CHINA'S 35 MILLION NON-CHINESE
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a house or open a field. But afterwards I forget it. You are not obliged to do the same for me. You don't owe me anything. What grows on my land is mine, but you are welcome to come and eat it as my guest. We never heard of dividing the crop equally and giving people who work harder more grain. Counting work done seemed nonsense to us and rather unfriendly.”
What irked the cadres in addition was the inefficiency of the primitive economy and light-hearted attitude toward mutual help in which, it seems, the Ching-p'o were already adept. This was a communal system which had its appeal, but the Ching-p'o operated it in a manner not approved by the cadres. Among the Ching-p'o nobody apparently believed in debts. As long as someone in the vicinity had food, no one went hungry. One merely went calling on the person who had food. When a family which ran out of food went to eat with another family until that one ran out of food there appeared to be no thought of debt or payment involved.
The Ching-p'o also found that it was a lot more fun to get up a work party to do a job cooperatively than to do it individually. When a Ching-p'o needed help, he merely made a large crock of rice wine or beer and invited other families to help him drink it and to give him a hand with the job to be done. There was no payment for the labour contributed nor had the host any feeling of obligation to return labour in kind. Nevertheless, since most Ching-p'o usually are quite ready for a social party, with or without work, formal sense of obligation is not required to get up a work party of neighbours.
The foregoing sections giving us some notion of the great variety of interesting differences that exist among China's non-Han ethnic groups. To complete our picture, we should also examine the present numbers and distribution of the non-Han peoples in southern and southwest China. No one knows what the history of tribal demography has been in southern China. Without writing, these peoples have left no written records of population numbers at different times. Han Chinese records only vaguely provide clues of relative sizes of populations. It is difficult, therefore, even to speculate rationally on whether the non-Han peoples have increased or decreased during the last century. Where acculturation and Sinicization have been strongly effected,