Graham Hutchings

“Oh, the South is great, the South is great! You can’t understand the language The food leaves you hungry The roads are narrow And you sleep in the rice fields The muddy roads are so slippery you can’t move It’s cloudy all day And the weather is really atrocious5 Such sentiments reflect the fact that the communists not only had to overcome a formidable physical barrier before they could conquer the rest of the country. They also had to cross a cultural, political and economic divide. For the Yangtze divided, as it still does, the predominantly wheat-eating, Mandarin-speaking, rather more conservative people of north China, with their generally closer association with the country’s ‘grand tradition’ of imperial power, from the rice-eating, dialect-speaking, more freewheeling, commercially minded southern Chinese, whose prosperous towns and cities enjoyed close links with the Chinese diaspora and the wider world in general. It was the boundary, if not exactly between two worlds, at least between the main two ‘sub-regions’ that make up China.”
― Graham Hutchings, China 1949: Year of Revolution