Colossal Failure

"The doubling of China's food crops in a single year," boasted Communist economists last October, "is one of the greatest victories of man over nature in history!" Soviet Russia might talk of outproducing the U.S., but Red China cockily promised to overtake Britain within a few years. Having herded 500 million people into the ant-heap life of "people's communes," Red China boasted that it had been able "completely to bury the so-called 'law of diminishing returns' which bourgeois economists claim to be universally true."

But last week came the shamefaced admission that so-called bourgeois economic laws were right, after all, and the Communists themselves perpetrators of an economic whopper. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, in a two-week meeting at the mountain resort of Kuling, formally conceded that nearly every one of it's 1958 production figures had been false (see box). And the errors were no small ones: if the new figures were to be trusted, all the hardship of the communes had produced only a 35% gain in grain, not the 102% Peking had boasted of, and there had been a 28% increase in cotton, not 104%. The false claims had to be confessed so that the planners could sharply drop their targets for next year. The party's communique put the blame for the false figures on "lack of experience in assessing and calculating output," and gloomily blamed the lowered output on bad weather, and the fact that reaping, threshing and storing "were all done in a somewhat hurried manner."

The new figures were a vindication for that small corps of Sino experts gathered in Hong Kong who, in the face of Chinese claims, had surmised a great failure and had reported food shortages in the cities while Peking was talking of vast stockpiles (TIME, Dec. 29 et seq.). And, as many Western observers had already suspected, the highly touted backyard steel furnaces proved a fiasco. None of 3,000,000 tons produced was usable in industry, confessed Peking. Between the lines could be read the bitter admission that the commune system had resulted only in pushing China's luckless peasants beyond their endurance. The report made sober reading for those Asians who had believed Red China's propaganda about the superiority of Communism as a way of swiftly industrializing a backward nation.

But with the admission of failure came a compulsive Communist need to label it a success. Red newspapers carried banner headlines crying, LONG LIVE THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD-- and LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S COMMUNES! In city after Chinese city last week, party workers were ordered into the street to beat drums and lead parades "celebrating" what were really ghastly failures. Most ominous of all were the blistering attacks on "rightist opportunists," i.e., Communist officials who had protested that the scheduled leap forward was too far and too fast. Such opportunists, said the party, "are singing the same tune as the internal and external enemies who slander us," and they are "the main danger of the moment." Thus, if heads rolled in China for a colossal doctrinaire failure, they would, typically, be the heads of men who tried desperately to stave off the flop of the leap forward, not those who obstinately insisted on it.

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