Living In Exile

From the year of 1912 to 1949, famines took place in successive years and countless people were reduced to refugees due to famines as well as usury, land annexation, ground rents, exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous levies. They did not toil over their farm work but drifted aimlessly from one place to another, gushing blindly into the cities, struggling to live in other villages, becoming bandits or soldiers, immigrating into and wandering in other countries. On one hand, refugees brought on such effects as disrupting public order, conflicts between natives and refugees, intense unbalance of vocational system, harsh labor competition, increase of refugees and crime; on the other hand, refugees brought about some active influence, such as boost of city modernization, acceleration of the development of refugees themselves, their native villages, and the other countries into which they immigrated. Refugees were, however, the general factors of social instability. Departments at all levels of Hunan and Hubei Provinces, consequently, took a series of radical measures and policies, such as physiocracy, warehousing and storage, building irrigation works; besides, some temporary measures were also adopted, for example, relief in kind, imposition of a tax or levy, provision of work as a form of relief, agricultural loan, lower grain prices, and so on. However, solving the refugee problems was not the work of a single day but required the political and economic reform along with other innovation.