Go Slow

The world knows that China's Communist masters face plenty of trouble in trying to rule their vast, war-torn country; the surprise was that Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung more or less freely admitted the fact. In his first "state of the nation" report to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party two weeks ago, Mao avoided the self-praise that the world has come to expect of Communist leaders, and listed some of Red China's problems.

China's Communists, warned Mao, must conquer complacency and stop thinking of themselves as heroes. Despite past successes, the Communist government still had to deal with vital problems, particularly in the more recently "liberated" areas, which support an estimated 310 million of China's people. In these areas, Mao admitted: "There are still more than 400,000 bandits [i.e., Nationalist guerrillas] to be annihilated; the land problem has not been solved; industry and commerce have not been properly adjusted; unemployment is still serious, and social order has not yet been stabilized."

The "bandits," said Mao, must be wiped out. But in attacking economic problems, Mao warned against "rashness or attempts to carry through reforms crudely." He made it plain that some of his eager underlings had gone too far in their crackdown on private business. Strategist Mao has consistently held that, before China can be completely Communized, there must be a period of transition during which private enterprise must be allowed to contribute to the country's economic growth.

Said he: "The idea of some people who think it possible to bring about an early elimination of capitalism ... is wrong and unsuitable to the conditions of our country." Land reform, too, must be carried out more gently. It was wrong, said Mao--echoing some of the fine promises made by Communist rulers to the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians--simply to requisition the land of the rich peasants; it was more important to restore agricultural production, try to end famine.

In trying to build a modern economy in China, Mao tackled one of the century's most staggering tasks. Mao, apparently determined to avoid the mad haste of the early Bolshevik planners in Russia, seemed to mean to do the job gradually. The West, by doing hardly anything at all to fight Communism in Asia, made it easy for Mao to stick to his own timetable.

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