Believe the U.N.?

OUTPUT RISE IN RED CHINA LEADS

WORLD, said the headline in the New York Herald Tribune, and if the statistics were to be believed, it was no exaggeration. Last week, in its annual World Economic Survey, the United Nations proclaimed (and the Herald Tribune published) that Red China's industrial and agricultural output for 1958 had jumped 65% over the year before. Even making allowances for statistical overenthusiasm, the U.N. still estimated that the increase in national product "seems to have been of the order of 50%." While the U.S. gross national product dropped nearly i%, according to the figures, China's national product had shot up five times as fast as that of the Soviet Union. "It is noteworthy," added the experts, "that the rate of output of crops was obtained without any appreciable increase in the sown area."

The U.N. being the U.N., staff economists find it hard to question the word of member governments, and even harder to check up on nonmember Peking. Western observers clustered in Hong Kong, however, were frankly skeptical of the U.N. findings. All along they were suspicious of Peking's 1958 claims and even more leery of Peking's blithe boast that in 1959 production would go up another 40%. Red China's government is now reporting droughts and pestilence and--in Kwangtung province--the "worst flood of the century" (TIME, July 6). And at the very moment that Shanghai was boasting that each of its inhabitants would be getting nearly four times as much food this year, travelers reported that even in the best hotels meat and eggs were hard to come by, and that in other cities the ration of meat, sugar and fish had been cut. As for Red China's great "leap forward" in steel, to a large extent accomplished by backyard amateur furnaces for smelting pig iron, Peking's official People's Daily was now complaining that some provinces of the country were able to use only about half of it.

Fortnight ago, at an "extraordinary meeting" in Shanghai, party secretaries from 37 major cities met with Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien to cope with a new crisis. Henceforth, the Vice Premier declared, city dwellers would start growing their own food on the "large tracts of land on the outskirts" of town. To outsiders, the announcement meant two things, one as grim as the other: 1) the start of the long postponed campaign to force the cities into the kind of anthill communes that now blight the countryside, and 2) tacit confirmation of the many reports that the people in Red China's cities are going hungry.

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