The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Illinois Farmers Visit China

ROBERT MacNEIL: This little piggy recently went to China. His name is Big Jim, and he`s a prize boar. Big Jim was accompanied by a delegation of American farm experts. After two weeks of studying Chinese farming the delegation came home. Big Jim stayed behind to give the Chinese his technical assistance.

Good evening. A pig, even one as prepossessing as Big Jim, may seem an odd goodwill ambassador; but for the People`s Republic of China, struggling to feed some 900 million people, he may be just the thing. China now appears to be in the market for farm products. They`ve just started buying our wheat again after a pause of four years. They`re also looking for agricultural machinery and know-how. Such exports are now a very important factor for the United states, desperate to solve its trade imbalance. But what the Chinese do with their agriculture may also have great bearing on how rapidly this huge nation develops as a world economic power. Tonight we get an intimate look at the state of China`s food production from the Illinois delegation that accompanied Big Jim. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: No relation to the other Jim, Robin. The Illinois group and their Jim went to China in mid-March and returned in early April. They went first to the capital city of Peking for a round of official meetings with those Chinese officials who decide what kinds of things China buys and from whom; and then it was north to the Kirin province and Changchun; from there to Shanghai and the surrounding countryside; and finally to Canton, site of the Canton Trade Fair and miles and miles of rice paddies.

The leader of the Illinois delegation was Congressman Paul Findley, an Illinois Republican who serves on the House Agriculture Committee. Congressman, whose idea was this trip, Illinois` or China`s?

Rep. PAUL FINDLEY: Illinois`, definitely. Our state has done a lot in trade development in Europe and Japan, and Governor Thompson and I talked about the desirability of a trade mission to the People`s Republic, recognizing that that might be one of the great frontiers of trade development yet untouched.

LEHRER: All right. And how was it arranged? Was that difficult?

FINDLEY: Well, I had been to China before; I had cultivated a friendship with the mission in Washington, D.C. And I wrote to them asking for clearance, and it came through. Unfortunately, it came at a time when the Governor couldn`t accompany the mission, but he asked me to serve as chairman.

LEHRER: I see. What was the express purpose? Was it to find new places to sell Illinois agriculture products -- was that solely the mission, or was there another purpose, too?

FINDLEY: No, we know that we aren`t going to get big business on the first call. The basic purpose was to establish better relations with China. I`ve been long committed to normalization; this is well-known in the Chinese liaison office in D.C. I felt that development of normal relations would lead to the development of trade, and I`m sure it will. And I was very gratified on this trip to find out that the Chinese have an eagerness for our agricultural technology -- so much so that they welcome it even in the absence of normal relations.

LEHRER: As you say, this was your second trip to China. When was the first trip?

FINDLEY: 1975, just a little less than three years ago.

LEHRER: Any marked changes, or was it still the same China?

FINDLEY: Well, I think people are perhaps a little more relaxed now. The government itself has made several very fundamental changes; the biggest, I think, is a decision to look to foreign countries for technology. Prior to that they were bent on self-sufficiency even to the extent of not accepting high technology agricultural developments such as we have in the State of Illinois. Now they`re eager to learn from the outside world, to invite enterprises in, to use these enterprises in their own ambitious development program.

LEHRER: All right. Congressman, I think I should be complimented for the fact that I did not pick up on the fact that the Governor of Illinois also goes by the name of Big Jim sometimes.

FINDLEY: He feels highly complimented to have a namesake in Peking.

LEHRER: Okay. Now let`s go into the trip in more detail. One of the members of the delegation who took many of the pictures we`re using tonight is with Robin in New York. Robin?

MacNEIL: Most of the Illinois delegation took cameras with them to China, but one man was filming for his own TV program and for the MacNeil/Lehrer Report. He is Orion Samuelson, farm news editor for WGN-TV and Radio in Chicago. He`s the host and producer of U.S. Farm Report, a television program syndicated on seventy-five stations. The only camera Orion was allowed to take in was a Super-8. Why was that?

ORION SAMUELSON: Well, from what we could determine, a few years ago the Italian producer Marcello Mastroianni took a sixteen millimeter camera crew into China, came out with a production that was not too complimentary, and it`s been difficult ever since to take a sixteen millimeter camera in.

MacNEIL: I see. And apart from that, did you have any difficulty in filming?

SAMUELSON: Not really. They were curious as to what I would do with the film when I came back to the United States; and the-only restrictions that were placed on me -- on everybody -- is that there would be no cameras and no binoculars in airports, in airplanes. And those were the only restrictions.

MacNEIL: Well, the first real country, as Jim said, that you saw was in northern China, in Kirin province, near the city of Changchun. Let`s look at the film that you shot on the agricultural commune there.

SAMUELSON: This is an area, Robin, that would be comparable to the Canadian-American border, and so it was rather chilly as we traveled to this part of China and had the opportunity to visit a people`s commune and really get our first look at agriculture as it`s practiced there. And at this particular commune they produced hogs and they produced other crops, but the hog is the major livestock enterprise in China. And the hog as such is used a little bit differently than we tend to use it here. We were provided excellent transportation. They produce reindeer, not for the meat, but they harvest the horns as an aphrodisiac for men in China. And they also, on this particular commune, produced fur-bearing animals -- not too many of them, but we did have an opportunity to see them.

They use everything in China; here people were out cutting the dead corn stalks to use as fuel for fire and for cooking and for heating. And in this part of China, as I mentioned, it was cool enough, they do need it; and yet in March they`re producing vegetables, and they do it under plastic. And because of transportation difficulties in China, it`s tough to get vegetables from southern China to northern China, so they use plastic and fire it with charcoal burners inside so that they can grow vegetables in the dead of winter. And I had to shoot this very quickly, because the cameras fogged up almost instantly once we moved inside.

MacNEIL: Because of the warmth inside.

SAMUELSON: Right. In Changchun itself, a city of over a million people, we visited an oilseed processing plant. The soybean started in China, of course, and we were interested in looking at some of their varieties but also at how they processed, because cooking oil is an important part of the Chinese diet. And they apologized for the plant, but it seemed to do what it was supposed to do quite well, and the soybeans that had been harvested last fall in this part of China had been brought in an stored there and are now being moved into...

MacNEIL: What did they apologize for in the plant?

SAMUELSON: Well, they felt it was old and certainly not as modern as what we might have.

MacNEIL: What about the quality of the beans themselves?

SAMUELSON: Quality of soybeans, pretty good. Then on to a tractor plant, because mechanization is one of the teachings of Chairman Mao that they`re working very hard on. And we had the opportunity to visit this tractor plant in Changchun; there were 5,500 workers, many of whom lived in factory housing right at the factory itself, and they`re turning out a tractor that generates twenty-eight horsepower and has six forward speeds, and they`re now working and developing a sixty horsepower tractor. But the tractor isn`t used in the field a great deal, the tractor is used on the roads to transport the goods of the communes. Hans Becherer of Deere & Company, part of our group, was along; he had the opportunity to drive it, and I talked to him about the tractor afterwards.

HANS BECHERER: The steering was rather stiff and difficult, which is all rather surprising for a tractor of only twenty-eight horsepower at the engine in fifteen horsepower in the PTO.

SAMUELSON: Do you see that there`s any technology there we could learn?

BECHERER: Absolutely not.

MacNEIL: So how does that tractor compare with an American tractor of the same size?

SAMUELSON: Well, technically speaking it`s quite a bit behind the tractors that we`re farming with today; it doesn`t have the sophisticated hydraulic system...

MacNEIL: But still a pretty usable tractor.

SAMUELSON: Usable tractor for the type of agriculture they currently have.

MacNEIL: From Changchun in the north you went south to Shanghai province, a much more heavily populated coastal region, and I guess the area where there`s traditionally been more Western influence in China. Was that apparent at all?

SAMUELSON: Yes, it was. In the city we certainly noticed it, and on the commune I think we saw a little more agriculture we were accustomed to. As I mentioned, the hog is the number one livestock enterprise; as best we could determine, they have about 280 million of them, compared to about 55 or 60 million in the United States. This breed, the misen breed, one of the uglier pigs I have ever seen, really, produces an average litter size of fourteen baby pigs, compared to about eight and a half or nine in the United States. But the hog is looked at as a fertilizer factory first of all, and food secondly, because the tremendous need for organic fertilizer to provide nutrients in the soil to produce their vegetable crops and their rice makes it ...

MacNEIL: Is that because organic fertilizer is considered better, or they just don`t have much of the artificial?

SAMUELSON: They don`t have much of the artificial. They`re building plants and are trying to do it. Here we are -- this is how their manure is taken out and applied to the fields, and they use everything, even horses on the highway that...

MacNEIL: And this is human excrement used as fertilizer.

SAMUELSON: That`s right; they call it nightsoil. And it`s both human and animal, and also the leaves of vegetables that aren`t eaten or used are put into compost piles to be mixed with it.

MacNEIL: Just what our organic enthusiasts would like us to be doing here.

SAMUELSON: That`s right. But it does hold back yields, of course. And there we saw those ladies at work -- and we saw that a great deal -tilling the soil. But they are working on chemical fertilizer, and this is one of the plants outside Shanghai that we had the opportunity to visit. It`s a rather low-grade fertilizer, but it`s an improvement over what they have and they realize the need for it. It`s transported out to the areas of the commune by bicycle, by cart, by tractors, and also by boat. Waterways seem to lace the southern half of China, either to drain water or to bring water in for irrigation. The soil`s either too dry or too wet, and so waterways and waterway transportation -- either mechanized or by hand -- is put to a great deal of use.

MacNEIL: I have read that they have in China eighty percent of their total population involved on the land in feeding the population. Do they admit to that figure?

SAMUELSON: Yes, they do. They say that eighty percent of their people are involved in producing food; that compares to less than four percent in the United States. The structure of the commune is interesting in that they try to be self-reliant. This is a machine shop where they build the tools that they need, where they build some mechanized equipment -- very small, as you see here -- and interestingly enough, the tractor factory doesn`t make parts for the tractor, they`re built in the commune foundry that you just saw there. Here the bamboo plant, where, first of all, they make, again, the baskets, necessary to transport the vegetables, to transport the nightsoil and the organic fertilizer. This is a bamboo scoop that they were using at that soybean plant that we saw a few moments ago. But they also do some fancy work for sale to the Friendship store in Shanghai for tourists like us to buy and bring back home with us. The commune has its own clinic, its own hospital, and here is a technician making false teeth --the only item, incidentally, that they have to pay for. Everything else is provided as far as medical care. And they do minor surgery at the clinic; major surgery is done at a hospital in the city. But this was the operating room, and the wards where patients are kept. It was a forty-bed hospital.

And the commune itself is structured, first of all, into production brigades and then broken down into production teams, and each production brigade has three to four doctors that serve the people in the brigade.

Doctors also do field work, and they`re called barefoot doctors, because they are out working.

A look at some housing on the commune. It was unusual to see more than one- story housing -- this happened to be one example of it -- and the friendly faces of the Chinese. And this is a forty-four year old fisher woman, because they fish-farm in this commune -- a delightful lady, who told us that things were much better today than they were before the Revolution in 1949.

MacNEIL: Well, those are some of your impressions. Let`s hear a few more from Congressman Findley.

Jim?

LEHRER: Yes. Congressman, did you get any feel for what it`s like to live,, strictly in human terms, on one of these communes?

FINDLEY: Yes, we had a chance to visit homes on communes; in Canton we had a chance to visit the apartment homes of factory workers; we were able to sit down and talk with the people about their life, their income, what their goals are, what they want to buy next, how many people live in the apartment, the type of facilities they have...

LEHRER: How would you describe them?

FINDLEY: Well, by our standards they`re primitive, they don`t have any of the home appliances that we take as commonplace; no refrigeration, no modern plumbing; a kitchen -- there`s a typical kitchen, there. They have to buy all their produce every day because they have no refrigeration. But they have a system that works, that`s organized on that basis, and they frankly have so many people tied up in food production that they don`t have the labor with which to produce the extras that we take as commonplace in our life.

LEHRER: What`s family life like? Are the families very close, they live together, stay together, work together, or what?

FINDLEY: Well, it`s different than our society. Most adults work -almost no exceptions to that. The husband and wife will traditionally not work in the same factory, or if they do they`ll be in different sections, which I think is prudent. They have day care centers; we visited one in the Canton area, just spectacular -- the young people obviously having a great time, learning to play ping-pong, among other things. They relish the fact that they have a chance to go to school. A fisherman family told of the night classes that the mother was able to attend. She had no chance for a formal education before the Revolution, she said; she was now catching up, and she was very pleased that her children were all able to go to school. In the ancient days, I guess the children worked as soon as they were old enough to do a job.

LEHRER: Was there any marked difference between the Chinese in the rural communities versus those in the big cities?

FINDLEY: Yes, some very substantial differences. For example, in the cities they have a retirement program -- for the most part sixty for the men. If men are engaged in very heavy manual labor like a foundry plant they might retire at fifty-five. Women retire at fifty-five. In the countryside there is no retirement program. In the cities they work six days a week, eight hours a day, they get about five holidays off a year in addition to the one day a week. In the countryside there is no fixed timetable to their work, nor is there a fixed vacation period. The work level varies considerably from one commune to another. They don`t have the retirement program at all. Those are the principal differences.

LEHRER: All right, thank you, Congressman. Robin?

MacNEIL: Orion, finally, from the Shanghai area you went further south to Canton, which I guess is the home of the annual Canton Trade Fair, where the Chinese can show off what they`ve got to sell and look at what other countries have got to sell.

SAMUELSON: Right. We had the opportunity to visit a commune here, and again, a totally different commune from the standpoint of agriculture, basically rice and orchards. This is one of the reservoirs, because one one of Chairman Mao`s teachings is that water conservancy is the lifeblood of agriculture. So they build earthen dams -- in this case...

MacNEIL: They were just learning here.

SAMUELSON: That`s right -- had built two hydroelectric plants that generate a small amount of electricity. But despite being told that they were mechanized, this is still a scene that was repeated over and over again, and this is rice country. And on this particular commune some 2,000 water buffaloes resided to do the kind of work that we`re seeing here. And this farmer on the commune -- or peasant, because they`re proud to be called peasants there, and that`s what they`re called and this peasant with his water buffalo did most of the work. They have mechanized somewhat, but as you can see, they have the same kind of trouble there when it gets too wet as we have in America when it gets too wet.

And I think these two gentlemen that were trying to use the tractor to plow the rice paddy -- had I been able to understand Chinese I probably would have learned some new words that day.

MacNEIL: Whereas the water buffalo doesn`t break down.

SAMUELSON: Doesn`t break down. Goes slowly, but at least keeps on going. Meanwhile, back at the tractor, we`re still trying to dig it out, and I don`t think they appreciated having eighteen Americans standing there watching them from the roadway as they were trying to get the tractor going. And we finally decided to get back into the cars and continue moving along.

This is how rice is planted, and these ladies, a skilled rice transplanter in an eight-hour day will transplant 270,000 rice plants -- eight to ten of them in a clump there, but that`s still working very quickly.

This particular commune produced a lot of fruit, as well as pineapple, and they had terraced the sides of the hills here so that they could again make use of every available space. And weeds practically nonexistent, because they just don`t allow them to happen. And here again, to show how they make use of the land as much as they can, this is an orchard, but under the trees they`re producing crops of vegetables; and high quality vegetables that somehow don`t take the nutrients and the moisture away from the trees, so they are able to produce.

The lichee nut is part of the produce of this commune, and I take it that`s a delicacy for the Chinese people. They served it to us as we met with them in the commune, and this is how they`re processed and dried. And they had these large trays that were out in the open -- it was not sunny that day, so they would tend to keep them covered.

Then we had an opportunity to see how Chinese housewives -- and men -- do their shopping. This was a food market in Canton, and we were there about eight o`clock in the morning, and it was very, very busy; it was like two or three days before Christmas in our big cities here. But this is how they buy their food; there`s no refrigeration, and so they shop every day.

MacNEIL: What did you observe about the diet from what you could see them buying there?

SAMUELSON: Well, I enjoyed their diet, and they have fish and pork and chicken. People walk up to counters like this and tell the people behind the counter how they want it cut up, and then they take it home.

Rice, of course, is a part of the diet. The only two food items, Robin, that are not rationed are fish and rice. Everything else is rationed -not to the point that anyone is starving. As a matter of fact, I didn`t see many obese people over there, and I lost four pounds on their food and I ate three full meals a day, so maybe we could learn something.

MacNEIL: As a U.S. journalist who is an expert. in agriculture yourself, what did you see there that was most significant to you and really opened your eyes? What did you think was most significant for us?

SAMUELSON: I suppose the way they treat their soil; and they have to treat it so well and they`re able to do it because they hand groom it, so to speak. They`re able to get two and three crops a year off fields in climates similar to our Midwest, where we do well to get one crop.

But because they do it by hand, the soil is just cared for magnificently.

MacNEIL: They do it by hand because they have hundreds of millions of people doing it.

SAMUELSON: That`s right.

MacNEIL: At what period in American history was it that we had eighty percent of the people providing our food?

SAMUELSON: I`d say perhaps 1815, 1820 -- early in the 1800s.

MacNEIL: And is that about where they are?

SAMUELSON: I would say so, and yet the question that came to us is, if they do mechanize, what will the people do?

MacNEIL: Good question. Jim?

LEHRER: Yes, which opens up this whole question, Congressman, of, is there anything that U.S. agriculture could learn from China? Obviously we`re not going to go back to tilling the soil by hand, but was there anything there that you think we could copy and get something out of?

FINDLEY: I think their very efficient use of water -- we can learn from that. Their efficient use of soil, too. Now, beyond that the only thing that occurs to me is possibly seeds that they may have developed that we could use to replenish our growth potential because we have to keep reintroducing new varieties in order to have healthy development in our country. We have a very intensive agricultural educational system; it may be that we can pick up some ideas from theirs, although theirs seems rather rudimentary so far as we could examine it in our brief visit there. It`s difficult to reach any final conclusions in a trip as brief as ours, but I must say that they are very forthcoming, they let us go almost anyplace we wanted to and talk directly with the people involved in whatever task was at hand.

LEHRER: Mr. Samuelson, would you agree with that? Was there anything that you came back with that you wanted to run back here to the United States to American farmers and say, "Hey, this is what we ought to do"?

SAMUELSON: Not really, not outside of what has already been mentioned, and that`s the way they do treat their soil and the way they do treat their water. I think we could probably learn something there. But other than that, I don`t see us adapting any of the methods of production that we saw there.

LEHRER: What was your idea in terms of what we could offer them that they needed the most?

SAMUELSON: Well, first of all, breeding stock, obviously. Big Jim was welcomed with open arms by the Chinese people, and they`re beginning to realize that that hog has got to do more than produce fertilizer. It takes twelve months for that hog to be ready for slaughter, compared to five months here in the United States, and so I think breeding stock is the first thing they`re going to look for, particularly in hogs. They don`t have beef cattle, I only saw one dairy heard; and then, as Congressman Findley mentioned, in seed stock. I think that we can exchange seed and perhaps improve some of the varieties.

LEHRER: Congressman, did you get the idea that there is a prospect for substantial agriculture trade between China and the United States?

FINDLEY: Yes, for a lot of reasons: first of all, the warmth with which our mission was received. It was beyond our fondest dreams. We were entertained by two vice ministers of agriculture at quite an elaborate dinner to which specialists and crops and livestock and management were invited. They received very warmly our suggestion that we exchange a couple of scientists from the University of Illinois, soybean-corn specialists. They were very pleased at our invitation to a Chinese agricultural mission coming to the State of Illinois...

LEHRER: I was going to ask you that, if you invited them to come back.

FINDLEY: Yes, indeed. And from this total experience I came away convinced that they are eager to have the fullest relationship they can with American agricultural technology.

LEHRER: What about the politics, though?

FINDLEY: Well, I was there three years before, and they talked about Taiwan a lot, the desire for normalization, how offended they were that we maintain an embassy at Taipei. This time they mentioned Taiwan but not with the frequency and the intensity as they did before, and I think it reflects a change in policy by the government. Chairman Hua has decided that China must take advantage of foreign technology. So today, as contrasted with three years ago, their government apparently sees an advantage to itself in expanding their contacts abroad.

LEHRER: Mr. Samuelson, the final question to you. Let`s say that the Chinese take up the invitation and send a delegation over here, the counterpart to the trip that you-all just had. And they come to Illnois and you are in charge of saying, Okay, here`s what I want to show you, the best things in Illinois that would help them the most. What would you show them -- where would you take them?

SAMUELSON:I think the first place I`d take them would be to some of the hog production farms that we have in Illinois --I think that they would find that extremely helpful -- and give them a look at the rations that we use...

LEHRER: "Rations," meaning?

SA14UELSON: The feed that we give to our hogs, because we put high protein feeds into hogs and they don`t do that. And if we could get them doing that, they`d probably buy a lot of our soybeans, because that would provide the protein they need. They`ve bought a few soybeans in the past couple of weeks, but not nearly the amount they could be using. And I think secondly I`d want them to see how we live. I think it`s important, because they really have no idea at all how we live.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there, Orion, I`m afraid. Thank you very much, Congressman. Thank you, Orion Samuelson. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. We`ll be back on Monday night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.