Red China: The Loss of Man

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power."

The man most responsible for the experiment is Vice Premier Li Fu-chun, the 61-year-old chairman of Red China's State Planning Commission. Thin, grey-haired, bookish and self-effacing, Li Fu-chun has been in charge of "squeezing" the peasants during the three bitter years, beginning in 1958, of the Great Leap Forward, which was aimed at giving China an industrial base greater than that of Britain. From Li's neat office in Embracing Kindness Hall—a two-story Manchu dynasty palace in Peking's Forbidden City—have poured the blueprints and directives that marshaled China's millions into antlike armies to dig canals, mine coal and iron ore, and work the soil of 24,000 spartan people's communes. It has been clear for some time that the Great Leap was really a leap into disaster, but the extent of the failure is only now becoming plain. By fanatically stressing industry, Peking nearly wrecked China's agriculture—without accomplishing its industrial goals, either. At present, Li Fu-chun is masterminding a gigantic turnabout, trying to relax some of the inhuman pressures on China's peasants in order to maintain at least subsistence food production.

Comparative Miracles. At the moment of victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, Mao Tse-tung resolved that, after decades of devastation, starting from a primitive economy, China must industrialize—not primarily for a better life, but so that China could become a militant force in world affairs.

Out of the turmoil that was uprooting China's ancient society, out of the alternation of hope and terror, of promised reward and present punishment, Communist China worked single-mindedly toward Mao's goal—and achieved comparative miracles. In eight years, the cotton harvest was up 30% from its prewar high to 1,600,000 tons. Steel production rose nearly six times above the 1943 peak of 900,000 tons,* although even this spectacular advance brought China's per capita steel production only to 4% of Japan's. With Soviet technical aid, China for the first time started to manufacture trucks and locomotives, tractors and planes. Big industrial complexes sprang up at Paotow, Wuhan and Anshan; dams rose to harness the great rivers; some 50 million newly irrigated acres were added to the nation's farmland. Chinese products invaded foreign markets.

But by 1957, the farm sector of the economy was already sagging—only 8% of the nation's capital investment had been allotted to its development. Though the gross industrial product increased by 123%, gross farm production rose a mere 26%, scarcely more than the eight-year population growth, by Western estimates. Common sense demanded that more help be given agriculture, even if it meant a pause in the forced drive toward heavy industry. But Mao Tse-tung treats economic problems exactly as he would an enemy's main line of resistance: by ordering forward a human wave to storm and overwhelm it. He conceded that the farms desperately needed chemical fertilizer, machines of all sorts and skilled labor. His solution: let the farmers do it themselves through the commune system.

The Red press and radio excitedly told of Mao's visit to rural Chiuling, where 31,000 peasants had "spontaneously" decided to "go forward on two legs"—build their own factories and blast