Red China: The Loss of Man

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Communist China's admission. The U.S. again expects to postpone the decision (the probable device will be referral of the matter to a study group), but it can no longer avoid debate of the issue.

Meanwhile, by encouraging incessant guerrilla campaigns in Laos and South Viet Nam, Red China seeks to gain control of Southeast Asia, thereby hoping to inflict a major defeat on the U.S. It keeps committing acts of aggression against its neighbors; having ruthlessly conquered and exploited Tibet, it is stirring up continuous border troubles with India. Last week India sent a strong note to Peking, protesting new border incursions by Chinese troops, who already occupy 12,000 sq. mi. of Indian territory. Peking moreover rivals Moscow for control of the Communist world, as became clear at the 22nd Party Congress, setting itself up as the guide and model for the world's underdeveloped nations and claiming Marxism's true ideological heritage. Peking argues that under Khrushchev's anti-Stalin line, the Soviet Union has grown fat and bourgeois and lacks revolutionary zeal in dealing with the West. Red China has even announced that it will develop its own nuclear weapons and many in the West take the threat seriously.

This is the paradox behind the China debate: a country that seeks the status of a world power, that defies both Washington and Moscow, that is driving to produce nuclear bombs, cannot even feed its own people.

The Experiment. In the past eleven months Red China has admitted only one non-Communist newsman—Fernand Gigon, a Swiss journalist, who took the pictures on the following pages. Gigon and other foreign visitors tell a story that supports the refugees' version of Red Chinese reality, sharply contradicts Peking's propaganda as well as the enthusiastic tales of such impressionable visitors as Britain's Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery. In fact, even Red China's normally boastful leaders guardedly admit serious trouble. In his comfortable villa at Hangchow, Chairman Mao Tse-tung told France's ex-Cabinet Minister François Mitterand that he knew "Western newspapers have printed large headlines on what they call the famine in China." But it was not a famine, insisted Mao, only "a period of scarcity."

China's history has been one long "period of scarcity." But in the past, China's endemic hunger had most often been the result of war, of natural disasters, of ignorance about how land should be treated and how man could be kept alive. In contrast, China's present hunger is the result of a vast plan. It is, moreover, happening when, for the first time in decades, there is no war in China, when elsewhere poverty is being abolished, and under a regime that has promised to end backwardness and social injustice.

Says TIME's Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow: "This is not merely another catastrophe common in the history of China, such as the northern droughts in the 1870s or the floods and famines of the 1920s, when millions starved. This is, rather, a rationed, regimented hunger that signifies more than China's traditional struggle for survival. It symbolizes the miscarriage of the most massive social experiment ever undertaken—the Communist attempt to transform China overnight from the most impoverished country in the world into a major industrial