Red China: The Loss of Man

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Li was taken under the wing of the late Edouard Herriot, mayor of industrial Lyon and afterward Premier of France. Li attended the College de Montargis, 65 miles south of Paris, where he alternated four hours of study a day with four hours' work in the field. Li seemed so immature that his fellow students called him tsao-pao (bundle of straw). He had no particular distaste for work—he was just not very good at it. After Montargis, he briefly held jobs at the Renault and Schneider-Creusot factories.

Red Togetherness. Unemployment freed him for more revolutionary talk in Parisian cafés and garrets with men like Teng Hsiao-ping, Chou En-lai and Chen Yi (now, respectively, Secretary-General of the party, Premier and Foreign Minister of Red China). He also found time to fall in love with an energetic, determined Hunanese girl named Tsai Chang. Soon both joined the Communist Party and were married. In 1924, after stopping off in Moscow, Li and his wife headed back to China, and, at the party's orders, went their separate ways—Tsai Chang to Shanghai to agitate among the workers in the cotton mills, Li Fu-chun to Canton to become an instructor at Chiang Kai-shek's Whampoa Military Academy, where Mao Tse-tung was briefly chief of propaganda.

After Chiang's Kuomintang and the Communists came to bloody parting of the ways, Li and his wife joined the Long March in which Mao led 90,000 Communists 6,000 miles from Kiangsi to the caves of Yenan, escaping the pursuing Kuomintang. Li Fu-chun ably handled supply problems for the fleeing Reds. When the Communists finally reached Yenan 14 months later, only 25,000 of them were left. Li's wife has never fully recovered from the ordeal. Correspondent Edgar Snow dined with the Lis in 1936 and noted in his diary that Tsai Chang still remembered her Paris days and served him an excellent "meal of French cooking." Today, Li and Tsai Chang are the only husband and wife on the party Central Committee.

By 1949, Li was specializing in economics as deputy to Chen Yun, a pragmatic labor organizer from Shanghai. With the Red conquest of the mainland, Li became Minister of Heavy Industry, and went to Moscow in 1950 to help negotiate a 30-year treaty of alliance with Joseph Stalin. In 1953 Li signed the pact under which the Soviet Union agreed to supply money and materiel for China's first Five-Year Plan. His reward was promotion to Chairman of the State Planning Commission.

Bricks for Jade. On the eve of the introduction of the commune system, Li Fu-chun warned that the economy was getting lopsided. Now, he said, there should be concentration on the farm problem. He was strongly supported by his fellow economists. One of them, hiding behind a pseudonym, wrote ominously: "We may gain heavy industry only to lose Man; we may even lose Man without gaining heavy industry."

But Mao Tse-tung's decision was for industry, not man, for greater tension, not less. The sloganeers took over from the economists. Without iron and steel, they shouted, China is "like a fat man—all flesh and no bone and muscle." Did the farms need fertilizer? Crowed an official: "I think of the stomach of every man and animal as a small fertilizer factory."

Li Fu-chun backed down. "I am an amateur," he said. "My views are only 'bricks thrown to obtain