have not supinely disdained to help themselves. Time was when the Yellow River shifted its course among the Chinese coastal lowlands after every flood, meandering scores of miles from its previous channels. So late as 1852 its waters principally flowed into the Yellow Sea at a point some 300 miles below its present main issuance into the Gulf of Chihli. But throughout the last millennium extensive systems of dikes have been gradually thrown up to restrain such rivers as the yellow Hwang Ho, and huge drainage canals have been dug. Even so the titanic Wet Dragon has escaped taming by Chinese methods.

Still more appalling is the task of taking effective steps against the Dry Dragon, a passive enemy feared even in the Occident. It is of record that under the Chou Dynasty, more than two millenniums ago, some 660.000 acres in Shensi were benefiting by a prudent irrigation system. But toilsome Chinese efforts, both before and since, have availed less in relieving droughts than have their partially successful flood control methods (success being measured by the proud statement of Chinese scholars that the great Yellow River has completely altered its course only three times in the last millennium).

War Dragon. Clearly the sole expectation that the Wet and Dry Dragons can ever be scotched lies in the progress of Chinese toward multiplying their might against the elements by adopting Occidental mechanisms and methods. Such progress is now held virtually at a standstill by the War Dragon. With each successive year since the fall of the Empire, China has weltered ever deeper in the morass of civil war. To-day three principal "War Lords" (see below) and their countless satellite "Generals" claim to rule China, but are merely raping her resources for themselves.

Already the notorious General Chang Tsung-chang has seized foodstuffs sent to relieve the spreading famine in Shantung and Chihli. The "War Lords" have, more over, complete command of the railways and canals, thus increasing the difficulty of getting U. S. food shipments through intact to starving civilian Chinese. In such circumstances famine relief can be only a desperate stop-gap measure, which must try to save simply "as many lives as possible" until China settles down politically, a process sure to require many heart-breaking years.

Meanwhile the following additional major causes will operate to bring famine: i) unrestricted childbearing among the ignorant Chinese masses, who have no knowledge of birth control; 2) low agricultural yields even from fertile land, caused by traditional, inefficient methods of cultivation; 3) backward financial and industrial conditions, just now accentuated by the widespread collapse of credit due to the Civil War; 4) the constitutional lack of a spirit of resolute co-operation among Chinese (this lack being constantly made manifest by their failure to unite in effective numbers for any purpose what soever beyond the horizon of a single family or village).

*By the American China Famine Fund Committee at Shanghai.