(2 of 2)
By October every third village in Free China had a collecting station, no farmer was farther than ten miles from such a station. Millions of well-drilled school children had sickened their parents with rice-raising slogans. Newspapers, party workers, sour-faced officials had explained every detail. Collection began the first week of the month. Hundreds of thou sands of blue-gowned farmers and landowners plodded into collecting stations; villages hummed with a bustling, boisterous festival air. In cotton bags, gunny sacks and willow baskets the brown, un-hulled rice piled up. Grey-uniformed officials weighed it, checked it, stored it in musty, shadowy Confucian and Taoist temples, in incense-fragrant ancestral halls, in any available building. The new-formed Ministry of Food was to haul grain from those places to secret permanent storage points.
By last week the collection was well into high, was even greater than had been anticipated. Szechwan alone was expected to contribute almost a million tons of grain. Chiang could turn his mind to other more pressing worries (see p. 2g). Szechwan was now irrevocably part of new China.