The Year of the Leap

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At night the sky over ten thousand villages glows red and gold with the glare cast by countless primitive blast furnaces of mud brick. In the fields lanterns as numerous as fireflies cast a softer light over "shock troops" fighting "night battles" to bring in bumper crops of rice, sweet potatoes and cotton. By 6:30 in the morning the clean-swept streets of the teeming cities resound to the chanting of millions of voices as clerks, factory hands and bureaucrats, all clad in blue boiler suits, perform the mass calisthenics that herald the beginning of another ten-to twelve-hour working day.

These were the sights and sounds of Red China this week in the midst of its "Great Leap Forward''--the sights and sounds of a nation in the throes of an economic and social convulsion unparalleled in modern history. Ten years ago, in what seemed only a provocative flight of fancy, left-wing British Author George Orwell conjured up in his novel 1984 a nightmare vision of the ultimate totalitarian state: "In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already . . . no one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth as one takes eggs from a hen . . . There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother."

Sorry Awakening. Today, a quarter of a century ahead of Orwell's timetable, a plump peasant who was born a subject of the Dragon Throne, is well on his way to converting Orwellian nightmare into reality in the world's most populous nation. In the past eight months, Mao Tse-tung has herded more than 90% of mainland China's 500 million peasants into vast human poultry yards called "people's communes." If Mao's historic gamble succeeds, the ordinary Chinese of day after tomorrow will have no fixed job, no home and no real family.

"Let China sleep," warned Napoleon nearly a century and a half ago. "When she awakens the world will be sorry." Eying the path along which Mao proposes to lead an awakened China, most of the world, if not yet sorry, is already apprehensive. In Warsaw recently a Communist editor nervously reflected that "the entire Polish nation represents little more than a slight miscalculation in Chinese population statistics for one year." In the U.S. some thoughtful men argue that within a generation the U.S. will be helping bolster Soviet defenses against Communist China. Writing in London's New Statesman, British Socialist M.P. Richard Grossman reports that he came back from a trip through Red China convinced that "Chinese Communism is far the biggest and far the most formidable mass movement in human history''--a movement which "within the next decade" may transfer the center of the world to Peking.

Exaggerated though such fears may be, they are not frivolous. As recently as World War II Winston Churchill could impatiently dismiss as "unrealistic" U.S. insistence that China have big-power status. Yet today, barely 15 years later. Red China is universally acknowledged as the most formidable military power in Asia, can throw into action at any time more jet planes (over 2,000) and more troops (over 2,000,000) than all the rest of the East Asian powers combined. Within the Communist bloc, when China speaks, Khrushchev listens.

The Glowing Image. More than any other government in the world today. Red China is the long shadow of one man. At 65, Chairman-Mao Tse-tung is at once China's emperor, pope and father image. Like Stalin in his heyday, Mao is quoted as the ultimate authority on ideology, military science, steel production, poetry, art, and the uses of fertilizer. Every proclaimed achievement begins with the phrase "Thanks to Chairman Mao." His public appearances arouse excitement bordering on hysteria, evoke near tearful tributes to his "affectionate and kindly gaze.'' Nor are foreigners immune to his spell: Brazilian Sculptor Maria Martins recalls him as "a glowing image--a genius in terms of 20th century politics and a sage out of ancient China."

When he is not touring his domain dispensing advice to athletes, farmers and lady cops, Mao lives with his fourth wife, exActress Lan Ping, and two teen-age daughters in the Imperial City's "Perpetuating Harmony House." No lover of regular office hours, he works either at home or, in good weather, in a tent set up in the park outside. Once a heavy smoker (50 or more British 555s a day), he now, on doctor's orders, confines himself to a pack a day, keeps fit by swimming in a luxurious pool in the Imperial City. For relaxation he writes classical Chinese poetry--a pastime his regime is otherwise discouraging by switching Chinese from their traditional ideographs to a Romanized alphabet.

For all his scholarly air, Mao is almost totally ignorant of science (which he dislikes) and, by the testimony of one of his former teachers, is "terrible at mathematics." Except for whatever he may have picked up on two brief trips to Moscow, he knows the world outside China only at secondhand, and according to Chang Kuo-tao, once his colleague on the Chinese Communist Politburo, he is a poor administrator ("Vague about details and has a rather poor memory about people who are not constantly around him"). Essentially, Mao's world is an imaginary one--a curious melange of Chinese monarchical concepts and Marxist ideology. And behind the benevolent, Buddha-like gaze lie vast personal ambition and ruthless purpose. To a sentimental intellectual who once suggested that "Communism is Love," Mao replied: "No, comrade, Communism is not love; it is a hammer which we use to destroy the enemy."

The Cave Dweller. Mao Tse-tung, who was born in the farming village of Shao Shan in the "rice bowl" province of Hunan, hated his father, a "rich," i.e., solvent, peasant who beat his sons often, gave them, as Mao bitterly remembers, "no money and the most meager food." After drifting through half a dozen schools. Mao at 24 got a job as assistant to Li Ta-chao, the Marxist librarian of Peking University, and finally found his hammer. In May 1921, he was one of twelve men who met in Shanghai to organize the Chinese Communist Party, though, according to one of his cronies, he "seemed to know little about Marxism."

In 1924 when the Chinese Communists, at Joseph Stalin's order, formed a coalition with the Kuomintang, Mao went along dutifully enough. But he was not convinced by Stalin's insistence that the Communist revolution must base itself on China's negligible urban proletariat. And when Chiang Kai-shek in a lightning stroke against his erstwhile allies all but wiped out the Chinese Communist Party in April 1927, Mao set out for his native Hunan to test his heretical belief that a successful Communist revolution in China must be based on the peasantry.

Mao's first, unauthorized attempt to organize a peasant uprising promptly got him expelled from the Chinese Communist Politburo. But within four years his "Chinese Soviet Republic," headquartered in a Buddhist temple on rugged Chingkan Mountain in Kiangsi province, was the most powerful Communist force in China. Five times Chiang Kai-shek's armies launched "campaigns of extermination" against the Communists; finally, in 1934, Mao's troops broke through the Nationalist lines and began their epic, 6,000-mile Long March to desolate Yenan in North China. When they reached their remote destination after fighting their way over 18 mountain ranges, less than a quarter of the 90,000 men who had begun the march were left. Of this remnant--and hence of the Chinese Communist Party--Mao was the unchallenged leader.

In the early Yenan years Mao, like most of his followers, lived in a cave. But from this rude lair, Mao succeeded in forcing Chiang Kai-shek to accept the Communists as allies in the "patriotic war" against Japan. Mao himself was primarily interested in profiting from chaos. "Our determined policy," he explained, "is 70% self-development, 20% compromise, and 10% fight the Japanese." Result was that in 1945 when Chiang Kai-shek emerged from his wartime back-country capital of Chungking, his power was largely confined to China's big cities; Communist forces, now over a million strong, roamed the countryside almost at will. The U.S. spectacularly failed in a politically naive postwar effort to bring Communists and Nationalists together, and by December 1949, what was left of Chiang's shattered armies was fleeing to Formosa.

The Creation of Peace. The nation that Mao had seized was devastated by twelve years of war and revolution, and it was cursed with a primitive economy--though not so primitive as China's present masters like to pretend. Mao inherited from the Japanese a major coal and steel complex in Manchuria and from the Nationalists considerable light industry as well as the Yumen oilfield--still China's biggest. Under Nationalist rule China's industrial production had risen 80% between 1933 and 1945. By the time Mao appeared, the stage was set for a Chinese industrial revolution comparable to that experienced by Japan in the 1880s or Germany under Bismarck. All that was missing was peace and a strong, central government.

These conditions Mao proceeded to create. In late 1952 Communist Minister of Finance Po Ipo publicly admitted that the Reds had liquidated 2,000,000 "bandits" in the preceding three years. Some Western experts calculate that 14 million Chinese were executed during the land-reform campaign of 1951 alone.

Today, with that sort of wholesale terror past but still a vivid memory, China is ruled by a weapon sometimes called "brute reason"--the knowledge that each man has no alternative. On trains, in city squares and village centers, loudspeakers blare away from dawn till midnight, urging China's millions not to spit in the street, and to "work hard for a few years, live happily for a thousand." In schools, factories and offices the walls are plastered layers deep with painstakingly handwritten posters of exhortation and criticism: "Professor Chen's teaching methods are strictly reactionary."

To ignore this barrage is impossible, since privacy has all but disappeared in China. One Shanghai factory manager during last year's "rectification" campaign spent four hours of every working day in group political discussions. And every Chinese city dweller lives under the baleful eye of a "street committee," most often run by a self-important woman. Wives are encouraged to write posters drawing attention to their husbands' shortcomings--and do. With depressing frequency newspapers throughout China carry reports such as the following: "Young Wei Kuo-chu, a student at Shin Tung High School, Shanghai, is cited and congratulated for having denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary.''

Once uncovered, a "reactionary"' is subjected to "re-education." His neighbors, his friends and his professional colleagues all "reason" with him, urge him not to drive them to the extreme step of ostracizing him. One particularly stubborn Shanghai writer managed to stand up to ten such sessions before he caved in.

The Crucial Question. While making his subjects more malleable under the never-ending blows of the Communist hammer, Mao also went to work on the Chinese economy. In exchange for technical help and machinery, he shipped out to Russia antimony, tin, tungsten and, above all, desperately needed food. Of the $2.2 billion in "aid" that China has received from the U.S.S.R. since 1950, almost none of it was a genuine gift; the $300 million surplus that China expects to run this year in its trade with the U.S.S.R. will go to pay off past Soviet loans.

By last year the combination of Russian machinery and Chinese toil had boosted China's steel production from a prewar peak of 1,800,000 tons to 5,350,000 tons, raised coal production from the Nationalist record of 62 million tons to 130 million tons. And this, according to Peking, is only prelude. Hailing 1958 as the year of "the great leap forward," the Chinese Reds took as their primary slogan: "Overtake Britain in production in 15 years." and after revising production targets ever upward, claimed that by the end of this year China would have produced 10.7 million tons of steel--double last year's figure. More breath-taking yet was their claim that production of edible grains would soar to 350 million tons, 90% over last year.

Peking's statistics are suspect, but 1958 figures, noted a British economist, "defy belief and baffle logic." But even if Communist figures could be trusted, Red China still has a long way to go before claiming to be a modern industrial state. Mainland China's rate of industrial growth last year was only half that of Japan's. By the end of its current six-year plan, Japan will have acquired new productive capacity greater than that of all the industrial plant Mao's China now has. The Chinese Communists have yet to produce an all-Chinese jet; their vaunted Manchurian "Detroit" still builds only a few thousand trucks a year, plus an occasional prototype "East Wind" automobile. And despite boasts to the contrary, all indications are that Chinese petroleum reserves are painfully scant. (Production last year: 1.46 million tons v. the U.S.'s 353.6 million tons.)

China's overriding economic problem is not its scarcity of resources but its oversupply of people. Population, now put at 653 million, is increasing by about 15 million a year. At this rate, there will be a billion Chinese by 1980, more than 2 billion by the turn of the century. In terms of per-capita production, Mao's China still lags far behind Japan or Formosa (see chart). Worse yet, despite mammoth irrigation and reclamation projects, population growth has cut the amount of cultivated land per person in Red China from .462 acres in 1953 to .429 acres in 1958.

Mao and his planners first sought to arrest China's inexorable march of population by birth-control propaganda, loudspeaker exhortations and traveling exhibits that featured crudely explicit diagrams and extolled the virtues of contraceptive devices, including something called "Healthy Pleasure Honey." All this hue and cry had no appreciable effect on the birth rate. Soon birth-control advocates found themselves accused of the heinous crime of "neo-Malthusianism," and China's teeming manpower became officially no longer a problem but the nation's greatest asset.

The Volunteers. To feed so many mouths, and to get work out of so many bodies, Mao decided on the ruthless and revolutionary device of the people's commune--a system of forced collectivization of human beings which the Russians abandoned as impractical in 1933. Rural people's communes, the first of which appeared in Honan province last April, sometimes have as many as 300,000 members, in most cases absorb the whole population of a county--peasants, traders, students, officials and professional men. Upon "volunteering" to join a commune, members turn over to it virtually all their private property, including homes, garden plots and heavy tools. Once in the commune, members cease to have a regular trade, become all-purpose production units. In Honan's pilot Sputnik Commune (which occupies an area two-thirds the size of Long Island), 43,000 members are divided into 27 "production corps" and 87 smaller "production battalions." At harvest time almost everyone is sent into the fields. In slack agricultural seasons or in their "spare time" they are put to dam building, construction of primitive factories, or industrial labor. All members of the commune get regular military training, and even when not on duty they must move by the numbers. At Chao Ying commune in Honan, according to an enthusiastic Red newsman, "assembly bells ring and whistles blow at daybreak. In about a quarter of an hour the peasants line up. At the command of company and squad leaders, the teams march to the fields, holding flags. One no longer sees peasants in groups of two or three smoking and going slowly and leisurely to the fields. The desultory living habits of thousands of years are gone forever."

Gone, too, is any notion of personal life or freedom of choice. Instead of a share of what they produce, commune members get wages fixed by a ruling committee of party activists. At Sputnik Commune, 260 mess halls have been set up where members are fed free rice. These communal kitchens, plus communal nurseries and "mending brigades," relieve the wives of members from "dull and trivial housework," transform women, too, into all-purpose laborers. (The sole concession made to femininity: pregnant women get a month off work with half pay.) Even the old folks, for whom the commune has established "Happy Homes," are kept busy with scheduled chores, such as feeding the chickens. And in at least one Kwangtung commune, when the inhabitants of the Happy Homes die, their bodies are dropped into a chemically treated pool and converted to fertilizer.

By last week,there were nearly 25,000 communes; their membership, at least on paper, comprised more than 90% of China's peasantry. The movement is now spreading to the cities. At Yangchuan coal mine in Shansi province, where more than 28,000 miners and their families formerly lived in "an unorganized, undisciplined manner." i.e., scattered around as they chose, workers have now been assigned to living quarters according to their work areas and shifts; according to Peking's People's Daily, "the head of a mine pit is simultaneously company commander of the militia and head of a row of rooms in the living quarters." Meanwhile, the miners' wives and teen-age children have been put to work running 40 new "industrial enterprises," including a cement factory. Logical next step at Yangchuan (and already in operation in some Red Chinese factories) is the "Saturday-night system," under which a married woman worker lives in a factory dormitory, is alone with her husband only on the odd Saturday night when she has the use of a dormitory room all to herself.

Tartars & Tonnage. For Red China's agricultural planners the commune system has obvious advantages: constantly under the eye of the commune's "activists," Chinese peasants will no longer be able to evade forced deliveries of crops to the government. More important, all of China's farmers can be forced to adopt improved techniques, such as deep plowing (as much as 3 ft.) and massive use of natural fertilizer, which have given Communist experimental farms per-acre rice yields twice as big as Japan's highest.

Through the communes, Mao also hopes to solve China's serious underemployment by building up vast cottage industries. Communes are now in the midst of a mass drive to produce pig iron and steel in tiny handmade blast furnaces of a kind developed by Chinese artisans in the Middle Ages. In China's desolate northern marches Mongol and Tartar women sweat over more than 5,000 furnaces which they have built in the last few weeks, and in Honan 440,000 furnaces (operated by peasants who have already put in a ten-hour day in the fields) allegedly turned out 300,000 tons of steel in October alone.

Western steelmen find it hard to credit Communist claims that such operations accounted for 30% of Red China's steel production in October. They are convinced, too, that the steel produced by these methods is of a low quality suitable only for the most primitive construction and the manufacture of agricultural implements. But Red China is headlong in its ambition to do-it-yourself.

Kill That Tiger! The xenophobia that in 1793 led the Emperor Ch'ien Lung to consider British Ambassador Lord Macartney a "Red barbarian bearing tribute," is still very much alive in China. "Westerners," says Foreign Minister Chen Yi, smiling faintly, "used to say Chinese were dirty. We were called an inferior race. Are we inferior now?"

Inevitably the U.S., as the most powerful of Western nations, has been declared the focus of Chinese hatred and resentment. With an ignorant arrogance that could have disastrous consequences for the world, Peking's rulers dismiss the U.S. as a "paper tiger," pooh-pooh the U.S. H-bomb. Four years ago Red China's War Minister confidently told Sam Watson, former chairman of the British Labor Party: "Even if 200 million of us were killed, we would still have 400 million left." Mao himself makes no bones of his ambition to "drive the U.S. out of East Asia," recently told a Brazilian journalist: "We must attack the tiger again and again until we finally kill it."

All for Australia. Dangerous as it may be for the non-Communist world, Red China's rise to great-power status is no unmixed blessing to Soviet Russia. Many Chinese visibly resent their industrial dependence on the Soviets. Even Mao, by stressing the fact that all Russian "aid" has been paid for by China, emphasizes the U.S.S.R.'s niggardliness. The bellicose men of Peking also realize that Russia has not yet seen fit to supply them with atomic weapons.

Ideologically, too, there are tensions between Peking and Moscow. Chinese Reds privately consider Khrushchev a waverer whose understanding of Marxism-Leninism leaves much to be desired. "The Russians are always blundering," one Chinese Communist loftily told British Journalist Dennis Bloodworth. "Weak Soviet policy was responsible for the Hungarian revolution and the trouble in Poland." Not having been afraid of differing from Stalin, Mao has never hesitated to differ from the Johnny-come-latelys now in authority in Moscow. The Russians officially proclaim Mao to be "a major Marxist-Leninist theoretician,'' but his writings are not required reading among Russian party members, and his major pronouncements are dutifully printed without endorsement or criticism. An embarrassed silence greets Mao's current claim that his people's communes will bring true Communism to China in the foreseeable future, since after 41 years the Russians have yet to make such a leap to "true Communism."

What the Russians have to fear from Mao's China is not that it will desert to the West or "pull a Tito," but that it will one day seize leadership of the Communist world. In public, Russian leaders are determinedly cheerful about their relations with Peking, but three weeks ago U.S. Pundit Walter Lippmann returned from a trip to Moscow to report that Russian reactions to China's "great leap forward" varied between "awe and anxiety." The vast geographical vacuum between the two countries is being competitively filled--by Khrushchev's reclamation of the Central Asian "virgin lands," and by China's intensive colonization of Sinkiang province, once a Soviet zone of influence. When Britain's Sam Watson forecast to Khrushchev that the Chinese would one day flood either north into Siberia or south into Australia, Khrushchev's reply was: "I'm all in favor of Australia."

Diminishing Rice Bowl. The central fact about Mao's China today, however, is that the bogeyman that in varying degrees haunts both the U.S. and Russia is still largely a bogeyman. If Peking's current statistics are questionable, its basic economic assumptions are even more so. That cottage industry can ever play a major role in transforming China into a modern industrial state is doubtful. As Peking has begun to admit, many of the mud-brick blast furnaces are vastly wasteful of coal and are located too far from major industrial centers to be of much value. And the rosy agricultural future that Mao promises does not take into account the possibility of repeated bad harvests ("Weather no longer counts in China"), or the fact that there is presumably a finite limit to the amount of food a given area of ground can produce ("There are no low-yield crops, only low-yield thoughts").

Best guess of many Western specialists is that within a decade or so Red China will reach the day when its food supply is inadequate for its population, even by low Chinese diet standards. If the rice bowl grows much emptier, Mao's promises of a glittering future may cease to assuage his subjects.

The outburst of student rioting and anti-Communist statements that followed Mao's abortive "Hundred Flowers" attempt at liberalization last year (TIME, May 27 et seq.) was clear evidence that the regime had forfeited the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. Mao's response--to treat all intellectuals as suspect and force them into "remedial" manual labor by the hundreds of thousands--may produce obedience, but hardly provides the climate for intellectual creativity. The great, vast public, foreign observers report, seems more resigned to its lot, and even grateful for the orderliness that keeps warlords from swooping down on farmers to steal their harvests. But in a nation that has only a paper-thin economic surplus to invest in industrial growth, a loss of mass enthusiasm and a consequent drop in production could be no less deadly than active popular resistance.

At a diplomatic turnout in Peking a year ago, Mao peered up at a towering Briton and jovially remarked: "It's not that you are so tall. It is just that we, at the moment, are too short." That Mao has started China growing again is a fact of incalculable importance. If human beings can be reduced to mindless production-line cogs, Red China may one day achieve the stature for which its rulers yearn. But, so far. the crucial elements of Chinese Communist power are still supplied by Russia. It was not Chinese strength but the fear of Russian involvement that ultimately led the U.S. to deny itself the means to victory in Korea. The smattering of glittering modern factories in China is also courtesy of Russia. And as Mao Tse-tung himself said almost a decade ago, so long as China must rely economically on foreign countries it will not be truly independent, far less a great power.

---An all-purpose title since Mao is simultaneously chairman of 1) the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 2) the Politburo oi the Chinese Communist Party, 3) the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, 4) the Council of National Defense.

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