The Bethune-Burrows China Legacies

Actually it's quite interesting that a small western, immigrant-infused country like Canada can have had such an impression on a hugely populous eastern country like China; one with its ancient social history, the other having emerged in the relatively modern era.

China is monolithic in ideology and government, controlling in a society comprised of quite a few ethnic groups, languages, religions, sternly guided in an ongoing effort to ensure that all its disparate parts meld in a harmony of subservience to the communist ideal, somewhat diluted over the past several decades with free enterprise.

Like any other living social entity, China's leaders share a human need to endure and to prosper and to preserve themselves and their purpose.  They make glaring errors, confuse the immutables of right and wrong, eventually recognize their mistakes and turn the ship of state back into calmer waters to serve themselves and the population.

The country's human rights record is nothing to be proud of.  The Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-Tung represents a reprehensible period of unforgivable human carnage.

Whatever else China has accomplished over the years of turmoil and re-grouping, it has managed the Herculean task of bringing millions of its people out of extreme poverty.  Its thinkers and its scientists are as capable as those from any other corner of the world.  Sometimes, though, there is a need for a fresh infusion of direction and sharing proving beneficial to the ongoing human striving for improvement.

The human condition is improved when there are no boundaries between science and humanity.  And two Canadians appear to have bridged a cultural, language gap between a remote and slightly-populated advanced country and a hugely-populated, exotic-heritaged country to the advantage of both.  Canada has quietly celebrated the reputation of medical doctor Norman Bethune's history in the China of the 1930s.

This is a move to give a figure of the early 20th Century whose dedication to the healing arts made great advances in battlefield surgery and medicine, pioneering techniques that would eventually be used all over the world, while more immediately advantaging the Chinese in their struggle against Japanese imperialism.

And then there is the more mundane but infinitely vital matter of agricultural advancement, and crops whose laboratory development has aided farmers the world over to take advantage of improving on nature's bounty.  A retired plant scientist who worked for Agriculture Canada, Vern Burrows, has been recognized by the government in Jilin province, China, for his pioneering work in plant genetics.

  ‘It’s a great honour,’ Dr. Vern Burrows said of the statue erected of him in the nothern Chinese province of Jilin.

He undertook to lecture at agricultural schools in China decades earlier, in the 1990s, and at the agricultural gene bank in Beijing. He mentored Chinese agronomists and he used his expertise to create hybrids from Chinese oat varieties and those in his laboratory.  Now there are Canadian-Chinese hybrid oats growing in China, prospering in soils heavily laden with salt.

"They've got millions of hectares of that land and nothing will grow on it.  I'd been selecting for salt tolerance without even knowing it", Mr. Burrows enthused when he finally realized he had taken California nursery oats originally watered from the salty Colorado River.  

"It's of great value to them.  These oats are pretty important to them both from the food standpoint and from a feed (for livestock) standpoint, and also maybe in land reclamation, to suck up the salt and may improve the soil."

His lasting personal legacy includes his having succeeded in growing oats to grow irrespective of how long days are; planted in the north or the south of the country, at different times of year.  "It's possibly the most nutritious cereal grain we can grow.  It's even better than what or barley or rye", the 82-year-old Burrows said.

He and his wife are pleased and honoured that China has recognized his contribution to their vital agricultural needs, in his original work that bred a hybrid that grows without the usual hard outer hull, called "naked" oats.  Varieties with a paper-thin coating rather than a thick husk, pleasing as well chickens and pigs both of which are not taken with oats with husks for feed.