Red China: The Slow Creep Forward

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From Manchuria to the upper Yangtse, Red China lay snowbound. In the drought-ridden northwest provinces, hundreds of thousands of peasants, students, and Communist cadres in patched cotton tunics marched through the icy, windswept wheat and barley fields armed with buckets of water to pour on the parched acres. In Szechwan province, farmers gathered nitrogen-rich pig manure in an effort to make up for a woeful lack of chemical fertilizers. In barbershops and mortuaries, others gathered human hair for the foreign wig market (5,000 tons last year brought $5.5 million to China). And in Peking itself, Chinese Communist leaders celebrated the Winter Solstice Festival with $10 meals of Peking duck, dipping the lacquered skin in sweet sauce, then rolling it with onions in wafer-thin pancakes. Thus last week did Red China look ahead to its new five-year plan.

Still benumbed by the disaster of 1958's "Great Leap Forward," Red China's economy is barely creeping today. During the first two or three years of the new plan, Peking must rely on foreign grain (anywhere from 112 million to 466 million bushels from Canada alone) to feed a steadily growing population: the 1965 grain harvest fell 3,000,000 tons short of 1964's output. What improvement in the food situation that has occurred is due largely to the relative freedom of peasants to raise their own livestock and till small private plots of land. With the grudging permission of a regime desperate to put some life back into the economy, fully 80% of Red China's pigs and 95% of its poultry are privately produced and sold in small free markets in the villages. The future of such free enterprise does not seem bright; editorials in the party press have begun to warn that "the fight against speculation of private dealers is a long and complex struggle: the collective must come first."

Industrial output has shown a modest gain. The growth rate (5%-8% in 1964) apparently has climbed to 11%. The next five years will see some $14 billion invested annually in "capital construction" (precision-instrument plants, integrated steel mills, tractor factories), and already industry has supplied agriculture with 50,000 sorely needed tractors and the beginnings of a chemical-fertilizer program.

But Peking's foreign adventures-and its efforts to develop a nuclear delivery capacity—strain heavily at the economy. Support for Viet Nam's "war of national liberation" and the crash development programs going on in nuclear weaponry cost Peking up to $5 billion a year—nearly half of what goes into industrial investment. U.S. experts estimate that it may take only ten years for Red China to develop a ballistic-missile system capable of delivering a thermonuclear punch to Western Europe or the Western U.S. Until that day, Mao insists that his millions keep their belts tight.