CHINA: Tiger Rag

In Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communist hunting ground, businessmen are known as "tigers." They are fair game at all seasons for bloodthirsty bureaucrats, who have orders to fill the party's war chest from the "illgotten wealth" of the rich. Last week the Red People's government announced the "successful conclusion" of the biggest tiger hunt since the Soviet Union exterminated the kulaks.

In five months, the "Five-Antis Campaign"—against "bribery, tax evasion, cheating in contracts, stealing of state property and theft of state economic secrets"—had killed thousands of tigers (many were suicides) and enriched the hard-up Red regime by some $200 million worth of confiscated property. The Five-Antis drive in effect served as a war bond drive for Korea—except that the Chinese businessmen won't get their money back and won't produce at the old rate. Enriched by the booty, government finances were obviously better; after a half year's lapse, the Communists began buying goods through British Hong Kong.

The bureaucratic hunters had:

¶ Investigated and punished 90,000 Shanghai merchants;

¶Found 90% of Tientsin's businessmen guilty of corruption;

¶Fined 30,000 Cantonese firms and confiscated 600 factories for failure to pay up. But the bosses agreed that some mistakes had been made. In their zeal to get at the helpless tigers, said the Peking People's Daily, party members had classified too many merchants as "half law-abiding," when they were entitled to a higher rating, to wit, "essentially law-abiding." South China's railroad system had broken down when the tiger hunters sacked its entire staff. So many businesses had been ruined that "trade outlets had lapsed into inactivity."

To stave off a complete collapse of business, the Reds last week called off the hunt. To the impoverished tigers that remain, junketing Red commissars explained Peking's new "policy of positive help." Now that businessmen have been relieved of their property and savings, it is their patriotic duty, the commissars said, to pitch in and put the People's economy back on its feet. At least until the next tiger hunt.