The New Empire Builders

"If railways could be built in Sinkiang, Manchuria, Tibet and Mongolia, and if all these railways could be linked into one system," said Sun Yat-sen long ago, "then China's people would have cheap food to eat." Red China and the Soviet Union are now building Sun Yat-sen's railroads, with a notably different purpose. They mean, by 1957, to bring Communist power by rail into Asia's heartland, to forge new steel bands across the world's greatest continent and to consolidate their grand alliance.

By Western standards, China has never been a railroad nation. Its peak total mileage never exceeded 16,700--against the U.S.'s 395,800. Its railroads, built mostly by the British and Japanese, serviced the coastal provinces and industrial Manchuria, and one-third of these lines were knocked out during the war with the Communists. Last week, from TIME'S bureau in Hong Kong, a city where the free world gets its best peek through the slits in the bamboo curtain, came the most detailed word yet of what the Reds have done and hope to do about the railroads.

Work Comes First. The Communists first restored the old networks, then probed out into the great, windswept Northwest. Their objective as such was not economic but strategic, i.e., to get direct new communications with Russia. To this end. the Communists relentlessly dragooned hundreds of thousands of peasants from their homes to the railroad sites. Soviet experts gave them an Orwellian slogan: "Work comes first. Time comes first. If time is lost, all is lost."

In the summer of 1952, the Communists completed the first new line on the way to Russia, a 314-mile stretch between Chungking and Chengtu (see map). That fall they completed a 216-mile roller coaster across 1,000 bridges and viaducts from Tienshui, terminus of the old main line from the coast, to Lanchow, the heart of the "New Northwest." The Communists are now at work on at least twelve more strategic railroads, more than 4,000 miles long, which will join Russia's Asian network in at least two places. Among them:

P:The Lanchow-Sinkiang Railroad: Red China has laid down 200 miles of this projected 1,200-mile line, northwest from Lanchow towards Russia. The Russians are building southeast to meet the Chinese. The job has Red China's top priority. "The workers are moving mountains and filling rivers at an altitude of 9,000 ft.," Peking recently crowed. "They are battling ice floes and swift currents in sub-zero weather." The Lanchow-Sinkiang will give Russia its fastest connection to the Pacific. (The Moscow-Peking journey now takes nine days via the aging Trans-Siberian Railroad and Red China's existing networks.) The new line will also give Red China its best route to the Soviet Union's industrial area.

P:The Suiyuan-Mongolia Railroad: Red China will run this projected 600-mile line from the Paotow region to Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia's capital, and the Trans-Siberian beyond. This will be Russia's second new main line to Peking.

P:The Chengtu-Paoki Railroad: This 500-mile line, one-fifth complete, will connect Lanchow with Chengtu, South China and, in time, with the Burma Road at Kunming. (A Chengtu-Kunming Railroad is in the survey stage.) It will not be ready until 1957, however, for it must traverse the wild, 6,000-ft. Tapa Mountains. From this range, a Communist observer recently reported: "Nearly 1,000 stonecutters with ropes around their waists are hanging from cliffs. Using drills and chisels, they are staging a general offensive against thousands-year-old rocks." To hear him tell it, these hordes of dangling laborers sing as they work:

We are determined to grind off rocks, Hardship succumbs before us; Our determination is harder than rocks, Our fervor higher than mountains.

P:The Laipin-Chennankwan Railroad: Red China has completed this final link in the military supply route from the Hankow-Canton Railroad to the IndoChina frontier.

The Communists are also pressing two military highways through Tibet right up to India's Himalayan frontier; they are repairing their section of the Burma Road. They are preparing to string two bridges -- one of them a 3,300-ft. double-decker --across the Yangtse and the Han at Hankow: these bridges will link Red China's basic Peking-Hankow and Hankow-Canton Railroads, and wipe out the present ferry bottleneck. Twenty-five Russian engineers are in charge of this project.

"Responsibility System." By U.S. construction standards, this "drill and chisel" performance is inefficient as well as heartless. By anybody's standards, China's railroads are badly run. The Communists are all for using marginal materials, for working not only their slave laborers but their machines until they collapse. In the patient old days, a Chinese locomotive got an overhaul every 31,000 miles. The Communists now have a "responsibility system," under which train crews must operate and maintain their own locomotives, and, to meet requirements, sometimes have run locomotives up to 124,000 miles without an overhaul. Successful crews get the title of "Heroes"; those who fail or get into accidents are punished. Yet for all the strain and pressure, Communist newspapers say that nine out of ten passsenger trains at Tientsin Station arrive late.

Despite the haste and waste, Red China and its Soviet technicians are undoubtedly getting on with their determination to fashion a stout redoubt in the Northwest, just as Russia has moved east of the Urals. The Chinese are building power plants, cement, machine-tool, chemical, textile and automobile-parts factories at Lanchow and at Sian. Lanchow's population in 1947 (according to Communist statistics): 200,000. Its population today: 700,000. And when the new Red rail network is complete, the two partners will be able to deploy Russian troops (or equipment) in South and Southeast Asia, or Red Chinese troops (or slave laborers) into Europe.

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