Disarray

The rulers of Red China came as close as they dared to a public admission of failure.

For three weeks, the National People's Congress met in secret in Peking. In the vast, modernistic Great Hall of the People, 1,027 delegates gathered to hear the new line. Premier Chou En-lai and other top brass were seated beneath a tan, tasseled curtain bedecked with the huge, five-starred Red Chinese seal of state. All foreigners were barred, even representatives of Peking's one dependable European ally, little Albania.

Finally last week, Peking published a summary of Premier Chou En-lai's state of the nation speech to the Congress. Chou announced that China's economy had "begun to take a turn for the better." but this tepid claim was not supported by statistics of any kind, much less by the grandiose and Utopian figures that were trumpeted to the world in 1960. Chou blamed China's food shortage on "serious natural calamities," and dwelt far more on overcoming present difficulties than on striving for future victories.

New Order. Premier Chou submitted a ten-point program to the Congress; even in its vague generalities, translators of Communist doublespeak find admissions of China's severe economic crisis. Instead of the old slogans about "20 years of progress in a single day!", there seemed little hope now of doing more than feeding and clothing the Chinese people and supplying them with the barest necessities. The Communist leaders completely reversed the old policy of giving priority to heavy industry, which had nearly wrecked China's agriculture; the new demand was for "all-round balance" between branches of the economy "in the order of agriculture, light industry and heavy industry."

Another Red backdown came on the "bourgeois" front. During the big drive to nationalize China's factories in 1956, their original owners were given monthly interest payments in return for "advice" on plant operation. The payments were scheduled to stop this year. Instead, Chou's program deems it necessary to "unite the patriotic elements of the national bourgeoisie" by prolonging the payments for another three years.

With its home sector in disarray, there was some evidence that Red China may be willing to resolve its ideological quarrel with the Soviet Union. Before the Congress. Chou En-lai protested that China, as always, was "firmly and unswervingly" a friend of Russia, paid lip service to the Khrushchev line--usually derided in China--of peaceful coexistence with non-Communist countries.

Sought Fissures. A Soviet trade mission concluded a new economic agreement for 1962 with Peking last week. China will exchange tin, mercury, wool, silk fabrics, readymade clothes and handicrafts for Russian oil products, chemicals, trucks, scientific instruments and machinery parts. Significantly, China undertakes to export no food, and the Russians apparently were supplying little or no equipment related to heavy industry.

At a banquet celebrating the trade agreement. Soviet Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko carried the thaw a bit further by pledging that "all attempts by the imperialists and various reactionaries to seek fissures in the relations between the Soviet Union and China are doomed to failure." But despite the slight show of conciliation on both sides, the Communist world's most fascinating quarrel seemed a long way from being patched.

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