All last week men killed each other in northeastern Hunan. They were fighting for no new victories to write on regimental records. They were fighting simply for rice.
Hunan—a round-bellied province that hangs like a bubble suspended from the lake country of the middle Yangtze* is famous for the most beautiful women, the most peppery food, the most savage fighting peasantry in China. More than anything else it is famous as the rice-bowl province of China. Its lush wet fields produce nearly 10% of Free China's stupendous annual 47-million-ton rice harvest.
All through August, under the blue skies of Central China, the blue-robed, sun-browned peasants had watched their rice fields slowly darken in green, then fade to the color of straw. Within their firm husks the grains of rice had whitened and hardened. It would be a good harvest. Prices were dropping in anticipation.
The Japanese garrison in Central China watched the rice too. Japan was rice-hungry. As the harvest began last month, 14,000 Japanese soldiers struck from their north Hunan bases down into the rice country. Last week while the decision seesawed in the balance, the Chinese soldiers fought desperately for their desperately needed rice. Two years ago they had driven the Japanese out of this sector. This time they meant to hold. But Hunan's battle was only a minor incident in the great struggle of Asia for rice.
"All the Rice in Asia." In Chinese, as in some other Asiatic tongues, one word is used for both "rice" and "food." No other grain yields so heavy a crop on the crowded fields of Asia's close-packed millions, no other food so satisfies their taste. The most populous countries of East Asia (China, Japan, Java), for all their unceasing efforts, are barely self-sufficient in normal times. China has a slight but chronic deficit. Three other Asiatic countries (Burma, Thailand, French Indo-China) produce almost the entire world's supply of commercially exported rice. Some years they export as much as 6,000,000 tons among them to such countries as India, Malaya, Cuba, France.
The long war in Asia has upset the traditional pattern of rice distribution. Lack of manpower and successive crop shortages have, since 1939, made Japan a major importer. Last year's emergency need for almost 2,000,000 tons of imported rice (a record figure, one-seventh of Japan's total consumption) was part of the urge that made her seize Indo-China. That need led to such abnormally large Japanese overseas purchases that Thailand placed export restrictions on rice, Burmese politicians urged similar action on their Government.
In China, the internal equalization of surplus and deficit areas has been upset by war. In Chungking, which formerly drew its rice from battle-pocked Hunan via the Yangtze, black-market prices of rice were 30 times pre-war prices last spring. Last year, to make matters worse, Szechwan, Chiang Kai-shek's base province, had a crop failure. Its yield fell off almost 50%. To prevent hoarding, to make certain of Army and urban rice supplies, Chiang's Government this summer decided to collect the land tax in grain (almost exclusively rice), not money. With a better 1941 harvest in the offing, Free China is faced with no immediate famine.