Word: ricksha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Government spoke of inhumanity, but most ricksha men had come out of the greater inhumanity of hungry villages and hopeless slums. The Government spoke of archaic labor, but last week the ricksha men showed how necessary their labor was to a nation that is not yet wholly modern. In Shanghai, they staged a spectacular two-day strike against exorbitant rentals charged by the ricksha owners. The metropolis of 3,000,000 hiked to shop and office, jammed itself inhumanely in over-jammed trolleys. The municipal government's social affairs bureau mediated a truce while coolies and hong owners negotiated...
...Beast. China has some 400,000 ricksha men; with their families they number over a million. They are as varied as their nation's cities. There are the muscular runners of Chungking, who bound downhill in great strides; the philosophical businessmen of Peiping, who pad their wages with commissions from shopkeepers to whom they wheel their riders; the noisy hagglers of Shanghai, whose existence is the meanest. Everywhere their shuffling straw sandals, klaxon cries and stained sweatbands are as ineluctably a part of China as temple gongs, a plum tree beside a bridge, or the marble Temple of Heaven...
...land where human labor is incredibly cheap and abundant, the ricksha man serves as a draft animal. His daily income may be as high as $2 or even $3, but in China's feverishly inflated economy, the average ricksha man can buy less now than in prewar times when his income was measured in pennies. He often eats only two meals a day-one of rice and one of congee (millet or rice gruel), with salted turnips and bean curd now & then, meat once or twice a year. On this fuel, if he is not yet slowed by tuberculosis...
Hope & Fear. Through gall and goad, the ricksha man has clung to his calling. Hong owners exploit him ("They are blackhearted," he complains-in Shanghai, before last week's strike, they upped their daily rentals from 60? to $2.60), moneylenders gouge him, racketeers batten on him. Yet, in 1918 in Shanghai, he took up bamboo sticks and iron bars to destroy the alien trolleys that menaced his means of meager livelihood-which, after all, is better than that of millions of his fellows...
...Shanghai, since 1933, ricksha men pay 4½? a day for social security to the municipal government's "Ricksha Pullers' Mutual Aid Association." In return they receive such benefits as $2.50 toward funeral expenses. There is also a Ricksha Pullers' Guild, organized in 1925. In Shanghai it claims 10,000 out of 60,000 pullers. Its membership fee is 5?; its boss is an oratorical, brown-gowned Kuomintang man named Chang. It was Chang's union which drew up and sent to the Government a petition voicing the ricksha men's fear and doubt over...