Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.RED CHINA: The God of Water
Where does the bumper harvest come from?
From the Communist Party. Insects and pests and diseases were eradicated.
The God of Water overpowered.
Hard work lasted 300 days.
Strength was turned into grain.
Thus, only six months ago, an imaginative member of the Chinese Politburo summed up his government's agricultural policies in a Peasant Poem, and no one inside China at the time was of a mind to doubt a single line of it. In 1959, Peking had declared, the nation's farms would outproduce by 40% even last year's staggering claim of 375 million tons...
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