Red China: The Loss of Man

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Mao Tse-tung had arbitrarily ordered that 10% of the arable land lie fallow, and, to make up for the loss, that what remained be close-planted and deep-plowed. In the endless numbers game of Chinese Communism, everyone enrolled in the double anti campaign (against waste and "conservatism") and helped eliminate the "four pests" (sparrows, rats, flies, mosquitoes). Now it appeared that close-planted wheat spread the ruinous infection of contagious rust. Deep-plowed paddies grew rice shoots so tall and weak that even ordinary winds flattened and destroyed them. The mass slaughter of sparrows brought on an upsurge of grain-devouring insects. Hastily, the Communists replaced sparrows with bedbugs in the "four pests" catalogue. Repeated a Japanese Socialist after a China visit: "All through my tour, I never once saw chemical fertilizer being used in rice fields. China's agricultural standard is 50 years behind Japan's."

After heartbreaking hours of work, the peasants discovered that their homemade pig iron was too brittle for farm implements. Steel ingots from rural communes were too small to be used in modern rolling mills. Many newly built factories either broke down or stood idle for lack of raw materials. The overburdened rail network ground to a halt. Perishable goods rotted on sidings. Rail junctions were choked with unmoved freight.

Exhaustion and apathy did the rest. British Author Felix Greene, a sympathetic visitor, last year toured a Russian-built truck plant in Changchun, saw rusting spare parts piled between buildings, an assembly line moving only three feet a minute, workers standing about doing nothing, a general lack of drive and precision. A Communist survey of 31 key industries this year in Liaoning province uncovered 40,000 tons of abandoned products. At Mukden, because of constant changes in specifications, 7,000 electric motors were thrown on the junkpile.

Bundle of Straw. Throughout these disastrous years, Li Fu-chun ran the controlled chaos of the Chinese economy. Although he was known to be opposed to Mao's extreme economic policies, he did his job ruthlessly—and without getting into trouble over any of China's economic setbacks. His loyalty as well as his immunity (so far) is the result of his background. He is a childhood friend of Mao's, a veteran of the legendary Long March, and, like Mao, a native of Hunan province, whose character Mao explains thus: "If China were Germany, Hunan would be Prussia."

Li Fu-chun's Chinese-Prussian career (he was born in 1900) has spanned the entire period of China's emergence from the feudal stupor of the Manchu Empire to its present bustling and dangerous ignorance under the Communists. When the Chinese Republic was formed, Li was a schoolboy of eleven, playing soccer on the school grounds at Changsha, capital of Hunan. It was in a soccer game that Li first met Mao Tse-tung, eight years his senior and already head of a left-wing study club that Li soon joined. During World War I, France invited 2,000 young Chinese intellectuals to join "work-study" groups near Paris, and Mao's club members volunteered en masse. Mao himself was ready to go with them, but at the last moment changed his mind, deciding that he could "learn more" by staying home.

Reaching France in 1919,