Red China: The Loss of Man

• Share

(7 of 10)

jade.' "** The first year of the Great Leap Forward seemed to prove that Mao Tse-tung had once again won his gamble. Peking shouted to the world an astonishing list of production figures, showing that, in factory and farm, the ambitious goals had been exceeded.

But slowly, in the months that followed, Li Fu-chun and his economists discovered the dreadful truth: the statistics were not only inflated but often imaginary. It became obvious that the panicky kanpus had simply given whatever figures they thought the party line demanded.

Finding Scapegoats. Instead of the whopping 375 million tons of food grains originally claimed, Peking admitted a harvest of only 250 million—and most Western experts scaled that figure down to 210 million, only 25 million more than 1957, the year before the Great Leap Forward. The cotton total was cut by a third. Of the boasted 11 million tons of steel, only 8,000,000 were found "usable in industry." By this summer, the figures had fallen so low that Peking refused to announce them, but even observers friendly to the Reds estimate grain production at a mere 150 million tons—substantially lower than the best pre-Red year.

Li Fu-chun lamely explained that the national economy developed from "imbalance to balance and then again to imbalance," but always advanced "uninterruptedly in these wavelike movements." It sounded suspiciously like the capitalist theory of business cycles.

China's economic imbalance was so bad that Communist trade delegations turned up in Australia, France and Canada to buy $362.4 million worth of food grains. Red China's export trade collapsed because of inability to make shipments. To meet commitments abroad, Peking emptied its treasury by sending to London silver bars and gold bullion, including melted-down coins from conquered Tibet. At home the time had come to look for scapegoats.

Mao Tse-tung had already discreetly vanished from the public scene by stepping down as head of state—though retaining his all-powerful chairmanship of the Communist Party. This withdrawal by no means meant that Mao was accepting responsibility for the failure of the communes; it was merely the first step in the classic Communist ploy of disengagement from catastrophe. Since it was now obvious that the planners had been right and the sloganeers wrong, reason would suggest that the sloganeers should suffer. But the Communist solution was to purge the most outspoken of the planners; then the party could majestically change course. Last April Li Fu-chun thundered: "Not merely has agriculture been neglected to promote heavy industry, but there has also been a waste of men, money and materials. There has been inefficient planning."

The Turnabout. Another crash program was launched, this time to help agriculture. As once the farmers had been marched into the factories, now the workers were marched onto the farms. In Kiangsi province, 480,000 workers were ordered out of their industrial plants and into the fields. In Shansi, 400,000 more were (in Peking's phrase) "retrenched" from dam construction and industry to the soil. Now, three years too late, the Communist Party announced that it was putting "industry at the service of agriculture." A Harbin plant switched from making freight cars to repairing tractors; in Kansu,