We were across the water at a family event in mid-August and my team arrived first at the lunch location. While I was lollygagging on the shingle beach pretending to be a mermaid, Dau.I the Librarian upstakes to view the visitor centre . . . which had a binful of 2nd-hand books. I've resolved to stop buying any more books, but thought her acquisition of Handbook on People's China [The foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1957] was cool enough, and data-rich enough, to borrow. If you're quick, you can snag your own copy from Kennys - €4.99, a snip! A snap-shot of the state of that nation, coming to the end of its First Five Year Plan, when I was still in diapers, it serves as a benchmark for how much has changed. There are 2⅓ times more people living there for starters. In Ireland there is 'only' 1.8x difference in the population of the Republic over the same time frame.
The frontispiece is a colour inlay showing the red [#EE1C25] with yellow [#FFFF00] stars of the flag of the PRC 🇨🇳 and the next page gives a template in case a) you speak English b) you're a fan c) you're a teeny bit obsessive about getting the details correct. The basic shape is a 3:2 rectangle and the five stars can be positioned by gridding the canton into 150 [15:10] squares as [L]. No, no, not Canton, the city: that's 广州市aka Guangzhou, China's 4th largest metro and home to 3x as many folks are RoIreland. I've beat myself up for never knowingly heard of Tianjin which houses even more people.
What else don't we know about China in the late 1950s? The legislature is/was the National People's Congress but it only met once a year and Executive function was carried out by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress chaired by Liu Shao-chi. I bet you've never heard of him and not merely because he was purged in the Cultural Revolution - "renegade, traitor and scab" etc. No consolation that his memory was rehabilitated 12 years after his death. Another member of The Standing Committee was . . . drum-roll . . . the Dalai Lama. That was 2 years before the Bodhisattva of Compassion fled Tibet and sought asylum in India.
Lesser organs of government include the Ministries of Internal Affairs, External affairs, National Defense, Public Security, Justice, Supervision, Finance, Food, Commerce, Geology, Machine Building, Coal, Chemicals, Timber, Textiles, Railways, Labour, Education, Agriculture. Each of which had its own named Minister and some Vice-Ministers
Another revelation was that in 1957, the PRC was generating a proud but puny 16 TWh = 1.6 x 10^10 kWh of electricity. In 2022, the Republic of Ireland used 3.4 TWh x 10^10 kWh [source] or 2x what China was consuming 70 years ago. That Irish data amounts to about 7,000 kWh of electricity per person.
Which is consonant with Caislean Bob's annual domestic consumption of about 10,000 kWh a year split between 2 permanent residents. The excess [7kWh - 5kWh = 2kWh] must be all the server farms and data-centres to which the government whores us out. Me, I use my share of the electricity to get through 50,000 pots of tea - at about 5 pots an hour 24/7. Obvs, since the Three Gorges Dam [whc prev] came on across stream in 2012 there is more electricity [95±20 TWh of electricity per year on average] to distribute across the PRC.
Right at the end of the book, my arithmetic heart beat a little faster at seeing a section III Conversion Tables on weights and measures. In 1957, in PRC
- a Chinese foot 尺 Chih is defined at 3 to the S.I. metre.
- for longer lengths, use 里 Li at 2 to the km
- areas? use 亩 Mou at ⅔ of 1000 sq.m. or ~7 ares = 0.07 hectares
- liquid measure? the 升 Sheng is defined as = 1 litre
- weight? 斤 Chin = 500g aka Catty [wch bloboprev - last 2 paras]
- for bigger lumps resort to 石 Picul or Tam = 50kg or 100 Catty
There, I'm glad we've sorted that out. And ahem <cof> <cof>: Other Chinas 🇹🇼 are available.
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