674. North China and Cen tral China have less rainfall than South China and East China. Peking has a climate almost exactly like that of Omaha, Nebraska. In the sections of smaller rainfall, millions of people either do not know what rice is, or they regard it as a luxury. The farms there are planted in winter to wheat and barley. and in summer to soy beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, and millet, a grain that looks something like Kafir corn. Peanuts, a new crop for China, are also grown here. About 1895 an American missionary gave a quart of seed to some farmers in Shantung. The nuts grew well and quickly became an important crop in that province. The peanut industry is rapidly increasing in importance in China and Japan, as well as in the United States and Africa. The province of Shan tung, the peninsula between the Gulf of Pechili and the Yellow Sea, alone produces enough peanuts each year to make five pounds for every person in the United States. Many of them are sent to this country.
675. Fuel and wood.—This land has had so many people for so long a time that very little forest is left. Houses are made of brick, with tile roofs and dirt floors. The Chinese have learned how to heat their houses with but little fuel. They have a very economical kind of stove called a kang. This is a wide, brick platform built along one side of the room and kept warm by a very tiny fire underneath. On the warm platform the people sit by day and sleep at night. The kang is often heated by burning straw, corn stalks, or trimmings of fruit trees, and the ashes are carefully saved for fertilizer. A long time ago the Chinese invented a kind of fireless cooker.
To get wood the Chinese, like the Japanese, grow the bamboo tree as they do any other crop. (Sec. 655.) This plant, which grows with great rapidity, has a strong, hollow, jointed stalk, which the people, like the Jap anese, have learned to use in numberless ways.
676. Western ideas.—About a hundred years ago there began for the people of Europe and America a period of time which may be called the Age of Science. Until that time we had nothing that China wanted, and her idea about wanting to be left alone was quite right. But now, like the Japanese, the Chinese begin to see that we have things that they want—new knowledge, new ma chines, new ways of doing things—so China has changed her attitude towards other nations. She is now sending her young men to the universities of America and Europe; she hires foreigners to come and teach in the Chinese colleges; she is starting schools to teach her own people the new knowledge.
Not far from Shanghai there is even a college to teach tea-growing. The Chinese govern ment has adopted a new alphabet of thirty six letters to take the place of the Chinese writing, which has thousands of word signs. With this new alphabet the type writer can be used, and a new school has been started at Peking to train teachers in the new way of writing.
Many of the people are cutting off the long queue, or plait of hair, sometimes called a pigtail. They are even beginning to give up their native style of clothes for the less com fortable and less satisfactory kind that we wear.
677. Western are replacing the junks on her rivers and canals. Automobile roads are beginning to replace the old trails where men trundled wheel barrows and donkeys carried packs. Tele graph lines and new railroads are being built. Some Chinese farmers are changing from the old, old plan of growing nearly everything needed on each little farm. Instead, some farmers now grow only two or three things and send most of what they raise to market. Factories are being built and equipped with European and American machines. There are even large modern iron works at Hankow on the Yangtze which sometimes send iron to San Francisco.
678. Government and hav ing been an empire for thousands of years, China has become a republic in name at least. It is a misfortune that China has as yet a very poor government. The Peking government has little power. In some of the provinces the people are ruled entirely by military usurpers, and sometimes there is a rival government at Canton.
After despising the soldier for centuries, China is, unfortunately, beginning to build, train, and equip an army, like the armies of Europe and America. She did this only after she had seen Russia take a part of Manchuria from her, Japan take Formosa, England take Wei-hai-wei and Hongkong, Germany take Shantung, and France take a corner of South China. If China should become organized and armed as Japan is, she might be much the most powerful military nation in the world. The United States has taken nothing from China, but has helped her all she could, and is regarded as her great friend. It is not only a duty of decency, but it is to the best interest of the people of the United States to see to it that China is so treated that she shall not become a militaristic nation.