The Loss of Man
RED CHINA
(See Cover)
Red China last week was like a ravenous giant. From the snowy plains of Manchuria to the humid bamboo forests of Yunnan, from the sky-merging grasslands of Central Asia to the dimly neon-lit waterfront of Shanghai, there was only one totally absorbing subject--food.
At Wuhan, where the steel mills have slowed to part-time operation, a month's rice ration lasts barely three days, sugar is issued only four times a year, and housewives try to thicken watery gruel by adding grass. Hungry people from Tientsin sneak into the fields at night to steal corn from the stalks, and Kwangtung villagers are reportedly eating bark from the trees. Among the fantastic mountain shapes of Kweilin spread even more fantastic rumors: the sour-tasting new soy sauce is said to be made from human hair. In Peking, when the first fish to arrive in weeks proved rotten, enraged women beat up a Communist official. Everywhere the traditional Chinese greeting "Have you eaten?" has turned bitter.
At night, the wide boulevards of Peking are dim and ghostly; because of the shortage of electric power, only one in every nine street lamps is lit. Two years ago, Chinese in Hong Kong shipped 870,000 food parcels annually to their relatives in China. This year, in answer to desperate appeals, they have already shipped 9,000,000. Refugees stream into Hong Kong and Macao, escaping any way they can. To avoid feeding those unable to work, Red China is now giving exit visas to the aged and infirm. One Hong Kong resident had gone to China in 1958 because "I wanted to work for my country"; last week he fled back to Hong Kong and reported, "There was no meat, and fish only once a week. You had to get up at 2 and 3 in the morning to stand in line for your ration of rice, fruit, vegetables, and cigarettes made from mulberry leaves--and even then they were not always available. A man is not a machine. If he has no food, he has no interest in working."
An 18-year-old girl refugee from Chekiang province said that only once this year had she been able to buy "shoes, stockings, washcloths and a tube of toothpaste. We got only eight feet of cotton cloth annually." Another woman refugee burst into tears when she spoke of friends "still suffering night and day back there."
The Paradox. Is this the true picture of China today? Not according to Communist films and propaganda. They show happy, husky children gamboling in village nurseries, smiling Kazakh herdsmen shearing fat sheep on the Altinshoki steppes, clear-eyed workmen scrambling among the wooden scaffolding of a thousand construction sites. Important guests are dazzled by the enormous parades sweeping into Peking's Tien An Men square with a swirling of scarlet flags, the cheerful explosion of strings of firecrackers whirled on poles, the rhythmic thunder of drums and cymbals. Healthy, pig-tailed girls dance by in a flutter of pastel scarves; fit-looking soldiers march past in cadenced columns; phalanxes of workers with banners roar out slogans extolling the greatness of Communism and hatred of "American imperialism." Here, evidently, is all the panoplied might of a confident and messianic power.
Internationally, Red China seeks to match that picture. At the U.N. the Communist countries and some neutrals are once again about to press for Communist China's admission. The U.S. again expects to postpone the decision (the probable device will be referral of the matter to a study group), but it can no longer avoid debate of the issue.
Meanwhile, by encouraging incessant guerrilla campaigns in Laos and South Viet Nam, Red China seeks to gain control of Southeast Asia, thereby hoping to inflict a major defeat on the U.S. It keeps committing acts of aggression against its neighbors; having ruthlessly conquered and exploited Tibet, it is stirring up continuous border troubles with India. Last week India sent a strong note to Peking, protesting new border incursions by Chinese troops, who already occupy 12,000 sq. mi. of Indian territory. Peking moreover rivals Moscow for control of the Communist world, as became clear at the 22nd Party Congress, setting itself up as the guide and model for the world's underdeveloped nations and claiming Marxism's true ideological heritage. Peking argues that under Khrushchev's anti-Stalin line, the Soviet Union has grown fat and bourgeois and lacks revolutionary zeal in dealing with the West. Red China has even announced that it will develop its own nuclear weapons and many in the West take the threat seriously.
This is the paradox behind the China debate: a country that seeks the status of a world power, that defies both Washington and Moscow, that is driving to produce nuclear bombs, cannot even feed its own people.
The Experiment. In the past eleven months Red China has admitted only one non-Communist newsman--Fernand Gigon, a Swiss journalist, who took the pictures on the following pages. Gigon and other foreign visitors tell a story that supports the refugees' version of Red Chinese reality, sharply contradicts Peking's propaganda as well as the enthusiastic tales of such impressionable visitors as Britain's Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery. In fact, even Red China's normally boastful leaders guardedly admit serious trouble. In his comfortable villa at Hangchow, Chairman Mao Tse-tung told France's ex-Cabinet Minister Franc,ois Mitterand that he knew "Western newspapers have printed large headlines on what they call the famine in China." But it was not a famine, insisted Mao, only "a period of scarcity."
China's history has been one long "period of scarcity." But in the past, China's endemic hunger had most often been the result of war, of natural disasters, of ignorance about how land should be treated and how man could be kept alive. In contrast, China's present hunger is the result of a vast plan. It is, moreover, happening when, for the first time in decades, there is no war in China, when elsewhere poverty is being abolished, and under a regime that has promised to end backwardness and social injustice.
Says TIME's Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow: "This is not merely another catastrophe common in the history of China, such as the northern droughts in the 1870s or the floods and famines of the 1920s, when millions starved. This is, rather, a rationed, regimented hunger that signifies more than China's traditional struggle for survival. It symbolizes the miscarriage of the most massive social experiment ever undertaken--the Communist attempt to transform China overnight from the most impoverished country in the world into a major industrial power."
The man most responsible for the experiment is Vice Premier Li Fu-chun, the 61-year-old chairman of Red China's State Planning Commission. Thin, grey-haired, bookish and self-effacing, Li Fu-chun has been in charge of "squeezing" the peasants during the three bitter years, beginning in 1958, of the Great Leap Forward, which was aimed at giving China an industrial base greater than that of Britain. From Li's neat office in Embracing Kindness Hall--a two-story Manchu dynasty palace in Peking's Forbidden City--have poured the blueprints and directives that marshaled China's millions into antlike armies to dig canals, mine coal and iron ore, and work the soil of 24,000 spartan people's communes. It has been clear for some time that the Great Leap was really a leap into disaster, but the extent of the failure is only now becoming plain. By fanatically stressing industry, Peking nearly wrecked China's agriculture--without accomplishing its industrial goals, either. At present, Li Fu-chun is masterminding a gigantic turnabout, trying to relax some of the inhuman pressures on China's peasants in order to maintain at least subsistence food production.
Comparative Miracles. At the moment of victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, Mao Tse-tung resolved that, after decades of devastation, starting from a primitive economy, China must industrialize--not primarily for a better life, but so that China could become a militant force in world affairs.
Out of the turmoil that was uprooting China's ancient society, out of the alternation of hope and terror, of promised reward and present punishment, Communist China worked single-mindedly toward Mao's goal--and achieved comparative miracles. In eight years, the cotton harvest was up 30% from its prewar high to 1,600,000 tons. Steel production rose nearly six times above the 1943 peak of 900,000 tons,* although even this spectacular advance brought China's per capita steel production only to 4% of Japan's. With Soviet technical aid, China for the first time started to manufacture trucks and locomotives, tractors and planes. Big industrial complexes sprang up at Paotow, Wuhan and Anshan; dams rose to harness the great rivers; some 50 million newly irrigated acres were added to the nation's farmland. Chinese products invaded foreign markets.
But by 1957, the farm sector of the economy was already sagging--only 8% of the nation's capital investment had been allotted to its development. Though the gross industrial product increased by 123%, gross farm production rose a mere 26%, scarcely more than the eight-year population growth, by Western estimates. Common sense demanded that more help be given agriculture, even if it meant a pause in the forced drive toward heavy industry. But Mao Tse-tung treats economic problems exactly as he would an enemy's main line of resistance: by ordering forward a human wave to storm and overwhelm it. He conceded that the farms desperately needed chemical fertilizer, machines of all sorts and skilled labor. His solution: let the farmers do it themselves through the commune system.
The Red press and radio excitedly told of Mao's visit to rural Chiuling, where 31,000 peasants had "spontaneously" decided to "go forward on two legs"--build their own factories and blast furnaces in their spare time. Millions of dazed peasants were regimented into the Great Leap. Banners called for 20 YEARS OF PROGRESS IN A SINGLE DAY! Accounting was ignored as a "headache that stands in the way of production." Women were freed from the "drudgery" of housework only to labor 18 hours a day in field and factory. Old folks were shut away in "happiness homes," babies in state-run creches. In the nurseries. Chinese moppets sang:
I have a good mother,
She works in the fields;
She works so hard that the commune
Has presented her with a red flower.
In the Soviet Union, romance took the form of girl-loves-tractor. In Communist China, it is girl-loves-bucket. Gushed a Red propagandist: "The girl carries away the soil as the boy dredges the pond. Sweat drips from their bodies. The girl does not complain of fatigue, although she has carried a thousand loads; nor does the boy feel the chill in the mud. It is not convenient to talk to each other, but they understand each other at heart. Both are heroic fellows. They work until the stars disappear and the sun rises."
Kanpu's Whistles. The instruments Li Fu-chun used to shape the formless multitude were the kanpus, or cadres, who carry out Peking's policies at all levels of society. They hustled China's peasant millions into people's communes, complete with mess halls, barracks, and the loss of identity common to military life. Routed from bed at dawn, the peasants lined up for roll call and marched off under red banners to the mist-hung fields. At the sound of the kanpu's whistle, they raced to their tasks of plowing, weeding or reaping. At the blare of a bugle, they dropped their tools and seized rifles (unloaded) for close-order drill. At the sound of whistles again, they fell to a new set of tasks, hurrying to simple workshops to make canvas shoes, coarse paper or cotton cloth, and to primitive blast furnaces to make pig iron out of low-grade local ore. Across the land, fires from the 2,000,000 tiny "backyard furnaces" lit the night sky. "Everything into the pot!" was the kanpu slogan. The communes put up their own money to buy equipment for new mines, factories, furnaces. Foreign visitors saw cotton gins made of boxes and old boards, textile machinery with wooden parts. In Sinkiang, when they ran out of steel for a pipeline, it was finished with bamboo tubing. A Honan commune owning 6,000 pigs and producing 300,000 Ibs. of fish a year, saw it all taken by the state while the workers' total daily diet was limited to dough buns, a few ounces of chopped cabbage, and a single dish of noodles.
The Junkpile. The Communists had boasted of their conquest of flood and drought. But last year in central China, there was no rain for 200 days in a row. In North China, the Yellow River dried up so completely that a car could be driven on its bed, but in Manchuria rampaging rivers drowned coal mines and steel mills in Anshan and Mukden. Yet bad weather, which Li Fu-chun and Peking's other leaders used as an excuse, was far from the whole explanation of China's woes. Formosa, Hong Kong and China's Kwangtung province have much the same weather. But though Hong Kong crops dropped by 8% and Formosa's by 13%, Kwangtung's agricultural output declined a full 30%. Communist mismanagement accounts for the difference.
Mao Tse-tung had arbitrarily ordered that 10% of the arable land lie fallow, and, to make up for the loss, that what remained be close-planted and deep-plowed. In the endless numbers game of Chinese Communism, everyone enrolled in the double anti campaign (against waste and "conservatism") and helped eliminate the "four pests" (sparrows, rats, flies, mosquitoes). Now it appeared that close-planted wheat spread the ruinous infection of contagious rust. Deep-plowed paddies grew rice shoots so tall and weak that even ordinary winds flattened and destroyed them. The mass slaughter of sparrows brought on an upsurge of grain-devouring insects. Hastily, the Communists replaced sparrows with bedbugs in the "four pests" catalogue. Repeated a Japanese Socialist after a China visit: "All through my tour, I never once saw chemical fertilizer being used in rice fields. China's agricultural standard is 50 years behind Japan's."
After heartbreaking hours of work, the peasants discovered that their homemade pig iron was too brittle for farm implements. Steel ingots from rural communes were too small to be used in modern rolling mills. Many newly built factories either broke down or stood idle for lack of raw materials. The overburdened rail network ground to a halt. Perishable goods rotted on sidings. Rail junctions were choked with unmoved freight.
Exhaustion and apathy did the rest. British Author Felix Greene, a sympathetic visitor, last year toured a Russian-built truck plant in Changchun, saw rusting spare parts piled between buildings, an assembly line moving only three feet a minute, workers standing about doing nothing, a general lack of drive and precision. A Communist survey of 31 key industries this year in Liaoning province uncovered 40,000 tons of abandoned products. At Mukden, because of constant changes in specifications, 7,000 electric motors were thrown on the junkpile.
Bundle of Straw. Throughout these disastrous years, Li Fu-chun ran the controlled chaos of the Chinese economy. Although he was known to be opposed to Mao's extreme economic policies, he did his job ruthlessly--and without getting into trouble over any of China's economic setbacks. His loyalty as well as his immunity (so far) is the result of his background. He is a childhood friend of Mao's, a veteran of the legendary Long March, and, like Mao, a native of Hunan province, whose character Mao explains thus: "If China were Germany, Hunan would be Prussia."
Li Fu-chun's Chinese-Prussian career (he was born in 1900) has spanned the entire period of China's emergence from the feudal stupor of the Manchu Empire to its present bustling and dangerous ignorance under the Communists. When the Chinese Republic was formed, Li was a schoolboy of eleven, playing soccer on the school grounds at Changsha, capital of Hunan. It was in a soccer game that Li first met Mao Tse-tung, eight years his senior and already head of a left-wing study club that Li soon joined. During World War I, France invited 2,000 young Chinese intellectuals to join "work-study" groups near Paris, and Mao's club members volunteered en masse. Mao himself was ready to go with them, but at the last moment changed his mind, deciding that he could "learn more" by staying home.
Reaching France in 1919, Li was taken under the wing of the late Edouard Herriot, mayor of industrial Lyon and afterward Premier of France. Li attended the College de Montargis, 65 miles south of Paris, where he alternated four hours of study a day with four hours' work in the field. Li seemed so immature that his fellow students called him tsao-pao (bundle of straw). He had no particular distaste for work--he was just not very good at it. After Montargis, he briefly held jobs at the Renault and Schneider-Creusot factories.
Red Togetherness. Unemployment freed him for more revolutionary talk in Parisian cafes and garrets with men like Teng Hsiao-ping, Chou En-lai and Chen Yi (now, respectively, Secretary-General of the party, Premier and Foreign Minister of Red China). He also found time to fall in love with an energetic, determined Hunanese girl named Tsai Chang. Soon both joined the Communist Party and were married. In 1924, after stopping off in Moscow, Li and his wife headed back to China, and, at the party's orders, went their separate ways--Tsai Chang to Shanghai to agitate among the workers in the cotton mills, Li Fu-chun to Canton to become an instructor at Chiang Kai-shek's Whampoa Military Academy, where Mao Tse-tung was briefly chief of propaganda.
After Chiang's Kuomintang and the Communists came to bloody parting of the ways, Li and his wife joined the Long March in which Mao led 90,000 Communists 6,000 miles from Kiangsi to the caves of Yenan, escaping the pursuing Kuomintang. Li Fu-chun ably handled supply problems for the fleeing Reds. When the Communists finally reached Yenan 14 months later, only 25,000 of them were left. Li's wife has never fully recovered from the ordeal. Correspondent Edgar Snow dined with the Lis in 1936 and noted in his diary that Tsai Chang still remembered her Paris days and served him an excellent "meal of French cooking." Today, Li and Tsai Chang are the only husband and wife on the party Central Committee.
By 1949, Li was specializing in economics as deputy to Chen Yun, a pragmatic labor organizer from Shanghai. With the Red conquest of the mainland, Li became Minister of Heavy Industry, and went to Moscow in 1950 to help negotiate a 30-year treaty of alliance with Joseph Stalin. In 1953 Li signed the pact under which the Soviet Union agreed to supply money and materiel for China's first Five-Year Plan. His reward was promotion to Chairman of the State Planning Commission.
Bricks for Jade. On the eve of the introduction of the commune system, Li Fu-chun warned that the economy was getting lopsided. Now, he said, there should be concentration on the farm problem. He was strongly supported by his fellow economists. One of them, hiding behind a pseudonym, wrote ominously: "We may gain heavy industry only to lose Man; we may even lose Man without gaining heavy industry."
But Mao Tse-tung's decision was for industry, not man, for greater tension, not less. The sloganeers took over from the economists. Without iron and steel, they shouted, China is "like a fat man--all flesh and no bone and muscle." Did the farms need fertilizer? Crowed an official: "I think of the stomach of every man and animal as a small fertilizer factory."
Li Fu-chun backed down. "I am an amateur," he said. "My views are only 'bricks thrown to obtain jade.' "** The first year of the Great Leap Forward seemed to prove that Mao Tse-tung had once again won his gamble. Peking shouted to the world an astonishing list of production figures, showing that, in factory and farm, the ambitious goals had been exceeded.
But slowly, in the months that followed, Li Fu-chun and his economists discovered the dreadful truth: the statistics were not only inflated but often imaginary. It became obvious that the panicky kanpus had simply given whatever figures they thought the party line demanded.
Finding Scapegoats. Instead of the whopping 375 million tons of food grains originally claimed, Peking admitted a harvest of only 250 million--and most Western experts scaled that figure down to 210 million, only 25 million more than 1957, the year before the Great Leap Forward. The cotton total was cut by a third. Of the boasted 11 million tons of steel, only 8,000,000 were found "usable in industry." By this summer, the figures had fallen so low that Peking refused to announce them, but even observers friendly to the Reds estimate grain production at a mere 150 million tons--substantially lower than the best pre-Red year.
Li Fu-chun lamely explained that the national economy developed from "imbalance to balance and then again to imbalance," but always advanced "uninterruptedly in these wavelike movements." It sounded suspiciously like the capitalist theory of business cycles.
China's economic imbalance was so bad that Communist trade delegations turned up in Australia, France and Canada to buy $362.4 million worth of food grains. Red China's export trade collapsed because of inability to make shipments. To meet commitments abroad, Peking emptied its treasury by sending to London silver bars and gold bullion, including melted-down coins from conquered Tibet. At home the time had come to look for scapegoats.
Mao Tse-tung had already discreetly vanished from the public scene by stepping down as head of state--though retaining his all-powerful chairmanship of the Communist Party. This withdrawal by no means meant that Mao was accepting responsibility for the failure of the communes; it was merely the first step in the classic Communist ploy of disengagement from catastrophe. Since it was now obvious that the planners had been right and the sloganeers wrong, reason would suggest that the sloganeers should suffer. But the Communist solution was to purge the most outspoken of the planners; then the party could majestically change course. Last April Li Fu-chun thundered: "Not merely has agriculture been neglected to promote heavy industry, but there has also been a waste of men, money and materials. There has been inefficient planning."
The Turnabout. Another crash program was launched, this time to help agriculture. As once the farmers had been marched into the factories, now the workers were marched onto the farms. In Kiangsi province, 480,000 workers were ordered out of their industrial plants and into the fields. In Shansi, 400,000 more were (in Peking's phrase) "retrenched" from dam construction and industry to the soil. Now, three years too late, the Communist Party announced that it was putting "industry at the service of agriculture." A Harbin plant switched from making freight cars to repairing tractors; in Kansu, machine-tool makers "agreed" to switch gears and to concentrate on agricultural equipment.
The cruel rigidity of the commune system was conspicuously softened. The workday was cut to ten hours. Husbands and wives were to be permitted their own room, the unappetizing mess halls were shut down, and commune members were allowed to keep such personal belongings as "houses, bicycles, clothing, blankets, quilts, radios, watches and bank deposits." There was even a typical, doublethink explanation for this return to capitalism. "The small freedom within the big collective--this is dialectical unity."
The kanpus, who in the past had been the grim overseers of the communes, were now forbidden to "arbitrarily set output targets, mechanically arrange crop acreage, or rigidly introduce technical measures." As a final insult, the kanpus were told to seek guidance from "wise old peasants."
Army Farms. The supple new line may have been hurried along by unrest in the Red army. The peasant rank and file was naturally bitter at the suffering of its families in the communes. Red army officers resent the use of their men as a labor force. Because of army protests in 1959, Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai was replaced by more pliable Marshal Lin Piao, who instituted a new and supposedly chastening system of sending officers into the ranks for one month each year to wear "ordinary soldiers' uniforms and to eat, live, drill, labor and play together with fellow soldiers." Even generals undergo this treatment, which seems clearly designed to discourage the emergence of an officer caste.
The Red army is mollified by getting plenty of food. On 700 large farms the army raises its own hogs, vegetables and grain. Enlistments far exceed normal requirements, since, as a refugee in Hong Kong put it, "the army's the one place you can get some meat."
Some Gains. What has held Red China together so far is the Communist Party kanpus, the army, the single-minded but aging leadership. Should these rivets begin to loosen, the whole structure might well come apart. Is there any hope, then, of imminent disintegration or revolt?
Almost certainly not, and to count on it would be a dangerous illusion for the West. China is so vast that no calamity can encompass the whole of it. While food is short everywhere, some provinces are far better off than others. Though most factories are badly run, all are not, and despite fatigue there is a slowly growing competence among skilled laborers. The Communists have even found a sunny side to the commune experience. Explained a Red official: "It wasn't production, it was education. Our people were in awe of technological processes. Now they have learned not to be afraid of 'technique.' It has lost its mystery. People who have actually poured their own steel and made things with it feel that they can do anything."
The mere fact that war has finally stopped in China has brought improvements, and would have done so under any regime. Undeniably, in their twelve years in power, the Reds have accomplished some badly needed reforms in Chinese society. An elementary knowledge of hygiene has spread, preventable diseases have been largely controlled, infant mortality has been greatly reduced, women have been released from the iron dominance of husband and mother-in-law, from child marriage and concubinage.
But whatever the gains, they do not begin to offset the price imposed by Peking through oppression and misery. Today no one can be sure how many people share this misery.*** Virtually all Western experts agree that Red China's population is increasing more rapidly than its food supply. Peking seemed to agree until the Great Leap Forward; since then, the attempt to hold down the population through birth control has been virtually abandoned. To Red China's masters, the swarming masses, even hungry, mean military and industrial power. Says a U.S. agricultural expert: "Even if everything were done perfectly for the next 25 years, where would they be? China would still have its narrow margin of arable land, and it would then have a population of a billion people."
Hard to Die. Last week fog and rain began moving down from the Manchurian plains toward the South China coast. Winter brings the end of the growing season, the end of the opportunity to steal food from fields and gardens, or even of scrounging the hills for edible leaves and roots. Winter also brings the need for warm clothes and warming fires. But as Red China enters its fourth winter since the Great Leap Forward, clothing and fuel are in nearly as short supply as food.
In the damp, bone-chilling mornings, factory workers line up in alleyways to buy bits of pancake or oily fritters at outdoor stoves. Often the street hawker runs out of food before half the line is fed. Those who can afford it visit the "free" markets, where peasants sell eggs at 30-c- each, peanuts at $2 per Ib. and chickens at $3 per Ib.
In Shanghai, where failure of the cotton crop has paralyzed textile mills, unemployed workers are being used as street cleaners. And it is becoming hard even to die. In one Kwangtung area, the commune provides one coffin per month, first come, first served. Other corpses must be buried in paper cartons, though some families scrape together enough wood to make triangular coffins, saving on corners.
Technique of Tension. Amid all this, Peking's press and radio blare night and day that China is ringed by imperialist bases, infested with reactionary spies, and subject to all sorts of dastardly plots. Some governments might fear the effect of piling tension on tension, of driving to despair the most docile population. But Mao Tse-tung believes in tension as a normal state. The Chinese masses, he once explained, ''are first poor and secondly 'blank.' That may seem a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. A blank sheet of paper has no marks, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it." From the start. Mao's new and beautiful words have hammered out two themes : 1) the greatness of Chinese Communism and 2) the West's envious wish to destroy it. Mao systematically adds fear to poverty and hate to hunger.
Parades, songs, slogans, brass bands and banners are constantly used to incite the people; plays, books, meetings, orations ceaselessly repeat the message that old China is now a country grown young. A poem of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906) reads:
Past the sunken boat, a thousand sails;
Beyond the diseased oak, 10,000 sap-green trees.
The party's propagandists explain that the decaying West resembles the sunken boat and diseased oak, but that Red China "is flourishing and hopeful, like a thousand sails racing ahead and ten thousand trees turning green."
More appropriate lines, say the refugees in Hong Kong, come from another Tang dynasty poet, Li Po:
The universe is like an inn,
The passing years are like dust.
We complain when we think of the past,
We would complain more if we thought of the future!
* Peking figures, considered by Western experts to be relatively accurate through 1957.
** A polite Chinese expression with a somewhat Madison Avenue flavor. The brick is a coarse, inexpensive article that is thrown out by the speaker so that others will throw in something more valuable like jade, in the form of criticisms and suggestions. It is something like saying of an idea: "Let's put it on the train and see if it gets off at Hunan."
*** The exact population of China is unknown. In 1948, during the civil war, the Nationalist government estimated, on the basis of a partial census, that there were 460 million mainland Chinese. Today the Nationalists on Formosa insist that mainland population has dropped to 450 million. Nationalist Historian Hu Shih, under a complex and interpretive system, insists that there are only 300 million. In 1953 the Chinese Communists held a nationwide census and came up with a figure of 582.6 million, and now estimate a population of 670-680 million. The latest figures published by the U.S. Census Bureau are restricted to the year 1958 and give China's population as 678 million. The U.S. independent Population Reference Bureau estimates that there were 716 million Chinese in mid-1961, a figure agreeing with that of India's demographic expert, Dr. Sripati Chandrasekhar.
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