8
Defeat:
The Failure of the Star Pupil, 1930s
China's preeminent agronomist, Shen Zonghan, whose career was remarkable, was trained in the United States. Born into humble family circumstances, Shen managed by dint of diligent study to win a series of scholarships that led him from Chinese schools to American colleges in Georgia and New York. He returned to China to take the lead in agricultural education, plant breeding research, and organization of new administrative structures to support agriculture. His accomplishments were sizable, and he himself saw his life story as an exemplary tale that could provide inspiration to younger generations. [1] Yet his many successes in the laboratory and experimental field failed to have much impact by the time the peacetime era ended in 1937. Like the American research scientists who trained him, Shen believed that agricultural development was primarily a technical problem of increasing crop yields. This narrowly technical approach was spectacularly successful in the laboratory, but it failed utterly in the countryside when unaccompanied by fundamental social and political changes. Foreign experts such as John Griffing had found it impossible to introduce their improved plants and techniques, and so too did American-trained Chinese experts.
Born in 1895, Shen grew up near Yuyao, Zhejiang, in a small, single-surname village of about two hundred families. His father was a member of the rural gentry who had an examination degree and much prestige but owned little property. As a young boy, Shen was taught the classics in a small academy run by a relative, but he also did farm chores at home, learning everything from applying manure as fertilizer to harvesting crops. At the age of fifteen, he did well on an entrance examination and won a scholarship to a primary school in the county seat, temporarily leaving the farm. Upon graduation he decided to study agriculture. Against the advice of his teachers and schoolmates, who thought a career in agriculture was inappropriate for a bright scholar, and in defiance of his father, who wanted his son to start teaching and contributing income to the family, Shen borrowed money to enroll in 1913 at the provincial agricultural high school in Hangzhou. [2]
Two years in Hangzhou gave Shen both his first exposure to foreign agricultural ideas and the desire to study abroad. At first his dream was to go to Japan. The school was directed by Chinese graduates of Japanese agricultural schools, who had their students study Japanese. English was also taught, but by a Chinese instructor who had studied English in Japan and who brought back incorrect pronunciation that he passed on to the students. Shen intended to join a group of his classmates bound for Japan in 1914, but he could not borrow enough money and had to stay behind. In a newspaper, he saw a notice that the Ministry of Education was offering scholarships for study in the United States. At the time, Shen knew virtually nothing about American agricultural schools, remembering only that he had seen a letter at a friend's house the year before written by Hu Shih, a student of agriculture at Cornell. (Hu was the discouraged student of apples mentioned in chap. 5; later, Shen would claim that Hu's "vivid" report on Cornell had inspired his dream of studying there, although Hu's account was probably not very laudatory.) Shen realized that he would be able to continue his education only if he won a scholarship such as that offered for study in the United States. But graduation from Beijing's Qinghua University was required of candidates for the fellowships, so Shen resolved first to get to Beijing to study at the National Agricultural College, as a preliminary step to transferring to Qinghua. [3]
Shen could continue his studies only by borrowing heavily from relatives and friends, winning a tuition scholarship from the school, and again defying his father. The courses in basic sciences and agriculture in Beijing turned out to be more advanced that those in the high school, but Shen had no trouble earning top standing in his class. Outside of his regular classes at the college, Shen spent almost all of his time studying English on his own—reading grammars, memorizing vocabulary cards, and declaiming speeches to imaginary audiences while pacing the athletic field. He also converted to Christianity and often visited the home of a Chinese YMCA staff member who had many books on religion and English literature. His ability to read English progressed rapidly, but conversational English remained a problem even with the most diligent self-study. To win the scholarship to the United States, he had to transfer to Qinghua, and despite excellent marks in his coursework, Qinghua's oral entrance examination in English kept him from passing. Deeply disappointed, Shen graduated in 1918 from the National Agricultural College with no prospect of being able to go to the United States. [4]
With his agricultural studies at an end, Shen faced the difficult task of finding employment that would utilize his expertise. With an introduction provided by an American missionary he had known in Yuyao, Shen wrote John Reisner in Nanjing to ask about work. Reisner wrote back offering the possibility of a modest position paying 14 yuan a month (about $6.00). Final approval would depend on a personal interview. Shen excitedly took a train to Nanjing, but when he arrived, Reisner was preoccupied with preparations for a lecture and postponed the interview. When
finally available to meet with Shen, Reisner was evasive and then explained that the position was no longer available—he had given the job to a Nanking alumnus. Shen had no leads to other possible jobs in agriculture. [ 5]
Without other prospects, Shen accepted a position as a private tutor in Beijing, preparing a young man for a high-school entrance examination. The job meant abandoning agriculture and teaching general subjects: English, mathematics, science, geography, and history. But Shen had learned self-discipline during his attempt to prepare for entrance into Qinghua, and he set himself a rigid schedule of self-study in addition to his tutoring responsibilities. His day started at 6:00 A.M. with a half hour of Bible reading and prayer, followed by an hour of reading English aloud, then additional English study sessions throughout the day. Two hours were devoted to reading an English newspaper, and another hour to writing English compositions. Shen also kept up agricultural studies on his own, reading Eduard Strasburger's Textbook of Botany, John Henry Comstock's Insect Life, and several Japanese books on entomology, soils, and botany. Not surprisingly, he found inspiration in the autobiographies of fellow autodidacts, such as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington. [6]
Shen hoped to secure a position related to agricultural teaching or research in Nanjing, the center of professional activity, but after two years of tutoring, his first offer of an agricultural job was at a small cotton research station in western Hunan, which was so remote and unprotected from wayward soldiers that no other agricultural graduate had been willing to go there. But the position offered a return to agriculture, so Shen took the job. When he arrived, he found soldiers everywhere and conditions just as unsettled as he had been warned they would be. He rented land, planted American cotton, and befriended nearby warlord Feng Yuxiang, who took a liking to the fellow Christian. But in 1920 fighting forced Feng to withdraw his troops from the area, and the cotton experiment lost its military protector. Fortunately for Shen, his wish to work in Nanjing was realized when he was offered a job teaching English at the First Provincial Agricultural High School. [7]
For someone who had taught himself English, Shen's command of the language was quite good. In fact, he won a national English essay contest sponsored by Millard's Review, an English-language weekly published in Shanghai. Topping sixty-one entries, many of which were submitted by more privileged students at American-run missionary schools, Shen's essay on the assigned topic of "How Can America Best Help China?" described the United States as a special friend and protector of China. Shen suggested that Americans needed to be better informed about China: "If possible, the Americans should teach Chinese history and geography as required courses in their universities and high schools so that the Americans in a general way have an intimate knowledge of things Chinese and their friendship to us may be built on a firmer foundation." [8]
Shen also recommended that America's "great and famous" men visit China
in order to point out China's shortcomings and suggest means of improvement. "Chinese social evils," he wrote, "such as gambling, immorality, drinking, public corruption, become more serious every day. Chinese in general have no idea of improvement." Shen also called for American investments, which, unlike Japan's, were free of imperialistic ambitions: "The United States of America in investing money in foreign countries has no other ambition further than to expect only a financial return." In the interests of serving world peace, Shen argued, "Americans should help China as much as they can politically, socially, intellectually, financially, commercially, and industrially." [9]
When Shen took up his new teaching position in Nanjing, he discovered that his students did not accord him much respect. They ranked their instructors in a hierarchy: at the top were teachers who had been trained at American agricultural schools; below them were those who had been trained at Japanese schools; and at the bottom were teachers like Shen, who had graduated from Chinese institutions. The students also wielded considerable power; they successfully forced a string of principals to resign, and in one of the political struggles that brought down a principal, Shen lost his job. The experience rekindled his dream of studying in the United States, partly to increase the respect he would receive, and partly to obtain more knowledge about cotton culture, which he had enjoyed discussing with John Griffing while in Nanjing. His last chance for a scholarship had fallen through when he had done poorly in a fellowship competition sponsored by Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, which was sending Chinese students to the United States to study tobacco growing in the expectation that they would then promote the cultivation of American tobacco in China. (In retrospect, this was one of the more controversial contributions that American agriculture offered to China in this period.) If Shen was ever to study in the United States, he would have to pay for it himself. [10]
Shen took a position at an agricultural high school in Wuhu, Anhui, added a weekend job at a local agricultural station, and bided his time saving money by extraordinary economy. Out of his monthly income of 130 yuan, he sent 20 to his family in Zhejiang, used 20 for his own subsistence, and managed to save most of the rest. Within two years, he had saved 1,000 yuan ($500); by borrowing another 1,400 yuan ($700), he bought his boat passage, purchased a few sets of clothes, and had $800 in U.S. currency on hand. His plan was to study cotton for one year at the Georgia State College of Agriculture, from which it seemed that all Chinese experts on cotton had graduated, and then work for six months gaining field experience. His father was furious that his son was abandoning gainful employment for more studies, with no apparent regard for the family's financial difficulties. Going to America when both his father and mother were alive and desired that he stay nearby showed, his father said, that Shen was most unfilial. Only with the intervention of an older brother did Shen receive grudging permission from his father to go. [11]
Sailing from Shanghai in August 1923, Shen met a friendly American couple, the Candlers, who were from Atlanta and who solicitously reviewed his travel plans. When Shen took the Southern Pacific across the country to Georgia, Candler was waiting at the Atlanta train station with a car to whisk him to a suite in a large hotel. The next morning, when Shen checked out and tried to pay for his room, he found that Candler had already paid. Shen was appreciative, but completely unaware of how untypical was this first American that he had chanced to meet: Candler was Asa Griggs Candler, Jr., the man who had helped his father build Coca-Cola into an empire and who was one of the wealthiest men in the South. [12]
When Shen arrived at the College of Agriculture in Athens, he intended to enroll as a graduate student, but the registrar's office would not accept his Chinese degree. Finally admitted as a probationary student, Shen soon impressed his professors with his knowledge and experience. Most of the textbooks were ones he had read on his own before he had come to the United States. Academic standards were not as high as he had expected, and he found little challenge in the classroom, earning A's easily. In fieldwork, his earlier cotton-growing experience in Hunan was clearly evident. It also distinguished him from the Chinese students who had come to Georgia before him, virtually all of whom had come from urban backgrounds, had no farm experience, and had chosen agricultural study as a means to an office career. One of the Georgia professors told Shen, "I've taught many Chinese students, but none of them knew how to grow Chinese cotton. You're the first Chinese student I've had who actually has had experience growing cotton in China." [13]
It happened that there were no other Chinese students on campus at the time. For companionship, Shen befriended a young American who was living in the same boardinghouse; the two took after-dinner walks together, and Shen practiced his English. The town also had a Chinese laundryman who treated Shen with affection, helping to dispel Shen's loneliness with Chinese tea, newspapers, and invitations to large Chinese feasts prepared on Shen's behalf on Saturday nights. The two men did not speak Chinese dialects that were mutually intelligible, however, so they had to converse in English, the only spoken language they had in common. [14]
Early in the fall term, Shen received an invitation to spend a weekend in Atlanta as the houseguest of the Candlers. Shen did not know their identity until it was explained to him by his landlady, who was amazed that her boarder was on personal terms with the richest man in the state. Shen was less excitable and took it all calmly. The tour of the Candler estate led him past hundred-acre gardens, greenhouses, a zoo, a swimming pool, an athletic field, stables, and art treasures. A huge dinner was given in Shen's honor (where he struggled to eat fried chicken with a knife and fork until one of the Candler daughters whispered that it was all right to eat it with one's fingers). Ballroom dancing followed. The next day, Candler gave Shen a tour of the university and hospital that the family had
donated to the city. At the end of the visit, Candler offered to help Shen in any way Shen named. Shen declined the offer, but asked the question that had been nagging him during his visit: "Why have you been so nice to me?" [15]
Candler's answer was an interesting specimen of national stereotyping. On the basis of his recent visits to both China and Japan, Candler explained, he had discerned significant differences in the character of the people. Take the rickshaw pullers as an example, he suggested: "In Tokyo, every time we took a rickshaw, we had to give a tip in addition to the fare, and even then be asked to pay more, which was quite aggravating. But in Beijing, when we paid the fare for a rickshaw, the coolie would simply say 'Thank you' and refuse our attempts to add a tip." From this comparison, Candler went on, he had found the Japanese people to be "corrupt," whereas the Chinese were "most likable." Candler had invited Shen to be his guest in order to show his "high regard for the Chinese people." [16]
Shen did not ask for special help and, it soon turned out, did not need any. He earned his master's degree within a year of arriving at the Georgia college, specializing in cotton and wheat studies. On the basis of his outstanding academic record and the recommendations of his Georgia professors, Shen was able to win a partial scholarship from the Qinghua Boxer Fund to extend his studies in the United States and pursue a doctorate. He chose the famous plant-breeding program at Cornell and moved to Ithaca in 1924. [17]
In contrast to his experience in Georgia, he now found that he had to apply himself to the coursework, a demanding curriculum that included genetics, advanced genetics, crop breeding, biometry, farm crops, soils, advanced soils, soil bacteriology, advanced plant physiology, and cytology. Shen also attended weekly seminars in four different departments—plant breeding, agronomy, plant physiology, and cytology—where he enjoyed observing the intellectual combat of professors and students, who gathered together to discuss and critique recent research. Shen plunged into his studies with a single-mindedness that left virtually no time for anything else; he worked from seven o'clock in the morning until eleven at night, seven days a week. [18]
The fellowship that supported his studies provided only half the living stipend that the other Chinese fellows in America received, so Shen could maintain just a minimal level of subsistence. He had no money for new clothes and shoes to replace the worn outfits he had brought from China, and to economize on food costs, he stopped eating at the cafeteria and cooked his meals on the Bunsen burners in the lab. [19]
His diligent study, his willingness to work hard in the experimental fields ("You're not like all the rest," he was often complimented), and his precarious financial position made Shen the ideal candidate for a special research fellowship offered by the International Education Board (see chap. 6). It was a singular honor, for he was the only Chinese recipient in the fellowship program. More important,
it meant he would not have to worry about having enough money to complete his doctorate. [20]
As an IEB fellow, Shen returned to China in early 1926 to assist in the Cornell-Nanking plant breeding program. It had been three years since he had left China, traveling third class. How different his return was, traveling first class, courtesy of the IEB, with enough money to present his father with a gift of several hundred dollars for his seventieth birthday. The prodigal son had finally made good, and the old man was happy. Shen's return to Nanjing was particularly rich in irony. On his last visit, eight years before, Shen had been an unemployable nobody, easily pushed aside by Reisner to make room for a Nanking graduate. Now he was the most honored Chinese agricultural student to have studied in America, and Reisner and his arch-rival at Southeastern, Zou Bingwen, each tried to woo Shen into making a commitment to come to his respective institution after Shen completed his degree at Cornell. When Reisner saw Shen, he asked, "Haven't we met somewhere before?" Shen, enjoying the moment but not wanting to embarrass Reisner, pretended that he was not clear whether or not they had ever met. [21]
Initially, Shen postponed making a decision between Nanking and Southeastern; he was busy teaching a course at Nanking and assisting the Cornell representative in residence at the time, Clyde Myers. Harry Love, then in Ithaca, proposed to Reisner that the University of Nanking abandon its claim to Shen and allow him to go to Southeastern after graduation. Certainly he could make important contributions to the work at Southeastern, Love pointed out. In return for "releasing" Shen, Nanking could obtain the services of another person. It would be a nice gesture of goodwill, and Shen could remain in close contact with his friends and colleagues at Nanking, making possible the coordination of plant improvement work between the two institutions. But Reisner was not receptive to the idea of sharing this prize find. He wrote back that the best results for plant improvement work would come about "by the [Nanking] College of Agriculture and Forestry strengthening its own work at every turn." [ 22]
In the end, Shen announced that he would return to the University of Nanking after graduation. He felt that, as a government institution, Southeastern was too vulnerable to political changes and sudden departures of presidents and deans; plant breeding research required a stable environment over a number of years, a condition that Southeastern seemed unable to guarantee. The University of Nanking, as a missionary school, offered a setting better sheltered against political winds, and it also had the larger budget. [23]
At the end of 1926, Shen returned to Ithaca to write his doctoral dissertation. When the International Education Board asked him how much money he would like for a monthly stipend, he replied that $80 would be sufficient to supplement the $40 he received monthly from the Qinghua fund. The other IEB fellows must have regarded him as an insufferable prig, for they had insisted that they needed at
least $200 a month. Then Shen came along, proposing to live on little more than half of that and telling the IEB that he was happy to forgo a large stipend so that a large number of students could be assisted. [24]
Shen's graduate career at Cornell ended with a number of new honors, but his dissertation on winter wheat crosses had to be completed quickly during the summer of 1927, for the evacuation of foreigners from Nanjing meant that the University of Nanking desperately needed Shen to begin teaching in the fall semester. With his Ph.D. completed (after only three years' combined residence at Georgia and Cornell), Shen rushed back to China to serve as head of the Crop Improvement Project at Nanking. He also taught genetics and plant breeding, and showed the distinctive marks of his foreign education. Shen stressed fundamental principles, not rote memorization of numbers and names. He insisted that text material be integrated with field experiences, leading students into a rice field himself to demonstrate transplanting. His students, who were from urban backgrounds, flinched at putting their feet into the muck and water of the flooded rice field, so Shen had to coax the timid. His classes came to be quite popular; at times they included more than half of the two-hundred-odd students of the College of Agriculture and Forestry. [25]
Shen soon found that in some respects his education at Cornell had not prepared him for his situation in China. Plant breeding was by its very nature quite specialized. Some of the most important crops in China—rice, sorghum, millet, and sugar beets—were grown but rarely in the United States and hence had been little studied. Accordingly, the only English-language textbooks on plant breeding that Shen could give his students for reference lacked detailed examples appropriate to China. Shen also discovered that Cornell had neglected to teach him about "blank testing," which he found useful in his classes. The test called for students to plant three hundred rows of one variety of wheat, then carefully measure the heads of each and note the varying weights from row to row. The data gathered gave his students an appreciation of the relationship between soil fertility and yields. At the agricultural college in Ithaca, the lesson was too elementary for the students, who came from farm backgrounds, so blank testing was never mentioned. But Shen found it an excellent exercise for helping rusticate his urban students in Nanjing. [26]
Shen spent only about a third of his time teaching; the rest was devoted to his own plant breeding work on wheat, rice, and sorghum. The work was done well, and one wheat variety tested under his direction displayed a pleasing combination of earlier maturation and significantly higher yields than common varieties. Offered opportunities to leave the university for positions in provincial administration, Shen chose to remain on campus, partly because he unabashedly liked academia, and partly because of his belief that the way to improve Chinese agriculture was to increase agricultural production, and the easiest way to begin that was to use improved varieties. "When the farmer plants an improved variety,"
he wrote, "he obtains an increase in yield without additional capital, fertilizer, or labor inputs. In economic terms, that is pure gain." [27]
The idea of "pure gain" from improved varieties, free of any accompanying drawbacks, was obviously appealing, but Shen saw that his plant breeding research at the University of Nanking was far too small in scale to serve as a national program. A private university could train specialists, but only the inauguration of government programs, as in the United States, would assure plant breeding research on a scale appropriate for the nation. In 1928, at a national conference of the Ministry of Agriculture and Mines, Shen proposed that the new Chiang Kai-shek government establish a national agricultural experiment station to serve as the hub of a research network, conducting research and coordinating the work of provincial and county stations. The proposal was well received at the conference and was sent on with a recommendation for implementation. But once it entered the Nanjing bureaucracy, it disappeared. [28]
In the meantime, Shen encouraged interprovincial cooperation in agricultural programs until a truly national program of agricultural improvement could be started. The provincial governments of both Jiangsu and Zhejiang were interested in agriculture, and Shen was instrumental in arranging for the two provinces to jointly hire his former Cornell teacher, Harry Love, as an adviser. Love was given a three-year contract and returned to China in 1931. [29]
The presence of an American adviser was adroitly used by Shen to prod the national government into action: Shen argued that the valuable services of the foreign expert would best be utilized if Love worked not for two provinces but for a national agricultural research bureau, such as the one Shen had already proposed. A reshuffling of cabinet ministers in 1931 brought to power people sympathetic to Shen's idea, and a fourteen-member planning committee was finally appointed. Aside from Shen and other leading Chinese agriculturalists, the committee included three Americans from Cornell: Love, Buck, and Myers. [30]
The committee presented concrete recommendations for establishing a National Agricultural Research Bureau (NARB), but implementation proceeded haltingly. The initial director appointed four American-educated Chinese specialists to head programs, but he and his appointees soon resigned or were dismissed when another cabinet shuffle brought new superiors to power. The next director, Tan Xihong—whom Shen regarded as an incompetent political appointee—hired his own friends, who, like Tan, had been educated in France. Two more years passed, while the NARB, without land, existed only on paper. [ 31]
In 1933, another governmental reorganization provided an opportunity for Shen and his friends to lobby for changes at the NARB. Tan was fired, and the new man who was brought in, Qian Tianhe, appointed Love as chief technician. Since so little had been done in the two years that the NARB had officially existed, the new administration started with virtually a free hand. The first pressing matter was
to find an appropriate site for the NARB's experimental fields and offices. The planning committee had originally recommended that both the NARB and its offices be located at Xiaolingwei, a few kilometers outside of Nanjing in Jiangning County, where a large tract of 2,700 mou (450 acres) was available. Love now suggested that the fields be placed in Jiangning County but that the NARB offices be built within Nanjing's city gates, for the convenience of visitors and the staff who lived in the city. But the Chinese saw the drawbacks of Love's proposal; it made little sense to keep the NARB's scientists so far from experimental fieldwork simply for the sake of "convenience." Love's proposal was rejected, and fields, offices, homes, and dormitories were planned for the rural site at Xiaolingwei. [ 32]
Construction of the first NARB buildings had barely begun when, in 1934, Love's three-year contract expired and he returned to the United States. Shen was chosen as the succeeding chief technician, but the University of Nanking was unwilling to let him go. In the end, Shen agreed to continue to teach at the university, but he moved his family to the new site at Xiaolingwei to show the university administration that he was serious about serving the NARB and that they should not delay in hiring a replacement for him. Shen's wife was an agriculturalist who had been appointed to the NARB before Shen, and he hesitated before accepting his new post, worried that a husband-wife appointment at the same institution would encourage whispers of impropriety and nepotism. When the Shens and their two children moved to Xiaolingwei, they were the first family there, and the only available housing was a small, dark temple. [33]
Six years after Shen had made a detailed proposal for its establishment, the NARB was finally functioning. In preparation for planting, fields were leveled, irrigation and drainage ditches dug, and impressive administration buildings and dormitories, standing above the Nanjing-Hangzhou highway, were completed in October 1934. More impressive still was the long list of research activities in which the NARB staff claimed to be involved. A number of years before, Shen had advised his home province. Zhejiang, to begin its agricultural improvement work by concentrating on just a few important projects that could produce visible results, and to avoid diffusing attention on an overly comprehensive agenda. The temptation was, of course, to take on everything at once, as the earlier generation of experimental stations in China had tried to do. Shen had noted that in attempting a little of everything, the stations had failed to do any one thing well. Now, at the NARB. Shen did not follow his own counsel; the NARB, too, appeared to tackle everything at once. [ 34]
For an organization with a staff of only fifteen specialists, the NARB had an elaborate structure of divisions, departments, and research programs. Its Division of Crop Production included departments of agronomy, forestry, plant pathology, and entomology; the Division of Animal Production was subdivided into animal husbandry and veterinary science; and the Division of Agricultural Economics had
separate departments of crop reporting, farm management, and rural industries. The studies for wheat improvement, from regional testing to hybridization, were so numerous that the list of their titles alone took up several pages in official reports; rice, cotton, and potato improvement programs also spawned long lists of ostensibly separate studies underway at the NARB. Each department boasted of its busy research activity, creating an impression that the NARB was twenty times as large as it actually was. [35]
One of the most interesting projects that the NARB started was its Department of Rural Industries, headed by John Bernard Tayler, the only foreigner on the permanent staff. The department recognized "the importance of supplementing agriculture with industry," an important need in a country such as China, "where the under-employment in the villages due to the density of the population and to the part-time nature of agriculture is estimated as equal to the whole-time unemployment of fifty to sixty million people." The department itself did not intend to create and manage rural industries, but it did plan to collect data about raw materials, power supplies, agricultural production, and markets, in order to advise others about recommended new industries for particular areas. Although the need to integrate agriculture and industry, which the department noted was then "widely felt in the Western world today," would be incorporated into national development policy only many years later, the NARB was at least aware of its importance. [36]
Beginning in 1935, the NARB annually invited a foreign agricultural authority to spend a number of months in residence, offering seminars for the staff and outside visitors. John Wishart, of Cambridge, England, was the first such visitor, and H. K. Hayes, a famed plant breeder from the University of Minnesota (and future developer of hybrid corn), spent ten months in China in 1936 lecturing at the NARB and accompanying Shen on visits to wheat-growing stations in North China. Shen thought the foreign experts contributed a great deal to the NARB, but he had to counter the criticism that their services were too costly. The NARB, Shen pointed out, did not use foreign experts without taking pains to be extremely economizing." Indeed, it paid only for their travel and living expenses; their home institutions paid their salaries. Nevertheless, Shen and the Chinese authorities at the bureau did feel that foreigners should be given accommodations that were even more spacious and comfortable than the new houses built for the top staff. When Hayes arrived with his wife, a new three-story, four-bedroom home was waiting. [ 37]
The national government was unwilling to substantially increase the level of its initial funding for the NARB, but it was willing to fund new organizations. Because of China's huge wheat and rice imports, the government created a new National Rice and Wheat Improvement Institute in 1935. The institute was located on the same campus as the NARB, and although it may have looked like a new, separate entity to outside observers, such as the government officials who spon-
sored it, Shen confessed in his memoirs that it was in fact indistinguishable from the NARB. The institute and the NARB shared the same administration, and Shen himself was put in charge of the new institute's wheat division, while retaining his old NARB position. Since the government was willing to spend much more if there were two institutions at Xiaolingwei instead of one, the staff members were happy to play along in the masquerade. The next year, still another new organization, a wheat inspection office, was established to guard against adulteration of wheat sent to market, and Shen accepted another concurrent office. Shen and his colleagues did not mind the multiple appointments, even though there was no additional salary, because they saw that the proliferation of institutions brought increased government funding for agriculture. [38]
By 1936, the Xiaolingwei campus, with its two "separate" institutes, had a total annual budget of 1 million yuan (about $360,000). The staff mushroomed, and one large new building was completed after another, providing expanded offices, laboratories, refrigeration rooms, greenhouses, and a gas plant. Shen was not only delighted to work amid well-equipped facilities but also liked the professional atmosphere that was so rarely seen at other institutions. The staff was required to work eight-hour days with strict hours—8:00 A.M. to 12 noon and 2:00 to 6:00 P.M. —without exception, "punching in" with their chops (personal seals) in a roll book that the director personally scrutinized. [39]
With an enlarged staff, well-equipped campus, and serious-minded administration, the NARB was an exciting place to work in 1935, 1936, and 1937. Later, looking wistfully back on these years, Shen called them a "Golden Age" for the advance of scientific agriculture in China. These years were also a golden age for Shen personally. A man who never aggressively pursued financial gain for himself, Shen nevertheless enjoyed the distance he had come since his days as a penniless student. The Shens moved to a new, eight-room house built especially for them on the NARB campus; modeled after those at the University of Nanking, it had a refrigerator, running water, and Western bathroom fixtures. The Shens were served not only by the modern conveniences but also by the traditional amenities: three servants. Shen Zonghan took particular pride in two things—his well-stocked personal library and his own Ford automobile, which took the family on picnics. [40]
Shen was "doing well by doing good." Moreover, his professional success in China and the promising expansion of the NARB and related agricultural institutes during the 1930s appeared to confirm the hope that Americans had placed in him and in his American-trained colleagues. China seemed on the verge of accomplishing something important, using American ideas but its own people. This moment of promise in Chinese agriculture attracted the attention of a potentially generous patron, the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation had a long-standing interest in China, dating
back almost as far as its 1913 charter, in which it pledged to promote "the well-being of mankind throughout the world." Its first president, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the only son of the Standard Oil tycoon, was a Sinophile and collector of delicate chinoiserie. Under his guidance, the new foundation sent several commissions to survey the needs of China. In 1914 the foundation had created the China Medical Board, which channeled a colossal sum—more than $30 million—into the Peking Union Medical College and related programs during the next twenty years. [41] However, the only agricultural program in which the Rockefellers were involved was the Cornell-Nanking project, which was funded not by the Rockefeller Foundation but by the International Education Board, the separate, administratively distant, and short-lived "cousin" of the main foundation (see chap. 6). Despite the tremendous investment that the Rockefeller Foundation had made to advance medicine in China, until the early 1930s it had ignored agriculture. In 1931, however, one of the foundation's vice presidents became excited about the potential of directing agricultural change in China, and thus decided to redress this oversight.
Selskar Gunn was the vice president primarily responsible for European programs, but on a return trip from Paris to New York during the summer of 1931, Gunn passed through China and spent almost two months surveying the scene and interviewing academics, officials, doctors, and businessmen. At the urging of a friend, he talked with rural sociologists at several universities and visited James Yen's "rural reconstruction" center at Dingxian, Hebei, where literacy education, health improvement, and "self-government" were offered to local farmers. [42] Gunn found it difficult to organize his impressions. He wrote shortly afterward, "China lives and moves, let us hope, forward. It is a mighty puzzle. No living being can pretend to find its solution." [43]
Gunn found numerous signs of instability. "The Nanking government," he reported, "really has control over a small part of the country. An authority attached to the Ministry of Finance stated that the Government actually only received revenue from three of the twenty odd provinces." Of the revenues that were collected, 90 percent were used for military purposes, he was told by T. V. Soong, the minister of finance. Gunn was not impressed with the Chinese government he encountered in Nanjing: "I had the feeling it was more like a group of youngsters running a high school society rather than the affairs of a country of 450,000,000 people." [44]
Gunn also found that "the Chinese have become touchy on the subject of inferiority." He wrote, "The danger of wholesale importation of Western doctrines is decried in an ever increasing volume. The demand is now to 'Chinafy' Western knowledge." He was not sympathetic to Chinese nationalism ("they have exalted ideas of what they could do if given the opportunity"), but he was intrigued by the state of flux that seemed to prevail in China. Gunn declared: "China has become
plastic after centuries of rigid conventionalism." Perhaps the Rockefeller Foundation could help shape the new China. [45]
When Gunn returned to New York, his appeal that China receive fresh attention from the foundation was supported by its president. Max Mason. In 1932, Gunn was sent back to China for an extended stay, in order to prepare a detailed list of recommendations for foundation action. The resulting report, presented to the foundation trustees in 1934, recommended support for rural improvement instead of continued funding of the elitist Peking Union Medical College. Gunn reported that in China, "all over the country one hears of plans for national or provincial reconstruction and with particular reference to the rural problems. This is natural as it is estimated that over 85 percent of the population is rural." Gunn recommended that the Chinese concern with the countryside receive the foundation's full support. "I urgently insist," he told the foundation, "that a considerable part of any future aid which we may give be devoted toward activities the benefits of which will be felt by the rural population." [46]
Gunn had developed more sensitivity to Chinese concerns about nationalism and Westernization since his first brief visit to China three years before, and his specific recommendations in 1934 reflected a new interest in developing indigenous institutions. Sending Chinese students abroad for Western training now seemed unwise to Gunn. The majority of returned students had "lost a good deal of their Chinese point of view and background and have picked up something of Western life but insufficient to make them really Western in their outlook." The result was that "many are disgruntled and become the leaders of radical movements." A better course was strengthening Chinese institutions, which also permitted more benefits for the money invested. Gunn calculated, "At the present rate of exchange, two or three [graduates at Chinese institutions] could be paid an adequate stipend and a thousand U.S. dollars could be given for equipment for a cost equal to that of one foreign fellowship." [47]
In his report, Gunn also frowned on sending foreign experts on short assignments to China. He had seen dozens of foreign advisers in China, guiding the Nanking government in financial and economic policy, rural credits, cooperatives, public health, sericulture, land tenure, and many other programs. "It may be rather hazardous to prophesy now what will be the outcome of all their efforts," Gunn wrote, but "indications are none too brilliant." The usual criticisms that Gunn had heard were that the experts stayed too short a time and that their recommendations were "generally along the lines of what has been done in the particular country from which they come." Gunn suggested that experts stay in China for three to five years, so that they could actively participate in the implementation of their recommendations. The College of Agriculture at the University of Nanking was lauded for its wise use of foreign experts, and it led the list of institutions that Gunn recommended for immediate Rockefeller funding of major rural projects. [48]
The total annual cost of a new, rural-centered "China Program" for the foundation would be about $300,000, Gunn estimated. But the Rockefeller trustees were reluctant to begin a new venture when the foundation was undertaking a thorough self-appraisal of all of its programs. Gunn's recommendations were referred to the foundation's ad hoc Committee for Appraisal and Plan, which had been formed to consider the best uses of the foundation's money as if it were starting "with a clean slate." The committee's critical evaluation of previous Rockefeller funding, both in the United States and abroad, paralleled Gunn's evaluation of previous Rockefeller spending in China: too much had been spent on medicine and public health, to the exclusion of other fields. The committee asked, "Is physical health the outstanding need of the world today? Do we best serve the welfare of mankind by devoting a substantial percentage of our contributions to disease?" [ 49]
Previous foundation emphasis on research now also seemed unwise. Instead of paying for the acquisition of more knowledge that would go unutilized, the committee suggested that it might be preferable to support "the better dissemination and the more thorough application of existing knowledge." Gunn's China Program was immediately appealing because it was practical and full of references to agricultural extension and mass educational programs. The committee was searching for countries where "a plastic condition" offered "opportunities for service" not found elsewhere. It wanted to avoid countries that were either too underdeveloped or too developed: "There are countries or areas that are either so backward in development that there is too litttle soil for seed, or relatively so advanced in development that the Foundation could make only a limited contribution." China seemed a perfect candidate for experimentation; combining great need with "wide open opportunity," it was a temptingly "vast laboratory in the social sciences." [50]
The review committee remained cautious in making new funding commitments, however. Gunn had not mentioned how long he thought a China program would be needed, and an open-ended commitment seemed dangerous ("if we embark, we embark for the duration"). The committee was also concerned that China had already claimed its fair share of Rockefeller funds, since the support of the Peking Union Medical College already had drawn the largest total sum in any country outside the United States. Other areas of the globe, such as Central and South America and India, had received virtually nothing. [51]
In December 1934, the foundation's executive board, heeding both Gunn's appeal for a new China program and the review committee's warning not to make an open-ended commitment, authorized $1 million to be spent in China over three years along the lines suggested by Gunn. It was not a large sum, but it conformed with the foundation's interest in getting the most dramatic benefits from the least expenditure of funds. The trustees believed that "the resources of the foundation are significantly large if they are applied over a narrow front, but they
become ineffectual and unimportant if they are widely scattered." A short-term commitment also permitted the foundation to retain its natural advantage over governmental institutions—namely, the freedom "to change its strategy at any moment." [52]
Foundation headquarters reserved the right to grant final approval for the specific projects, but Gunn was sent back to China in early 1935 to head a new Rockefeller Foundation office in Shanghai, where he could refine his recommendations and supervise administration. The moment he returned, however, he found that he was besieged by Chinese institutions who sought foundation grants. He wrote to Mason, the foundation president, "I am taking especial pains to spread around the news that the Foundation's new program is a very modest one and that the funds available are small. This is not easy to do, as the name 'Rockefeller' still inspires hopes of large appropriations." [53]
The College of Agriculture at the University of Nanking, headed now by Chinese administrators, was especially forceful in pressing its requests on Gunn. However, he refused to be stampeded and took a dim view of their use of the sentimental argument that the school had been "established largely by Americans with American money." That fact, Gunn felt, was irrelevant. The important question was whether Nanking—or agricultural colleges at any other mission college, such as the admittedly "pitiful case" of Groff's college at Canton Christian, recently renamed Lingnan University (see chap. 4)—could survive financially in the future. All had experienced deep cuts in funding from home mission boards squeezed by the Depression. Gunn reported to New York, "Mission colleges have either got to produce some new money or get out of the game." Sentimentality could not be permitted: "We will be completely sunk if we allow our sympathies with some of these foreign institutions to go to the extent of appropriating sums of money which will not in all probability give us the best return in terms of our main objective." [54]
Gunn was much more interested in helping Chinese institutions that were independent of other foreign funding, and these included both Southeastern—recently renamed National Central University—and the National Agricultural Research Bureau. Southeastern/National Central could not shake its checkered political history, but the NARB, being so new, was unburdened with a troubled past. Indeed, the NARB seemed a perfect candidate to support: it was a Chinese-staffed institution, invulnerable to the nationalistic criticism that had tarred with the taint of imperialism those agricultural colleges, like Nanking, that were filled with foreigners. Moreover, the NARB was bypassing the brewing land-reform controversy by offering a distinctly nonrevolutionary answer to China's rural problems: technically achieved improvements in crop yields.
With three outstanding agricultural institutions in Nanjing, Gunn was aggravated to see that the University of Nanking's College of Agriculture was unwilling to work with the other two. "I have a strong impression," he reported,
"that some of the Nanking University crowd who apparently are not very keen toward cooperating with the Government would like to see us finance their institution so that they could go ahead without any particular relationship to the National Central University Agricultural College or to the National Agricultural Research Bureau." Gunn decided that the best thing the Rockefeller Foundation could do in Nanjing was to force the three institutions to work together. [55]
In 1935, the first year of its new China Program, the Rockefeller Foundation treated the three Nanjing institutions generously: the NARB received $34,400; National Central, $34,600; and Nanking, which had the best programs in the country, was given $5,500 and a large sum, 72,000 yuan (about US $30,000), in local currency, despite Gunn's reluctance to help a mission school. Large grants were also given to James Yen's "rural reconstruction" project at Dingxian, Hebei, and to rural programs at Nankai and Yenching universities. The more a Chinese institution seemed to be independent and self-contained, the more eagerly the foundation offered grants. Yen's program of education and health projects was attractive, among other reasons, because it seemed to be supported solely by the local population, which offered to the Rockefeller Foundation the promise that its programs could be "adopted elsewhere without the use of funds other than those normally available." [56]
The foundation grants to the NARB and the two Nanjing agricultural colleges came only after "prolonged discussions" with all three institutions about their willingness to work more closely with each other. Gunn was pleased that he had convinced them of "the importance of team play" in agricultural training and research, but the agreements Gunn reached with them did not provide for their working cooperatively, only for their staying out of each other's domain. The NARB was given responsibility for insect control; National Central, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine; and Nanking, agricultural economics. [57]
Most of the time, Gunn was a shrewd observer who had little patience for the inflated claims of accomplishment that issued regularly from all Chinese offices in the Nationalist period. "The National Government," Gunn reported to New York, "for political reasons finds it necessary to carry on activities in many places and over wide areas." Gunn called this a "quantitative" approach to rural reconstruction, launching efforts in many directions "with generally inferior results." The Rockefeller Foundation's China Program, he hoped, would show the government the importance of a "qualitative" approach. Gunn was not naive and hardly believed that all components of his China Program were doing well. National Central had few accomplishments to show for its grant to develop animal husbandry programs, and the school came to lead Gunn's list of disappointments. By 1937, Gunn would candidly report to New York that at National Central, "the results obtained through our aid have been only mediocre." [58]
The NARB, however, enjoyed immunity from Gunn's critical scrutiny. With
the pride of American agricultural colleges, Shen Zonghan, as a leading figure, the NARB had special appeal, and its reports were granted more than the usual credibility. Shen wrote to Gunn of the sprayers and dusters built in the NARB's new machine shop, the new insecticides developed in the laboratory, and the extension of insect control "on a national basis," all made possible by the "far sighted promotion" of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gunn, ignoring the fact that such "reports" contained no hint of any problems and were intended more to ensure grant renewal than to describe actual experiences, approvingly passed them on to New York. [59]
The foundation trustees in New York were duly impressed. The NARB was praised for its good staff, its dozen major departments, and the long list of publications to its credit though it had existed only a few years. After one year of Rockefeller Foundation support, the insect control program appeared to be doing quite well: photographs sent from Nanjing showed an entomology laboratory, a field being sprayed with an oil emulsion to control cotton aphids, and most impressive of all, uniformed Chinese soldiers ("under direction of the Bureau's entomologists") working peacefully in a campaign to control the pine caterpillar. The Rockefeller Foundation renewed its grant to the NARB for a second year. [60]
In 1937, more good news came in, with a report from Shen telling of "very successful results." Newly established training programs and printed pamphlets took insect control research at the NARB out to the farmers; extension work, in fact, was declared to be "relatively easy to do" since farmers themselves had increasingly realized the value of insect control. And Shen reported that the NARB's new sprayers and dusters had been "distributed over almost all the country." Another NARB official claimed that over $5 million in crop losses had been averted by the work accomplished to date. The trustees in New York were pleased, noting that the China programs "were essentially of Chinese conception" and that the foundation's contribution was simply to assist "Chinese institutions and workers who are spending their lives in search of adequate answers to the many complex problems which exist. Credit for the resulting accomplishment belongs to the Chinese." The NARB insect control program received funding for a third year. [61]
In early 1937, Gunn declared the Rockefeller Foundation's support of the NARB to be one of the "most gratifying" activities in the China program, still believing the sunny picture that Shen drew for him. But Gunn and Shen were deceiving both themselves and the Rockefeller Foundation. An insect control program was indeed critically important to Chinese agriculture—one conservative estimate put pest and disease losses at 10 to 20 percent of China's crops—and the insecticides that the NARB worked on were, technically speaking, satisfactory. [ 62] But the program itself was an utter failure. The problem was the same one that held back the effectiveness of the NARB in particular and of American-inspired tech-
nical improvements in general: unsuccessful extension of the new knowledge and techniques to the farmers. The talk of an insect control program that was "popularized on a national scale" was premature. The program not only failed in its home province, Jiangsu, but also in its home county, Jiangning.
This lack of success was especially remarkable because Jiangning offered the most favorable conditions for agricultural extension in the entire country. Not only was it militarily secure and its administration free from the external disruptions posed by the Chinese Communists or the Japanese elsewhere but, by virtue of its location, it was host to the nation's capital of Nanjing and received extraordinary development aid from both the national and provincial governments. Designated a privileged "Self-government Experimental County" in 1933, Jiangning was placed under the control of the Central Political Academy. More than any other county given "experimental" status, Jiangning was intended by the Nationalists to be the showcase of rural reconstruction for the entire nation. Its special status also brought tax remittances and subsidies. [63]
Yet even in the most ideal environment in Republican China, insect control was unsuccessful. First, Jiangning's most serious pest problem, locusts, originated elsewhere, in the bogs and swamps around Hongze Lake and the Huai Basin. Without provincial cooperation and regional programs to address the locust problem, a single county, no matter how favored with special designations and funds, remained vulnerable to devastating locust attacks, against which local remedial measures could do little. Jiangning farmers did the best they could to destroy the pests as soon as they alighted in their fields, bagging them or trying innovative forms of combat (once, a battalion of 5,000 ducks was deployed, when it was discovered that they could gobble more than half their weight in locusts each day). When desperate, the farmers resorted to burning their crops. [64]
Unfortunately, the county leadership of Jiangning did not lend much assistance to the NARB and other agencies interested in tackling the problem of insect control. A chronic problem was the indifference of government personnel to rural problems. Before Jiangning received its special designation, one insect control worker complained, "According to our experiences in the past, we feel that the most difficult thing about locust control is not the locusts themselves but the human problem. The officials in each locality generally do not understand the locust control program nor do they work hard on it." The locust control workers, he said, could not be successful without support ("You can't clap with just one hand"), and they did not receive it from their lay colleagues in the government. Even after Jiangning became an "experimental" county, the problem persisted. [ 65]
Despite the constant talk of "rural reconstruction," the new Jiangning administration was almost as indifferent to the countryside as the old had been, and it spent its money in exactly the same ways as its neighbors—on police, roads, education, and administrative expenses. The Jiangning "experiment" was innovative in one respect: it was the most top-heavy, expensive county administration
in the province, perhaps in the country. Its farmers had little reason to rejoice about the county's special status; the annual budgeted amount for administrative expenditures outran the amount earmarked for agricultural improvement by a ratio of eleven to one. The funding for the Nationalists' internal party business alone was almost four times more than the government agricultural budget. When the new county administration rejected the offices it had inherited and built a palatial office building instead, a magazine editorial politely asked whether such expenditures, used for the material comfort of government officials in the midst of a countryside suffering from economic depression and bankruptcy, might not "give rise to an unfavorable impression" among the county's residents. [66]
The NARB could not escape the stigma of association with a government that on all levels—national, provincial, county, and local—seemed callously unconcerned with the needs of farmers. When the insect control workers ventured out of the laboratory and into the field, their new sprayers and insecticides in hand, farmers were unimpressed. Experience had taught them that the arrival of government representatives was usually a harbinger of trouble, and even the best-intentioned insect control workers were unable to dispel the farmers' distrust. In an article titled "Look, What Can Be Done?" (Nikan zenme ban?), a Nanking graduate described how the farmers' instinctive misgivings were justified. The writer had been assigned to a pest-control work team that had gone from village to village introducing new control measures, and each village that the team visited insisted on sending guards to accompany them to the next stop. He had been mystified as to why these temporary guards always seemed so eager to volunteer for duty, until he discovered what had been happening. Upon arrival at each destination, the "volunteers" deposited the agriculturalists into the good hands of the villagers and then went off on their own, brandishing the weapons they had obtained for their temporary assignment and robbing whomever they encountered. Strictly speaking, these brigands were neighboring villagers, not government employees, but the victimized farmers could scarcely ignore the fact that the pest control team had brought the problem along with them. [67]
Even when a pest control team was able to enter a village without provoking a hostile reaction, it faced entrenched educational problems that could not be changed by the short visit of a few college-educated agriculturalists. The very best insecticides and sprayers, however perfectly they worked in tests on the NARB campus, had to be accepted by farmers whose formal educational background was minimal and whose understanding of science was often scanty. Farmers viewed the crop pests or blight as a sign of displeasure from Heaven; agriculturalists complained that villagers lit incense and prayed for relief instead of taking action to help contain the problem. In some places, locusts were viewed as a kind of angel, and any farmers who wanted to implement control measures were prohibited from doing so by their more religious neighbors. [68]
The superstitions about pests could only be circumvented, it seemed, by
playing upon other superstitions. A pest control worker in Jiangning stuck a large wooden sign into the fields of all farmers who had not implemented field cleaning measures required for controlling rice-stem borers. The signs' characters announced, "This Field's Rice Stalks Must Be Removed Within Three Days," and they were fairly effective in prodding landowners to clean their fields. The deadline on the sign was not as important as the physical presence of the sign itself, which was considered an extremely inauspicious omen. To get the sign removed, the farmers were willing to comply with the pest control regulations. [69]
The farmers' low educational level also hampered effective use of the insecticides and applicators that the NARB staff tried to distribute. One extension worker, Chuan Shengfa, who tried insecticide extension work among vegetable growers in Jiangning, reported to his professional colleagues that farmers were "extremely stupid." Chuan complained, "You explain carefully to them how to prevent and control pests, but they are unable to ever remember." The insecticide base that Chuan tried to introduce had to be diluted with five measures of boiling water, followed by twenty measures of cold. But when on their own, Chuan reported, farmers never added boiling water, only warm (undoubtedly less a problem of poor memory, as Chuan believed, than one of high fuel costs and simple economics). Moreover, the farmers often tried to stretch the insecticide base by diluting it with far more than the recommended amount of water, leading to poor results and later complaints that the insecticide they had used was worthless. [70]
The primary control campaign that the NARB attempted to launch in Jiangning was directed at the rice-stem borer, a pest with a voracious appetite that annually destroyed a considerable portion of the county's rice crop. The bureau printed and distributed leaflets that explained how borer eggs lay dormant in the rice stalks that were customarily left on the fields during winter; destruction of the stalks, the leaflets pointed out, would lead to destruction of the pest. The bureau held promotional meetings in every district in the county and set deadlines for having fields cleared. Farmers could remove the stalks by burning them or by pulling them up and making compost piles sealed with river mud, but whatever method was used, no stalks could be left uncovered on the ground. [71]
"Destroying rice-stem borers is the responsibility of every farmer," residents were told in the campaign's leaflet. "If everyone does not participate, if some do but some do not, then the pests in the fields of those who did not comply will spread to the others." The program attempted simultaneously to coerce and persuade all of the county's farmers into meeting the stipulated deadlines. Farmers who did not comply were to be subject to arrest; those who did were eligible for commendation. The thirty-five most diligent farmers in the county were to be awarded a certificate of merit, and the very best among them were to receive an inscribed plaque to be presented personally by the head of Jiangning County. [72]
Despite all the publicity and arrangements, the campaign flopped. To avoid
embarrassment for the NARB in its quest for additional funds from America, Shen never sent Gunn and the Rockefeller Foundation the NARB's report of how poorly its campaign fared. The NARB estimated that in only one district out of seven was a majority of rice stalks properly destroyed; no estimates were ventured for two districts; and in one, a mere 1.40% of the rice stalks was reported to have been removed. Since nothing less than complete compliance in all the districts was necessary to have any effect, the NARB campaign was a total failure. [ 73]
The NARB then attempted to mobilize farmers for rice-stem borer control in a neighboring county—an attempt that ended the same way. Yet it should not have been a surprise that the farmers remained uninterested and would not clear their fields. Mobilization of the countryside could not be accomplished by assigning a handful of experts to launch a population of several hundred thousand on a novel enterprise. In one case, four staff members—three of whom were apt to spend their time in the county seat rather than in the field—were assigned to a county with a population of more than four hundred. The agricultural experts working for the Nationalist government tried to organize the masses in the countryside, but they did not have the organizational structure, let alone the simple credibility, to make their efforts successful. [74]
The abysmal failure of its pest control campaigns led the NARB staff to debate internally different strategies for the future. One senior staff member, Wu Fuzhen, argued that the use of force was the only way to secure compliance. Furious that farmers had tried to cheat inspectors by piling conspicuous stacks of rice stalks along the side of roads while leaving stalks on their fields, Wu called for stricter inspections and a novel measure: closing all teahouses and wine shops during future campaigns. Wu believed that the farmers were indolent and unco-operative with the NARB during the winter months because of their patronage of the shops. Conceding that the closure of all drinking establishments would be controversial, he argued that the action would "create the appropriately tense atmosphere of an emergency situation" and would also disrupt the spread of news in the countryside, thus reducing "obstructionism" caused by gossip and rumors. [75]
Others agreed that administrative muscle needed to be applied, but NARB staff member Lü Jinluo proposed a more innovative approach. "The period of implementation should be shortened," Lü said, "and everyone—from the county head down, including bureau chiefs, department chiefs, district heads, elementary school teachers, and the entire county's police force—all should be mobilized to create together a very pressing atmosphere." Lü felt that if all levels of government displayed official commitment, any farmer who did not comply could justifiably be dealt with severely. In the face of dramatic government mobilization, "the farmers will not dare to sit around staring at each other and will implement the measures on time." Experience had taught Lü that insect control would never be successful if it relied solely on "technical personnel," such as those dispatched by the NARB, as a substitute for active involvement by the entire government establishment. [76]
The NARB had no opportunity, however, to retry an insect control campaign, either in the "model" county of Jiangning or elsewhere in eastern China, because the outbreak of war with Japan in July 1937 brought its agricultural improvement programs to a halt. Many staff left for west China, and in August, Shen Zonghan put his family on a Yangzi riverboat bound for safety in the interior. Shen and other staff members who remained behind in Nanjing had to abandon their research and work on emergency food plans. By October, the deterioration in the military situation forced further evacuations, and Shen prepared to leave, reluctantly closing a happy period in his life. Touring the empty NARB campus one last time, Shen recalled how the fallow land purchased just four years before had been transformed into neatly arranged experimental fields for rice, wheat, cotton, and other crops, with six laboratory and administrative buildings built and equipped with the best research equipment in the country. In Shen's mind, the NARB had also become the national model for conducting agricultural research and encouraging work for the public good rather than for individual aggrandizement. Now the campus, once home for more than a hundred staff members, stood empty. Shen said good-bye to his books, gave the keys to his Ford to a friend who was staying behind, and took his two pieces of luggage down to the tumultuous scene at the river wharf, to fight through the crowds for his reserved place aboard a steamer headed up the Yangzi. [ 77]
Rockefeller representative Selskar Gunn, who was in Shanghai, was forced to flee even more hurriedly; he and his wife had to leave behind all their personal possessions to obtain passage on a steamer sailing for Java. The dream of having the Chinese themselves continue the foundation's China Program was ruined by the war. Gunn wrote to the New York office, "I have never felt so futile in my whole life." As the postevacuation situation stabilized and the Nanjing universities, the NARB, and other beneficiaries of the foundation's grants set up wartime operations in west China, the foundation continued to extend emergency grants for a few more years. But the Rockefeller Foundation did not like renewing grants for emergency purposes and terminated its ties as soon as it could without appearing to be callous toward victims of war. [78]
When Shen and Gunn had to abandon their work in 1937, a larger experiment, the peacetime application of American methods to Chinese agricultural problems, was brought to a close. Nationalist officials and sympathizers would later assert, over and over, that the development efforts of their "Nanking decade" would have succeeded had they not been interrupted prematurely by the war. But the agricultural programs of the government showpiece, the NARB, designed by Shen and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, were not on the verge of success when cut short in 1937. The foundation's financial support was due to expire that year and was to be wholly assumed by the Chinese; the intrusion of the war actually extended Rockefeller funding beyond its scheduled termination. If the
Japanese had not invaded and forced the evacuation of the NARB, it is questionable that it would have accomplished much on its own.
Shen was both well and poorly served by his earlier experience in the United States. Trained to be a research scientist, he could draw upon his graduate education and research experience in America to help guide rapid development of plant breeding programs on the NARB campus. But Shen was poorly equipped to handle the world of human affairs that lay beyond his orderly experimental fields. As the insect control program showed, it was easier to deal with locusts themselves than with farmers, who for a variety of reasons did not want to cooperate with the experts. For both the Chinese and the Americans who were interested in improving Chinese agriculture, it was comparatively easy to train a Shen Zonghan in the United States and send him back to China to organize a model research laboratory. Building organized structures that would extend improvements from the experimental field or laboratory to the populace at large was a far less simple task.
Shen's colleague, Lü Jinluo, envisaged a government that was mobilized from top to bottom for agricultural improvement campaigns, but it was an idea that sprang from Chinese conditions, not American experiences. Shen himself overcame the limitations of his originally narrow, technical approach to agricultural improvement and developed an interest in land reforms and farmer cooperatives. But the change in his thinking came only after he was driven from his protected sanctuary in Nanjing and had worked as an agricultural planner for the Nationalist government during the difficult years of the war against Japan and of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists.
Gunn did not survive the war, but future events in China would not have surprised him. Early in 1937, before the Japanese invasion, he prepared a candid assessment of the Nationalists' weaknesses. Chiang Kai-shek's New Life Movement seemed to Gunn to be "tending towards a Fascistic state with the accompanying regimentation of the population and a good deal of lip service for National Reconstruction" Democratic measures had been discussed but had yet to be implemented. Gunn wondered, "Perhaps China is not ripe for such form of government." [ 79]
Rural China, Gunn realized, remained poorly understood by most foreigners: "Western people in China are almost exclusively in contact with 'Western' Chinese. They may live in China years without realizing that despite the display of Nanking and the large cities where the 'Western' Chinese are to be found, there exist the 'Chinese' Chinese who make up the backbone, power, and authority of the large part of China, including the entire rural regions where 85 percent of the people live." To Gunn, the Westernized Chinese stood for technical progress but were stymied by the conservative "landlord, gentry, and usurer group," who did not want to increase the purchasing power of the farmers. "A debt-free rural popula-
tion," Gunn wrote, "would be to them a great disaster." But maintenance of the status quo "plays into the hands of the Communists." [80]
When Gunn concurred in 1937 with those who had warned Chiang that "it will be necessary to outdo the Communists and 'go them one better,'" his attitude signaled an important change in the history of American technical assistance abroad. Before that time, Americans had gone to China to try to improve Chinese agriculture for a number of reasons, combining noble impulses with the mundane. Most shared a belief that even if the content of the agricultural expertise they brought from home did not apply to conditions in China, an undefined American style of work was superior to all others and would find ready acceptance. Still, the pride taken in American ways fell far short of constituting a coherent ideology, and when Americans first confronted Communists in China in the 1920s, their inclination was not to fight for hearts and minds but simply to leave. By the eve of the Second World War, the essentially private initiative behind the early American programs to aid Chinese agriculture was about to disappear. Agricultural improvement programs for the developing countries of the postwar period would become, first and foremost, a government instrument in an ideological battle, and the early American experiences in China would be visible only through the intervening haze of the Cold War.