Tigers Behind

"In villages throughout the country, the high tide of the new socialist movement is approaching. Yet certain of our comrades are like a woman with bound feet toddling along and constantly complaining to the others: 'Too fast, too fast' . . . They fear dragons before and tigers behind . . ."

With these earthy sarcasms, the ex-farmboy who bosses about one-fifth of the world's people came down last July from the Olympian remoteness in which he has been wrapped for seven years. Before him, Mao Tse-tung could see failure.

The first Five-Year Plan called for the mobilizing of 250 million peasants in collective farms by the end of 1957. Faced with a peasant upheaval, party bosses had ordered a slowdown to "consolidate" the 650,000 collectives formed so far. Communist newspapers reported that scarcely one-third of these collectives were operating, and few of these kept books so that members could be paid properly, according to the wage points their labor had earned them. In fact, they admitted, few kept books at all.

Last July the National Peoples Congress voted, in the militant language Communists use even in retreat, for "a resolute shrinkage" in the program.

In Stalin's Steps. One day after the congress adjourned, Mao loosed his 13,-ooo-word blast before party leaders. The industrializing of the country, he said, depends on growing farm surpluses, which can only be produced by larger and more efficient cooperatives. If the future of Chinese Communism is to be saved, said Mao, "we must mount our horses quickly" and charge off to the left along the trail so boldly blazed by the Russians. The Central Committee had decided that no more than a million collectives should be formed by next fall. "That is not enough," snapped Mao. "The existing number of 650,000 should be doubled."

The speech sent China's Communists flying into action. New cadres were trained and sent out to ginger up timorous local committees; schools for two million bookkeepers were started. Evidently there were sweeping changes in the top command: Teng Tsu-hui, China's farm boss, has not been seen or heard from since. By last month the Central Committee was ready to spring the new line. Mao's speech (made public for the first time) provided the new battle cries. Red China's ubiquitous loudspeakers dinned his down-on-the-farm phrases about bound-foot hobblers into a billion ears. Because Mao had said that the great mass of poor farmers were in reality pining to join collectives, "to rid themselves of their poverty," local committees proclaimed class war against "newly rich peasants and counterrevolutionaries" who had sprung up by "spontaneous capitalist influence" after Mao's original land redistributions of 1945-1952.

69 Million Guinea Pigs. The "great upsurge" for which Mao had called was so vast as to dwarf even the Soviet collectivization of the '30s, which Stalin once told Winston Churchill was harder to win than the war against Hitler. In bouts of self-criticism during China's earlier, more leisurely reforms, the Communist press had told how Szechwan peasants--following the example of the Ukrainians before them--had killed their own livestock rather than turn them over to collectives, how in Shensi province other villagers chopped down their trees. Not a word has filtered through the Bamboo Curtain yet of the human consequences of Mao's new drive. But last week the Red China news agency Hsinhya reported that with four months to go. Father Mao's program of doubling the number of collectives has been virtually achieved.

On the basis of Mao's statement, the average Chinese collective numbers 26 families. This would mean that nearly 30% of China's no million farm families have been collectivized, and that in the first hundred days after the Red Moses came down from China's Sinai, 69 million peasants have bowed to his new agrarian commandments. Making every allowance for Communist statistical moonshine, this, numerically, is the most ambitious social experiment of all time, so ambitious that important changes, such as the mechanization of wheat and rice growing and the opening up of 75 million acres of virgin soil, must be deferred until near the end of the land revolution. In all, it is to take 18 years, which Mao compared with the 17 years required for Russia's land transformation from 1921 to 1937.

The Good Earth. On Russia's thinly settled plains that task cost an estimated 5,000,000 lives. In the ancient rice valleys of China, where peasants live over 1,700 to the square mile, and garden rather than farm their tiny strips of terraced land, the human cost promises to be unimaginably greater. Mao knows all about Russia's nightmarish experience, and speaks smoothly now of "voluntary" peasant participation. But he must solve the problem that Russia's Khrushchev says the Soviet Union has still not solved--to wit. how, with or without bloodshed, the land can be made to produce more food after it is socialized. His only answer, vague enough for any agrarian reformer, is: "We should believe that our party is able to lead the masses in overcoming such difficulties."

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