Erosion Fighting in China

My mission took me up the Yellow River, "China's sorrow," to find out where all the silt that is the chief cause of its floods came from. I concluded that famines in northwest China were due not to adverse change of climate, but to suicidal agriculture in cultivating steep slopes without adequate measures for protecting fields from soil erosion.

This expedition led me into my life work, the study of the interrelation of soil erosion and civilizations. By arrangement between the Governments of the United States and China, I went again to China in 1942-43 to collaborate with officials and farmers of that great ally in reclaiming eroded land and increasing food production. My work was part of the war effort against Japan.

On this trip, instead of meeting the Yangtze River at the coast, we bored through the clouds to find our landmark 1,000 miles in- land, where the Kialing joins the Yangtze River at Chungking. As we descended, the gorge and its yellow-brown waters appeared to rise to meet us. We landed on a small island in close quarters in the gorge, where the water rises 90 feet in a season.

Getting into our individual sedan chairs and tilting back precariously, we were carried up the 364 stone steps from the river level to the city of Chungking.

Millions of Chinese were killed when the Japanese invaded China, but China has not surrendered. During these terrible eight years since China was invaded by the Japanese in 1937, the greatest drama of all her history has been enacted. Into this vast and little- known territory of Free China, only a little larger than the United States, has swept a tidal wave of refugees-50 to 70 million souls from coastal areas.

They came by every means imaginable- on foot, carrying bundles and babies: in wheelbarrows and sedan chairs: on Chinese junks, poled or pulled upstream with bamboo poles by sweating manpower. They came in carts, on donkeys or horses, or with the modern speed of steamers, automobiles, and tri-motored planes.

Business men, industrialists, and farmers, old folk and infants, artisans and professors, and more than thirty colleges and universities were swept back into the estuaries of their native homeland. They have come back to where Chinese civilization had its birth: back to Siking (Sian), which, known as Changan, was the capital of China for several long periods ; back to Chengtu, one of the capitals of the Three Kingdoms and ancient intellectual center where books were printed long before the time of Gutenberg.

Here, in Szechwan, against a literal wall of the snow mountains of old Tibet, China has established her base for resisting the invader …"