Chinese who is who

Brian Eyler, Southeast Asia program director of The Stimson Center, said he was surprised to see China follow through with sending its foreign minister and an entourage of high-level officials to a Lancang-Mekong Cooperation ministerial meeting in Vientiane on Feb. The U. Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup is a Berlin-based freelance journalist and co-founder of the online-magazine MedWatch , covering science, bioethics, and China-related topics.

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Previous Next. East Asia. October 07, AM. Joyce Lau. See comments Print. Newest Newest Oldest. This forum has been closed. This is not only because the farms feed the cities. A large Chinese city, seen from the air, is surrounded by concentric circles of different shades of green.

The densest growth and the darkest green is nearest the city, where the fertilizer is cheapest and most plentiful. The crop yield per acre diminishes in proportion to the distance from the source of fertilizer in the city.

More than 80 per cent of the Chinese people are farmers, and the typical farmer does not live in a house in the middle of his own land, like the American farmer, but in a village. A city in the densely populated part of China is therefore not surrounded by residential suburbs, but by clusters of villages. Before the war two occupational groups of Chinese might have been called the largest in China as a whole. They are still two of the most important groups, but their importance relative to each other is changing in a way which typifies the emergence of the new China out of the old China.

One of these types is the peasant, the other is the landlord-gentleman. Judged numerically, since four-fifths of the people live by farming, the typical or average Chinese is a peasant just the kind of simple, honest, limited, but shrewd and likeable peasant we have come to know through The Good Earth and other books by Pearl Buck. Comparatively few Chinese farmers own the land they cultivate, and exorbitant rents and taxes have kept their standard of living very low.

They are industrious and self-reliant, however, and go ahead rapidly when not too much restricted by the paternalism and oppression which have been traditional in China.

Both the paternalism and the oppression trace back to the gentry, or landlord class, in the Chinese Empire before The power of the landlords rested on the fact that grain, accumulated and stored, was until very recently the standard of wealth.

This made the landlords more powerful than the merchants, because the landlords actually controlled agriculture. In fact, merchants were often merely the agents of landlords.

It is true that according to the law of the empire the way to appointment was through the public examinations, which anybody could take, but since the knowledge of literature and philosophy required for these examinations demanded years of study, the sons of landlords, who did not have to work in the fields and could study at home with private tutors, had a big advantage over the sons of peasants.

Accordingly, while peasants did occasionally rise to high official rank, the vast majority of mandarins came from families which produced a regular crop of candidates for the examinations, generation after generation. The artisan class is being rapidly changed into an industrial proletariat, divorced from the villages and the peasant family standard.

The last to be affected have been the peasants. This makes the fate of the peasant decisive for the nation. If he is to be held down to the old way of life while the rest of the nation changes, then China will become a vast Japan, with an industrial development high in certain activities, but uneven as a whole, and with a disastrous and widening gap, as in Japan, between the mechanical progress of the factories and the human-labor standard of the farm.

Either the peasant must be granted equal rights to progress with the rest of the nation or else the low standards of human labor on the farm will drag down the wages and standards of factory labor and undermine the whole national economy—again, as in Japan. GI Roundtable Series. Corey Prize Raymond J. Cunningham Prize John H. Klein Prize Waldo G.

Marraro Prize George L. Mosse Prize John E. Palmegiano Prize James A. Schmitt Grant J.