Red China: The Loss of Man

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But whatever the gains, they do not begin to offset the price imposed by Peking through oppression and misery. Today no one can be sure how many people share this misery.*** Virtually all Western experts agree that Red China's population is increasing more rapidly than its food supply. Peking seemed to agree until the Great Leap Forward; since then, the attempt to hold down the population through birth control has been virtually abandoned. To Red China's masters, the swarming masses, even hungry, mean military and industrial power. Says a U.S. agricultural expert: "Even if everything were done perfectly for the next 25 years, where would they be? China would still have its narrow margin of arable land, and it would then have a population of a billion people."

Hard to Die. Last week fog and rain began moving down from the Manchurian plains toward the South China coast. Winter brings the end of the growing season, the end of the opportunity to steal food from fields and gardens, or even of scrounging the hills for edible leaves and roots. Winter also brings the need for warm clothes and warming fires. But as Red China enters its fourth winter since the Great Leap Forward, clothing and fuel are in nearly as short supply as food.

In the damp, bone-chilling mornings, factory workers line up in alleyways to buy bits of pancake or oily fritters at outdoor stoves. Often the street hawker runs out of food before half the line is fed. Those who can afford it visit the "free" markets, where peasants sell eggs at 30¢ each, peanuts at $2 per Ib. and chickens at $3 per Ib.

In Shanghai, where failure of the cotton crop has paralyzed textile mills, unemployed workers are being used as street cleaners. And it is becoming hard even to die. In one Kwangtung area, the commune provides one coffin per month, first come, first served. Other corpses must be buried in paper cartons, though some families scrape together enough wood to make triangular coffins, saving on corners.

Technique of Tension. Amid all this, Peking's press and radio blare night and day that China is ringed by imperialist bases, infested with reactionary spies, and subject to all sorts of dastardly plots. Some governments might fear the effect of piling tension on tension, of driving to despair the most docile population. But Mao Tse-tung believes in tension as a normal state. The Chinese masses, he once explained, ''are first poor and secondly 'blank.' That may seem a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. A blank sheet of paper has no marks, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it." From the start. Mao's new and beautiful words have hammered out two themes : 1) the greatness of Chinese Communism and 2) the West's envious wish to destroy it. Mao systematically adds fear to poverty and hate to hunger.

Parades, songs, slogans, brass bands and banners are constantly used to incite the people; plays, books, meetings, orations ceaselessly repeat the message that old China is now a country grown young. A poem of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906) reads:

Past the sunken boat, a thousand sails;

Beyond the diseased oak, 10,000 sap-green trees.

The party's propagandists explain that the decaying West resembles the sunken boat and diseased