Second Year (1949-1950): Toward Economic Growth ... - PDF, 101 mb

Perspectives 13
Crisis in Asia
The drama which unfolded in Asia during the first half of this century
was of a different kind. Yet the crisis there was no less profound
than in Europe. What were the more prevalent among the historic influences
making for upheaval?
To start with, there has been throughout modern times a steady
thickening of population on the Asiatic continent and its neighboring
islands, which together support roughly half the world's people. The
pressure of men against resources has surpassed any ever known in the
West.
Maps of the Far East do not ordinarily show the severe limits of
arable soil. Nor do the histories of that part of the world always record
the divisions, redivisions, and re-redivisions of farmland which occurred
generation after generation as fathers passed on to their sons
fragmented holdings of ever-diminishing size. But no traveler across
the countryside today can fail to note the intensity with which every
available patch of earth is tilled and dressed, or the terraced gardens
climbing incredibly high on mountain slopes, or the grinding poverty
of peasants engaged in a relentless struggle for existence on tiny farms
-many of which are not more than one or two acres in size.
The rural people of .much of Asia-an overwhelming majority of the
populace and its most rapidly increasing segment-are so close to the
margin of subsistence that undernourishment is commonplace and a
drought, a Hood, a blight, or a plague of pests may bring death to thousands
or even millions. Famine, as R. H. Tawney noted, is "the last
stage of a disease which, though not always conspicuous, is always
present." 6 The farmer, as another writer has put it, is like a person
standing up to his neck in water: a ripple may drown him. And the lot
of the coolie laborer in most areas is even harder than that of the
peasant.
A second and related influence, dating also from a long past, was
social inertia. While Europe was experiencing its unprecedented release
of dynamic energies during the nineteenth century, the habits
and customs of the East were becoming more deeply imbedded. Markettown
and village communities, in relative isolation, lived culturally upon
the past-having experienced no counterpart of the Renaissance and
Reformation movements, no commercial, agricultural, industrial, or
social revolutions to disturb their medieval tranquility.
6 Land and Labour in China (Allen & Unwin. London, 1932), p. 77.