Leaper's Risk

Day after day last week Peking's red-pillared Hall of Encompassing Benevolence rang with the synchronized frenzy of the 1,200 trained seals who make up Communist China's National People's Congress. One subject not originally on the agenda caused the most heat. The subject: Tibet. "The Tibetan reactionaries," sneered Premier Chou Enlai, "often put on pious airs and express the hope that everyone will go to heaven. But they have turned Tibet into a hell on earth." Another speaker charged that "the British imperialists and Indian expansionists instigated the Tibetan upper-strata reactionary clique to carry out a traitorous armed rebellion . . . We want to warn the Indian expansionists . . . Please be more clear-minded; do not lift a rock that will squash your own feet."

Docile, and splendid in a silken robe, the captive Panchen Lama, 22, was trotted out to make the right noises for his Communist masters. "Tibet," he declared, "is always China's Tibet."

The mood of the Congress was of a Communist leadership feeling itself beset and bellicose. As an illusion of parliamentary government in action, the People's Congress was, of course, pure sham. But as a kind of distorted fun-house mirror of the condition of China after ten years of Communist rule, the "deliberations" of the Second National People's Congress had their uses.

Speed Gets 'Em. Western specialists on Chinese affairs regard Communist statistics about their great leap forward as blatantly inflated. But instead of modifying them, the Communists multiplied them last week, making vast progress by statistical exhortation. Blandly, Chou En-lai advanced the claim that Red China's industrial and agricultural output increased by 65% in 1958--"a speed which has never been attained and cannot be attained under the capitalist system." No less fantastic were the production targets announced for this year: 18 million tons of steel (up 54% over 1958), 380 million tons of coal (up 41%), 525 million tons of grain (up 40%), 40 million kilowatt-hours of electricity (up 45%).

What Goes Up. Beneath this display of international arrogance and domestic boasts ran admissions that last year's vaunted gains had been barely enough to keep China on the economic rails. "Since the autumn of 1958," admitted Finance Minister Li Hsien-nien, "there has been tension . . . owing to short supply of some non-staple foods and manufactured daily necessities in the cities." One of the chief causes of these "temporary difficulties," conceded Li, was the upheaval created by "such a great social change as the people's commune movement."

Chou Enlai, too, reflected Peking's second thoughts about the economic impact of the people's communes: he made no mention of the once highly touted scheme to herd city dwellers as well as peasants into the communes. And he was clearly fearful that China's hard-pressed citizens in the cities might begin to ask why, if the countryside was producing such vast quantities of food, their rice bowls got no fuller. "It is also possible," warned Chou in what would have been heresy in a lesser official, "that output increases of certain industrial and agricultural products--particularly certain agricultural products--may in one particular year be lower than the previous year."

The Irrepressible Hunch. Despite Chou's implicit admission that things were not so rosy as Peking's inventive statisticians made out, Red China was obviously, at a lower rate than the boasts, pushing forward industrially. The people might suffer, but for centuries China's people have known hunger and oppression; the people might be resentful, but never before, under any tyranny, had there been so systematic and efficient a thought-control system, so vast a network of informers patrolling home, church, school and work place.

By all the signs, Mao's government was more firmly in the saddle than any government the Chinese people have known for two centuries past. Yet the undertones of uneasiness occasionally audible in the proceedings of the National People's Congress carried with them the possibility that in some circumstances unforeseeable now the whole thing could come a cropper: a desperate people, overworked, underfed, a trivial incident of defiance, a single lapse of authority--such as an army unit's refusal to fire on a handful of insubordinate peasants in a commune--might set off a chain reaction. No one saw such prospects now. Yet better than anyone else, Red China's outwardly confident rulers know that great leaps involve the risk of disastrous falls.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.