To the Editors:
The two articles by Nick Eberstadt that have already appeared (NYR, April 5 and April 19) offer a welcome cautionary look at the rosy depictions of the People’s Republic of China which have blossomed with multilateral manuring by Dick and Henry and Jimmy and Zbig. Eberstadt, however, paints his picture too black through the improper use of statistical data that is surprising in a population specialist.
I cite only one of many examples: on page 44 (April 19) he discusses the proportion of women in China’s colleges, estimating this at between 49 and 40 percent of the total college attendance. At the higher figure, he says, “China would be similar to countries like Swaziland, Kuwait, Brazil, Jamaica, and the Philippines….” At the lower, “China is on a par with Argentina and Mongolia, and behind such countries as Lesotho, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, and Madagascar.”
Eberstadt surely must know that the comparisons must take into account the social structures, populations, and economies of the various countries. A country in which, say, only 1 percent of the college age spectrum—and that vastly different in income from the rest—attends college presents a very different case from one in which even only 10 or 20 percent—but from a more homogeneous social and economic mix—go to college.
Harry Grundfest
College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University
New York City
To the Editors:
Americans have a grand passion for averages even though, when pressed, they will readily admit that averages can be very misleading. The Chinese for whatever reason seem less afflicted by this obsession. Perhaps, some first-hand observations of conditions in China would lessen Dr. Eberstadt’s dependence upon dubious averages.
To cite one example, he cites a figure of 2100 calories as the average daily intake of the Chinese, whose numbers he seems to estimate at about 900 million. This figure, as he notes, is taken from the Joint Economic Report, “Chinese Economy Post-Mao,” 95th Congress, Second Session. A look at the source should convince any careful researcher, however, that the figure is almost meaningless; it is not based upon actual consumption but on food rationing allotments and, since many foods are not rationed in China, the result tells more about the rationing of grains and oil than about the daily diet of adult Chinese. Even here, however, one should be wary: the Joint Economic Report says that 15 to 20 kilograms of grain are provided per adult in the ration system but, in computing its figure of 2100 calories, it bases itself on the lowest level, 15 kilograms, and not the highest level of 20 kilograms, a difference of one-third. The Joint Economic Report airily assures credulous readers, “Per capita food consumption levels in China appear on the average to have changed little since the 1950s” and while Dr. Eberstadt seems to accept this assumption, many Chinese have told me otherwise and, since I was in China during the three bad years of drought, 1959-1961, I can understand why the Chinese would smile broadly at the assumption on an “average” that has remained constant for nearly thirty years.
At another point, Dr. Eberstadt attributes to China a “GNP per capita of about $300.” So far as I know, the Chinese do not calculate any GNP. Perhaps they do not share our ardor for this much-abused index of well-being, which can be propelled upwards by the forced buying that follows widespread destruction from fire, earthquakes, etc.
To be sure, China, as a developing country, has many problems to solve. It is not an easy task to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical services for a people of nearly a billion in number. But I doubt that 95 percent of the Chinese would seriously consider Dr. Eberstadt’s suggestion that they “abandon the socialist experiment.” An old Chinese said to me, “We know something about your capitalist freedom—the freedom to be unemployed, the freedom to go hungry, the freedom to go broke. We want socialist freedom.”
Charles J. Coe
Brooklyn, New York
To the Editors:
Despite a variety of sources and a reasonable amount of statistics, Nick Eberstadt’s article on China does more to obscure than deal with the problem of China and the lives of its people. The comparisons to Taiwan and South Korea—offered by the author as a yardstick—appear meaningless. Do the governments of those two nations, blessed with some amount of foreign aid and a manufacturing/industrial sector that brings in seemingly significant amounts of foreign capital, face the same problems in feeding and caring for their people as the rulers of the People’s Republic? Jumping around within provinces in India or comparing India and China without sound statistical yardsticks does little to further understanding of the problem. After reading the article it is difficult to tell what the problem and possible solution is.
Mr. Eberstadt would have performed a far greater service had he chosen to marshall his knowledge differently. Given the varying quality of Chinese agricultural land, what are reasonable per yields for crops—within broadly defined regions and for the nation as a whole? How does potential yield per acre in China compare with other nations—as India—within the same statistical grouping? What are good estimates for China’s real yields per acre? How close does Chinese agricultural yields approach potential yields? Given the cost of modern American farming practices (fertilizers, seeds, machinery, etc.), how would the cost of modern techniques compare with the possible increased yield? If the Chinese are producing at near 100 percent theoretical yield then no effort of the regime—or any regime—would bring significant results. It may be that China continues to have the same problem it has had since the Ch’ing (as Elvin points out in The Pattern of the Chinese Past), there are too many people and too little land. If Chinese agriculture is efficient and such other nations as Indonesia or India is not (given potential yield per acre), then few comparisons between these nations are helpful. I do not know the answers but given all the work Mr. Eberstadt has done, surely the figures must be at his hand. Is the solution to China’s problem—if there is one—development of a strong export market to earn foreign currency, to buy foreign techniques, to purchase foreign grain because China cannot increase total agricultural yield (though possibly cutting down on cotton to increase rice or similar tradeoffs)? Calorie counts are important; how does Chinese caloric intake given their size and bone structure compare with other peoples’ caloric intake and body structure? What is the significance of the heavy reliance on foodgrains for calories in China? Does it mean the Chinese are freer of the problems our society has owing to its high intake of animal protein and fat? Is there a nutritional difference between forms of protein? Is it simply a boredom with the sorts of food they eat? Would the Chinese be better off having fewer pigs and eating the grain the pigs consume?
The questions are many and the task before Mr. Eberstadt is great. Certainly he faces a near-impossible task attempting to provide some ideas about life expectancy, infant mortality, birth and death rates. When he turns to agriculture surely he could have been more rigorous in his method and allow us clearer insight into the problems of Chinese agriculture. Even if Mao’s boast that the Chinese eat well is not true, are they eating as well as can be expected with their vast population and limited agricultural land base?
Charles M. Dobbs
Department of History
Metropolitan State College
Denver, Colorado
To the Editors:
In his discussion of economic equality in Chinese villages (NYR, May 3), Nick Eberstadt misses the central point in my article, which he cites and blithely dismisses for having data from only six cases (though he accepts a portion of a somewhat contrary argument made by Professor Martin Whyte on the basis of one case). That point is quite simple: the size of the gap between highest and lowest incomes, which Mr. Ebertstadt, along with many others, uses as his main measure of inequality can be very deceptive because it says nothing about how many people are at or near the extremes and how many are grouped in the middle. In the villages I studied, the poorest 40 percent of the population received an average of 25 percent of the collective income, and the middle 60 percent received 57 percent, nearly their theoretically equal share. While I have not seen good data on intra-village distributions for other countries, it is difficult to imagine distributions too much more equal than these.
Mr. Eberstadt also forgets that in Chinese villages land, tools, draught animals, and other productive resources are collectively owned. This means that economic inequalities among individuals in a village stem not from inequalities in ownership, but primarily from the fact that at any given time families differ in the number of workers relative to the number of people to be supported. But these “hand-mouth ratios” tend to even out over the family’s life cycle, since mouths do usually grow into hands. In China, then, lifetime incomes are probably much more evenly distributed than in countries where productive resources are privately and unequally owned, even though statistical measures of the magnitude of inequality in any one year may be similar. Perhaps more important, this tendency of income inequalities to even out over a lifetime clearly affects the subjective importance which Chinese peasants attach to them. A cadre interviewed in China in 1977, echoing statements made by several others, said that a very poor family in her village was not worried about a large debt it had accumulated, because “when it reverses its position (fanshen) it will be a family to be reckoned with.”
Marc Blecher
Department of Government
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
To the Editors:
In his argument that China’s agriculture shows declining factor productivity, Eberstadt cites India as an example of improved efficiency. However, Eberstadt could not have used Mellor’s data to show that India’s agriculture is increasingly efficient, because Mellor’s analysis is based on the assumption of constant returns to fertilizer. (See Mellor’s New Economics of Growth, p. 311.) The chart Eberstadt refers to shows that fertilizer has played an increasingly important role in India’s agriculture, not because it is used with increasing efficiency, but because it is used in increasing quantities. My attempts to do the type of comparisons suggested by Eberstadt indicate that fertilizer may be used more efficiently in China than in India, and that the efficiency may be increasing in China while decreasing in India. In both countries, however, continued agricultural growth will require massive investments.
The attempts to demonstrate declining agricultural efficiency in China are flawed by the inability to count the myriad “outputs” of the rural economy. They emphasize grain, but little is known about fruits, vegetables, poultry, pork, agriculture, cottage industry, and the value of housing and infrastructure, which have not been adequately surveyed in China, much less reported. Moreover, how should improved stability of yield, which is more important than growth in avoiding catastrophic famine, be valued?
