Gourmets in the Land of Famine

The Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Canton

Seung-Joon Lee

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804781763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

A study of the politics of rice in Canton, this book sheds new light on the local history of the city and illuminates how China's struggles with food shortages in the early twentieth century unfolded and the ways in which they were affected by the rise of nationalism and the fluctuation of global commerce.

Author Seung-joon Lee profiles Canton as an exemplary site of provisioning, a critical gateway for foreign rice importation and distribution through the Pearl River Delta, which found its prized import, and thus its food security, threatened by the rise of Chinese nationalism. Lee argues that the modern Chinese state's attempts to promote domestically-produced "national rice" and to tax rice imported through the transnational trade networks were doomed to failure, as a focus on rice production ignored the influential factor of rice quality. Indeed, China's domestic rice promotion program resulted in an unprecedented famine in Canton in 1936. This book contends that the ways in which the Guomindang government dealt with the issue of food security, and rice in particular, is best understood in the context of its preoccupation with science, technology, and progressivism, a departure from the conventional explanations that cite governmental incompetence.

Part One

FEEDING THE CITY OF GOURMETS

chi zai Guangzhou, shi zai Guangzhou
“Eating must be done at Canton”

1 South of the Mountains

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE PEARL RIVER DELTA

By the turn of the twentieth century, the urban residents of Canton did not rely on getting their daily rice supplies from the rural hinterlands of Guangdong province. Rice shortages were prevalent in the surrounding rural districts of the Pearl River Delta. Since rice production in the delta was insufficient to meet local demand, Canton had come to rely largely upon imports from external provinces and the overseas market in order to maintain an adequate rice supply for the local population. The acting commissioner of China Customs at Canton, R. De Luca, remarked: “Even in ordinary years the local production of rice in the province is never equal to local requirements, and large imports are always necessary to supplement the deficiency. The greater part of the rice thus imported comes from abroad—principally Saigon—whilst the balance is brought from the Yangzi.”¹ These supplementary rice imports had to come first to the port of Canton, after which they were redistributed at market towns in the rural districts. Instead of relying on its rural hinterlands for its food supply, Canton acted as a gateway and redistribution center for external rice supplies and provisioning the surrounding rural districts.

Despite its chronic rice shortages, however, Canton never met with any disastrous food crisis in the turbulent decades of the late Qing and early Republican transition. Many contemporary observers were struck by the local rice insufficiency. At the same time, they were equally fascinated with the commercial prosperity in the city of Canton because in spite of chronic rice shortages Canton maintained its reputation for wealth and flamboyant urban commercial culture. As early as 1902, one foreign observer summarized the stereotypical image of Canton: “Even the wealthiest of inland Chinese cannot match Cantonese. In the variety of cultural and customary experience, there is a huge gap between coastal Chinese and inland Chinese. Daily requirements in foreign goods are enormous. The foreign goods consumed daily in Canton and Fuzhou, only two cities, might match the total consumption of Yunnan province.”² Although rising rice prices “often caused considerable distress among the poorer classes,” it is true that no serious famine occurred.³ Rice relief efforts, operated competently by the Cantonese mercantile elite and local authorities alike, stabilized rice prices. Year after year in Canton, soaring rice prices and the consequent rice relief efforts were common features of everyday life. Once the “[local] crop was doomed to failure and fears of famine and disorder were entertained, the local authorities and a few of the well-known charitable institutions of Canton came to the rescue,” and rice imports “were sold at low rates to the urban poor.”⁴ Indeed, significant portions of food supplies for Canton were facilitated much more by the Cantonese commercial networks, which extended far beyond provincial boundaries and were interwoven throughout the coastal China and the South China Sea, than by local supplies from nearby rural districts. Why did the Pearl River Delta fail to provide enough rice to feed the local population? Why did such a rice-starved city never lose its reputation for commercial prosperity? Why did external rice supplies come from as far away as the Yangzi and Saigon? Why did they not come from Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, or Guangxi, which not only shared administrative borders with Guangdong but were also dominantly agricultural provinces?

To answer these questions, this chapter will examine how Guangdong happened to become China’s largest food-deficient province and how local inhabitants coped with the region’s chronic rice shortages. As a matter of fact, nothing characterized the social world of Canton better than the chronic coexistence of rice insufficiency with commercial prosperity. To understand this state of affairs, we must start from the geography of the Pearl River Delta. This does not mean that rice trade routes were determined solely by topography. Geography in and of itself does not completely explain the complicated structure of Canton’s rice supply. Rather, we will trace the human efforts that developed and transformed the structure of the rice supply in the given environment.

The Topology of Guangdong: Waterways and Mountains

The topographic conditions of the Pearl River Delta primarily defined Canton’s location: rivers and mountains. The delta provided excellent river ways to the city, but ground transportation routes were severely hindered, since the delta was surrounded by chains of hills and mountains on three sides: north, east, and west. The Nanling mountain ranges (also called Dayuling) separated the rest of China from Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. The two provinces were thus known as Lingnan (literally, south of the mountains). The mountains also contained the watersheds of many rivers that flowed south into the South China Sea. The West River, the most significant waterway flowing from the mountains to the south, ran entirely across Guangxi and down to the delta. Two more rivers—the North and East rivers—whose confluence was immediately next to the city of Canton, provided principal waterways for the inhabitants of the delta by merging after Canton into the Pearl River.⁵ Most commodities transported back and forth between Canton and other market towns had to pass along these waterways. Yet the perimeters of trade were obviously limited, simply because they could not extend further north, east, or west beyond the mountains. Only Canton, then, connected the hinterlands of the delta to the south to the outside world, namely, the maritime world. For the hinterland population, the waterways that reached Canton were a lifeline on which they solely relied, since what the inhabitants of the “South of the Mountains” could not produce—or could not sufficiently produce—had to be purchased in Canton. One prominent commodity of this sort was rice. In the 1820s, the local population had to find significant supplies of rice in the Canton rice markets where external rice imports were primarily handled. One local account notes: “In 1825, many districts of the Lingnan were struck by famine. However, the only thing they could do was to rely on Canton and Foshan, where rice from all directions was shipped and stocked.”⁶

However, this is not to say that rice insufficiency hindered the economic development of the delta. Rather, the local rice insufficiency was an unexpected consequence of significant social and economic changes. In the eighteenth century, when the Qing empire had reached its height, the Pearl River Delta had become densely populated and intensively commercialized. In terms of urbanization, many scholars unequivocally rank the Pearl River Delta second after the Jiangnan region as the empire’s cultural and economic heartland. However, the delta’s population density far exceeded Jiangnan’s, since only the delta—about 30 percent of the provincial terrain—provided arable plains in a province surrounded largely by mountains.⁷ On the West River alone, for example, on average three thousand people were squeezed into one square mile of land.⁸ The dense population gave rise to economic development, because it provided a massive workforce for the thriving local economy. Yet such an economic shift was accompanied by the decline of rice production, because an increasing number of rural households abandoned grain cultivation and sought more profitable commercial crops. The rice insufficiency that Canton faced at the turn of the twentieth century, then, stemmed from the rapid commercialization of the local economy.

CANTON AND THE “SILK DISTRICTS”

What boosted the prosperity of Canton was the commercial agriculture of the delta, the major products of which were consumed much more in the overseas markets than in the local markets: silk, sugar, and handcrafts. Of particular prominence was the silk industry that flourished near Canton. Canton’s silk industry developed a unique system of raw silk production called “sericulture combined with pisciculture” (sangji yutang: literally, dikes of mulberry trees and fish ponds); it entailed planting mulberry trees on the dikes surrounding fish ponds, with the fish eating the silkworms’ wastes. The practice, widespread throughout the counties of Nanhai and Shunde, astonished Ruan Yuan, the new governor general and a native of Jiangnan, when he was first appointed to the empire’s southernmost province. In 1819, he noted: “These mulberry farms extend to one hundred li in diameter. Farming households in the hundreds of thousands raise mulberry trees and rely on sericulture. Indeed, this area is the most fertile land for sericulture in Guangdong.”⁹

To understand such changes of land use patterns, the ecological condition of the lower delta should be taken into account. From the viewpoint of the rural inhabitants in this region, it was a smart choice to give up rice cultivation and switch to sericulture. Not all parts of the region were suitable for grain cultivation. Despite being excellent waterways, the countless rivers and creeks carried huge amounts of sediment. As sediment was deposited over and over again on the alluvial plains, the height of the water tended to rise quickly, and the direction of the waterways frequently changed. In a chain reaction, such environmental pressures often caused the overflow of waterways and floods. In this environment, nothing would have been better than planting mulberry trees and building pisciculture, which required a certain degree of high water levels. The huge amounts of sediments brought by waterways could also be used for dike building. Massive plantings of mulberry trees along fish ponds were one way by which the local population tried to forge a local ecosystem as much as they adjusted themselves to it. Moreover, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when steam-powered silk filatures were introduced and constructed around suburban Canton, the silk industry blossomed further.¹⁰ Such a transformation of the rural landscape was noticeable throughout the lower delta, with such counties as Nanhai, Shunde, and Xiangshan, which foreign observers nicknamed “Silk Districts,” particularly prominent.¹¹ Yet the increasing sericulture asymmetrically transformed the crop rotation patterns of the Silk Districts; rice cultivation was quickly supplanted by these new commercial developments. A local account noted: “The mulberry trees are so close together that it looks like a forest. Silkworm markets and raw silk markets are everywhere. Calculating these mulberry farms, it is no less than thousands of qing. . . . Most of the arable land is filled with mulberry farms, with rice paddies only about one or one-and-a-half out of ten.”¹² This transformation not only diminished the amount of arable land available for rice cultivation but also took huge numbers of workers away from rice cultivation. By the 1920s, approximately 70 percent of the arable land in the Nanhai County had become mulberry land, and nearly 80 percent of the working population was involved in some part of sericulture.¹³

Soon, however, widespread sericulture and silk filatures turned out to be a double-edged sword. Although the local economy thrived, the rural districts of the delta could no longer provide an adequate rice supply for the population. Increasingly, cultivable lands were being converted into seri-culture and commercial planting. At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of rural dwellers flocked into Canton and its outskirts to seek work in such new industries as silk filature, sugar refining, and kerosene oil production, to name a few. How was this new urban workforce to be fed? Where would Canton find additional rice supplies? The rising urban population and decreasing local rice supplies became the greatest focus of Cantonese public concern:

The silk export of this prefecture reaches over twenty million [units were not identified]. The population continues to be concentrated in Canton, the provincial capital (shengcheng), as well as its suburbs, and exceeds four million. Most counties, including Nanhai, Panyu, Dongguan, Shunde, Xinhui, and Xiangshan, have populations numbering in the several millions each. Thus, twenty million shi of rice needs to be shipped from Annam and Siam, three to four million shi each also from Zhenjiang, Wuhu, and Guangxi. As a result, living costs have increased, firewood has become as valuable as laurel, and, in this way, rice has become as valuable as pearls. There may never be a day when the poor do not sack the stores of rice.¹⁴

In short, the dearth of rice stemmed from this thriving commercial agriculture, led mostly by the silk industry. Yet some questions still remain. Why did the Cantonese find their supplementary rice supplies in such places as Zhenjiang (in Jiangsu province) and Wuhu (in Anhui province), and even foreign places like Saigon and Siam? Geography cannot give a complete answer, but it is a good starting point.

Mountain Barriers to Trade

In stark contrast to the myriad waterways of the delta, the conditions for ground transportation over the mountainous northern hinterlands, through which one had to travel to rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Feeding the City of Gourmets
• Part Two Saving the Nation from Famine
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index