Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

• Share

(3 of 6)

∙ THE MILITARY. Red China's armed forces of 2,700,000 men—roughly equal to the U.S.'s 2,935,562 and Russia's more than 3,000,000—is formidable, but not a modern force by American or Russian standards. The infantry, 1.8 million men divided into 35 field armies (110 divisions), is well trained and adequately armed with light weapons, but it is woefully deficient in transportation, maintenance, service, communications and medical branches. In addition, there are a million security police and a militia of upwards of 20 million, most of them armed with makeshift or hand-me-down weapons. The army could probably defend China well in any homeland war against an invader, but its deficiencies allow it little ability to move far beyond China's borders. The Chinese air force is second rate, consisting of about 175,000 men and 2,500 aircraft. Most of the jets (1,900) are obsolete for combat against the best U.S. and Russian craft. The country's navy is negligible by big-power standards: 140,000 men, 30 to 50 diesel-powered Russian submarines, one missile-launching sub, a few destroyers and a flock of motorized junks. Despite three test explosions, nuclear capacity is still elementary. About 1,300 engineers and 500 scientists are working on the bomb, and estimates are that there will be ten to 20 bombs by the end of 1967. But there will be no ICBM until at least 1970, and, unless there is a real forced draft effort, no serious ability to get a bomb on target with that missile until about 1985.

∙ THE ECONOMY. It is still quite a mess, but improving. China's gross national product is estimated at $70 billion (compared with Japan's $71 billion, Britain's $86 billion, the U.S.'s $714 billion). After a rapid expansion in the first decade of Red rule (the G.N.P. reached $85 billion in 1959), the economy was badly set back by the failure of the Great Leap Forward (backyard steel furnaces, instant communization), a monument to statist mismanagement. University of Michigan Professor Alexander Eckstein believes that the mismanagement of the Leap "cost the Chinese economy roughly a decade of growth." The economy has been improving for the last two or three years, but it is now approaching only its 1957 levels. (By contrast, little Taiwan's per-capita production is almost three times as large as Red China's.) Another indicator of the economy's state is the number of motor vehicles in Red China; the country's pitiful total of 236,600 compares with 5,782,085 for Japan, 4,391,000 for the Soviet Union, 830,063 for New Zealand. As for any comparison with the U.S., there are nearly three times as many cars and trucks in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (706,653), as in all of Red China. Mainland China remains largely an underdeveloped country, still at subsistence level. Its economy is still basically agricultural, and its agriculture is still largely primitive. Just to keep up with an annual increase of 15 million people in population, the regime needs to increase food production by 2% to 3% a year—a mark it has not yet attained. Concentration of food production has forced a cutback in the rate of new plant construction, and the removal of Russian aid and the high cost of nuclear development have also hurt the economy.