"Decades of Effort"

Like its senior partner Russia. Red China is caught in an economic dislocation between its vast ambitions and its limited means. Peking admitted as much one day last week, when 1,105 delegates to the National People's Congress assembled in the Hall of the Benevolent Heart to be told what they should unanimously approve for the next twelve months.

The Congress opened with what Peking Radio called a "thunderous standing ovation" for Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou Enlai. That done, the delegates listened to a mournful recitation of China's economic woes by Chief Planner Li Fu-chun. Nearly three years after the announcement of his Five Year Plan, Li confessed that his grandiose project to remake China in the image of Soviet Russia by 1957 was hardly worth the paper it was written on.

The Five Year Plan proper did not get going at all until last February, two years behind schedule. "This was because of ... our lack of experience in drawing up long-term plans and our very inadequate experience in construction work," explained Planner Li. With the "wholehearted, disinterested and fraternal assistance of the Soviet Union," the plan had been revised and brought "closer to reality." In practice, Li admitted, this meant a drastic reduction in many of the fanciful targets he set in 1952.

Back to the Caves. Peking has already slashed its planned expansion of the textile industry by $360 million, of railroads by $270 million, of its fuel industry by $45 million. Building standards for homes and offices must be "resolutely lowered." warned the official People's Daily. After all, added People's Daily, as if to explain everything, Chairman Mao spent eleven years of his life living in a cave at Yenan.

Last week Planner Li ordered even more drastic cutbacks, especially in agriculture. The target for grain output in 1957 will be lowered by 12%. Instead of driving one-half of China's peasants into collective farms in the next 2 1/2 years. Peking will be content to drive only one-third of them. But let no one imagine that this means any letup in the drive to collectivization, said Li Fu-chun. "China's small peasant economy" must be abolished and replaced with "collective farming."

"The anarchy of capitalism" must also be wiped out by "socialist industrialization." In the next 2 1/2 years, Li told the People's Congress, China's heavy industry must almost double itself. In Chinese terms, and in effort required, this is an onerous request. But it will not make Red China an industrial giant. Li's specific targets for 1957: Steel: 4,100,000 tons--1/25th of current U.S. output.

Coal: 113 million tons--half that of Britain.

Electricity: 16 billion kilowatt-hours, far less than Norway's.

Fifty Years to Go. Many of the big new plants promised at last week's Congress are to be built in the mountainous interior, as far away as possible from U.S. bomber bases. Among them, Planner Li expects to develop atomic-energy plants, built with "direct Soviet aid." Red China also plans to keep on spending far more than it can afford on guns, tanks and planes, "because the imperialists are still encircling China, and she must . . . liberate Taiwan." Hidden in Peking's budget for 1955 was a sizable increase in arms spending.

How long will it take to achieve the "socialist transformation" of the Chinese economy? Li's answer was ominous: "In perhaps 15 years of intense work and arduous construction, we may, in the main, achieve a Socialist society, but to build a powerful country with a high degree of Socialist industrialization requires decades of effort--say 40 to 50 years, or the whole second-half of this century."

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