Civil Wars, Invasion, and the Rise of Communism 125
kill them, tapeworms and other parasitic organisms survived and eas-
ily bore into the skin and infected peasants who waded with bare feet
and legs through muddy rice paddies. Millions of Chinese peasants died
every year from such parasitic diseases.
The traditional sources of peasant misery—fl oods, droughts, and
famines—continued to infl ict great damage in the Chinese countryside
From the fi fteenth century on, Beijing (renamed Beiping, or Northern Peace, in
1927) was known for its magnifi cent walls and gates, including Qianmen, the
138-feet-high “Front Gate” of the inner city, photographed here with a mixture
of rickshaw pullers, cars, trucks, and electric trams in 1931. Modernization
sometimes caused serious social tensions, as when 25,000 rickshaw pullers (who
traditionally hired themselves out to move people about the sprawling city) rioted
in October 1929, attacking the newly installed electric trams and their passengers.
Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–137015