| People should be the orientation of a country,and food is the dependence of people’s lives.Grain storage is important insurance for regulating civil food and relieving people’s livelihood pressure.In the pre-Qin period,thoughts of grain storage emerged,and there were examples of grain reserve.From the Western Han Dynasty to the Southern Song Dynasty,the Changping Warehouse,the Yi Warehouse,and the She Warehouse,which were closely related to food,emerged gradually.Since the Yuan Dynasty,granary continued to develop,and had a peak in the early Qing Dynasty.However,from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China,the traditional granary rapidly declined with the weakening of the regime’s power,continuous war,and social unrest.After the Republic of China,grain production grew slowly,natural disasters occurred frequently,food supply and demand became increasingly tight,and the import of foreign grain became more and more fierce.In view of this,the voices of all groups of the Republic of China to revive the granary were raised,and the Beijing government reorganized granary and achieved certain results.After the establishment of the National Government of Nanjing in 1927,in order to standardize the construction and management of the granary,the Nanjing National Government issued a number of grain storage statutes and gradually established a more complete granary system.From 1927 to 1929,Nanjing National Government explored the granary system.The Ministry of the Interior published the Regulations on the Management of Yi Warehouses,which stipulate that granary was collectively referred to as "Yi warehouse" and was managed in the traditional way of "official supervision and private administration".However,due to the political instability at that time,and the central regulations were too brief and lacked operability,the construction of the local storage granary system was limited,and only a few areas such as Jiangsu,Zhejiang,and a few other areas made significant progress in the granary system.The period from 1930 to 1935 was the time of establishment and rapid development of the granary system.In 1930,The local granary Management Rules promulgated by the National Government of Nanjing established the new granary system.Government-run granaries were divided into five categories according to their locality:county warehouse,municipality warehouse,district warehouse,village warehouse,town warehouse.Private donated granaries were called charitable warehousing.In 1933,the eight provincial grain conferences clarified the basic principles of county granary management,improved the status of the government in granary management,and changed the previous management mode of "official supervision and private administration ".At the same time,according to the spirit of the central regulations and the spirit of the eighth provincial grain conference,combined with the local actual situation,the construction and management of the granary was systematically stipulated.From 1936 to 1937 was the improvement stage of the granary system.The central government promulgated the Outline of Measures for developing granary and the implementation plan,and extended the county granary management system to all the district and town granary,further strengthening the government’s control over the granary,and establishing a clear connection between the granary development and rural revival,thus enhancing the status of granary in the development of people’s livelihood.Hubei,Hunan,Guizhou,Zhejiang and other provinces formulated local granary regulations in accordance with the Outline of Measures for developing granary,providing more detailed provisions on the management and construction of granary.Zhejiang’s regulation was the most innovative,combining the granary with the agriculture warehouse,and changing the previous operation mode of granary.Establishing and optimizing the granary system strongly promoted the development of local grain storage and reversed the declining trend of granary since the late Qing Dynasty.In the construction of storehouses,most regions in accordance with the central and local regulations,through the expenditure of local public funds and military repayment and land belt levy to obtain construction funds,either repaired the original storehouses and public places or constructed new storehouses,so as to increase grain storage sites.The number of storehouses increased significantly throughout the country,and there emerged models of storehouse construction represented by Shandong Pingyuan county storehouse,Jiangsu Tongshan county storehouse and Jiangsu Wu county Fengbei storehouse.The scale of grain and funds stored in granary was expanding day by day,among which Hunan,Jiangxi,Yunnan,and Shanxi provinces of grain accumulation performance was the most outstanding,both the total amount of grain accumulation and the amounts of grain accumulation per capita were in the forefront of the country.In terms of granary management,the granary management committee and the storage committee became the mainstream management organizations,effectively strengthening the government’s control over granary.However,although local granary was significantly developed,there were still many problems.For example,the quantity of storehouse cannot meet the requirement,and the overall quality was difficult to reach the standard;grain and funds didn’t reach the central and local government’s expected goals,and there was a large gap between the number of grain and funds between different areas,and many regions in the management of the grain in haste,causing a nuisance to the people.Granary management organization reorganization was not thorough,and grain and funds preservation condition was not good,and so on.With the development of granary,the scale of the national grain reserve expanded rapidly,which provided certain support for relieving people’s livelihood,resisting the dumping of foreign grain and supplying military grain.For example,during the great drought of 1934,granaries in Anhui,Hubei,and Zhejiang played an important role in providing relief to victims and improving people’s livelihood.Another example is that in the early days of the AntiJapanese War in 1937,a considerable amount of grain in granary were used as military grain,strengthening the logistical material support for the war.On the whole,however,the development of granary from 1927 to 1937 played a limited role in national food security.First of all,the grain collection system wasn’t fair and simple,and the granary management system imposed responsibility on the government,resulting in the rigidity of the granary.Secondly,due to the constraints of the financial situation and social and economic conditions,the government was unable to construct all kinds of granaries at the same time.Most of them prefer the construction of county granary while ignoring the development of town granary,and can not carry out relief work nearby.Thirdly,the way of using grain was the traditional selling at par,lending,and dispersing,which fell behind the development of modern society and can not give full play to the value of grain. |
