Red China: The Loss of Man

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furnaces in their spare time. Millions of dazed peasants were regimented into the Great Leap. Banners called for 20 YEARS OF PROGRESS IN A SINGLE DAY! Accounting was ignored as a "headache that stands in the way of production." Women were freed from the "drudgery" of housework only to labor 18 hours a day in field and factory. Old folks were shut away in "happiness homes," babies in state-run crèches. In the nurseries. Chinese moppets sang:

I have a good mother,

She works in the fields;

She works so hard that the commune

Has presented her with a red flower.

In the Soviet Union, romance took the form of girl-loves-tractor. In Communist China, it is girl-loves-bucket. Gushed a Red propagandist: "The girl carries away the soil as the boy dredges the pond. Sweat drips from their bodies. The girl does not complain of fatigue, although she has carried a thousand loads; nor does the boy feel the chill in the mud. It is not convenient to talk to each other, but they understand each other at heart. Both are heroic fellows. They work until the stars disappear and the sun rises."

Kanpu's Whistles. The instruments Li Fu-chun used to shape the formless multitude were the kanpus, or cadres, who carry out Peking's policies at all levels of society. They hustled China's peasant millions into people's communes, complete with mess halls, barracks, and the loss of identity common to military life. Routed from bed at dawn, the peasants lined up for roll call and marched off under red banners to the mist-hung fields. At the sound of the kanpu's whistle, they raced to their tasks of plowing, weeding or reaping. At the blare of a bugle, they dropped their tools and seized rifles (unloaded) for close-order drill. At the sound of whistles again, they fell to a new set of tasks, hurrying to simple workshops to make canvas shoes, coarse paper or cotton cloth, and to primitive blast furnaces to make pig iron out of low-grade local ore. Across the land, fires from the 2,000,000 tiny "backyard furnaces" lit the night sky. "Everything into the pot!" was the kanpu slogan. The communes put up their own money to buy equipment for new mines, factories, furnaces. Foreign visitors saw cotton gins made of boxes and old boards, textile machinery with wooden parts. In Sinkiang, when they ran out of steel for a pipeline, it was finished with bamboo tubing. A Honan commune owning 6,000 pigs and producing 300,000 Ibs. of fish a year, saw it all taken by the state while the workers' total daily diet was limited to dough buns, a few ounces of chopped cabbage, and a single dish of noodles.

The Junkpile. The Communists had boasted of their conquest of flood and drought. But last year in central China, there was no rain for 200 days in a row. In North China, the Yellow River dried up so completely that a car could be driven on its bed, but in Manchuria rampaging rivers drowned coal mines and steel mills in Anshan and Mukden. Yet bad weather, which Li Fu-chun and Peking's other leaders used as an excuse, was far from the whole explanation of China's woes. Formosa, Hong Kong and China's Kwangtung province have much the same weather. But though Hong Kong crops dropped by 8% and Formosa's by 13%, Kwangtung's agricultural output declined a full 30%. Communist mismanagement accounts