TIME on China 02.25.1966 Red China: Frustrated & Alone

  

Friday, Feb. 25, 1966 Red China: Frustrated & Alone If it is possible for a nation of 700 million people to have a nervous breakdown, Communist China is perilously close to the breaking point. Its craving for victory in Viet Nam, where it has staked its revolutionary reputation on the success of "the war of national liberation," has been frustrated by the stepped-up American commitment. Traditionally paranoid about foreigners, China has become more isolated and sealed off than any other Communist state (including Stalin's Russia). Led by aging, ethnocentric men with little personal knowledge of the world beyond, it feels encircled and threatened on every side. When it directs its voice to the outside world, its normally strident tones now verge on hysteria. This is the nation whose intentions are a main topic of speculation in the West, and were frequently invoked at last week's hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (see THE NATION). About to set off its third nuclear blast, supported by a huge army that could bring full-scale war to Southeast Asia if it marched south, Red China is certainly what Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recently called it: "a threat of greatest concern to the U.S." The threat is the more bother some because China's very frustrations make its reactions so odd and unpredictable. But, while the West worries about China, China is building for itself a worrisome string of problems that looks to be nearly as long as the Great Wall. Pimps & Promises. Its relations with Russia are steadily growing worse. It now refers to the Russians as "pimps of the imperialists," and last week it all but ignored the 16th anniversary of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship—while the Russians marked the occasion by carrying a long Pravda attack on the Chinese. Peking is bristling about Leonid Brezhnev's recent visit to Ulan Bator and the resulting U.S.S.R.-Outer Mongolian treaty, which contains military clauses that China believes are clearly aimed against it. There is mounting evidence that the Soviets will try to practically excommunicate Red China from the world Communist movement at the 23rd Party Congress in Moscow next month, thus isolating the Chinese even further. Because Peking is beginning to look like a loser, its position is markedly deteriorating just about everywhere. Cuba has slammed the door in its face be cause it welshed on a rice deal (TIME, Feb. 18). Last week in Indonesia, once the brightest Red Chinese hope in Southeast Asia, the deputy chairman of the Communist Party went on trial for leading a revolt against the government, and the now-dominant army leaders huffily withdrew their ambassador to Peking for "consultation." Peking has fallen into disrepute in most of Africa, where it has failed to produce on its big promises of aid. Even hard-lining, Peking-backing Albania (which Chou En-lai called "the flower garden of socialism") is showing symptoms of a turn politically and economically away from China and toward its Eastern European neighbors. To the Boondocks. As China's reputation in the outer world slides, its internal policies are hardening and its struggles to erase "revisionist" tendencies increasing. The army has been singled out for stepped-up ideological indoctrination, but the campaign is much broader. Mao Tse-tung recently banished 160,000 artists and writers to the boondocks "to remold their thinking." Vicious attacks have just been launched on two top Chinese Communist writers, Playwright Tien Han, 66, who wrote the Red Chinese national anthem, and Historian Wu Han, 56, the former vice mayor of Peking. Tien was accused of writing a play that "preaches an idealistic historical viewpoint," and Wu has confessed to "using idealism and metaphysics" to attack bureaucracy. China's economy is not doing too badly—it has about recovered to the 1957-58 level after the disastrous "Great Leap Forward"—and its nuclear capability is obviously growing. Experts believe that the Chinese may soon set off a hydrogen explosion in addition to the expected atomic explosion, and that China will try to bypass other delivery means and develop a missile to carry its bombs. But the Chinese are probably testing their bombs as quickly as they make them, will have no atomic arsenal for some time—perhaps not until 1970. In the interim, Mao & Co. have plenty to worry about. Despite stringent nationwide efforts at birth control, China's population continues to escalate with lemming-like abandon. Self-sufficiency in food production remains a hit-or-miss proposition. China's nascent industry is already cranking overtime to produce war supplies for Viet Nam and small arms for tinhorn revolutionaries from Africa to Latin America. Less rabid Reds in Europe and Asia threaten China with ideological isolation—to Mao, the unkindest cut of all. It is not at all strange, in these circumstances, that a note of persecution has crept into China's propaganda. As Peking's Red Flag saw it, everyone is out to get China—particularly "the Soviet-Japanese-American-Indian alliance."

                                  

TIME on China:May. 20, 1966 WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

05.20.1966 WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

Friday, May. 20, 1966 Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA EXCEPT for flies, beggars and Americans, Communist China is not a Forbidden Land in the way in which that celebrated term applied to Tibet. In an age of satellite eyes-in-the-sky, it is certainly not Terra Incognita; its huge land mass, slightly bigger than all 50 U.S. states, lies naked before the orbiting cameras. The figurative curtain that it has drawn around itself is not of iron but, more appropriately for the Orient, of pliable bamboo. Yet of all the earth's too many closed societies, that of Red China ranks as the most ominously secretive. This secretiveness, paranoiac in its intensity, is the more worrisome to the world because militant Red China is the global troublemaker with the greatest revolutionary threat. Red China has brawled with its most powerful neighbors, India and Russia. It has urged on, by word and deed, the war in Viet Nam, has openly supported insurgency in neighboring Thailand and has exported subversion as far away as Africa. Its disciplined, indoctrinated population, which constitutes a quarter of the human race, is told ceaselessly that the U.S. is "the world's chief enemy." To read the intentions of this sullen giant and to formulate its policy toward it, the U.S. obviously and vitally needs to heed the ancient dictum: "Know thine enemy." Knowledge is the basis of policy—but just how much does the U.S. know, and how much can it find out, about a nation of such implacable hostility and resolute secrecy? Sophisticated Snooping There are two answers, one expectable, the other surprising. The first is that the U.S. knows not nearly enough, because secrecy inevitably covers with impenetrable shrouds certain facts about China. The second—and surprising—answer is that the U.S. knows more about Red China than does any other nation, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union. Says an expert who has been studying China for more than 20 years: "We know a lot more about some things in China than the Chinese themselves." The practice of "Sinology"* is enjoying a boom in the U.S.: there are now ten major academic centers and 50 lesser centers for China studies, and some $50 million in private grants has recently been made for such studies. China-watching has become the indispensable underpinning for the evolution of U.S. policy. To get the material they need to form realistic analyses, both Government and academic experts tap numerous and diverse sources, covert and overt. The U.S. maintains its largest consulate in Hong Kong, where a corps of translators collects and analyzes an endless stream of Chinese periodicals, some smuggled out from remote provinces. The compulsive outpourings of Radio Peking and other internal radio stations are monitored by a string of sophisticated snooping devices on China's perimeter. Drone planes, high-flying U-2s and satellite cameras record roads, railways, steel mills, oil wells, nuclear plants, missile ranges and troop movements. U.S. Government analysts early spotted China's gaseous diffusion plant at Lanchow, the plutonium reactor at Paotow, and the atom-bomb test site at Lop Nor in the Taklamakan wastes of Sinkiang. They have predicted well in advance the timing of all three Chinese atomic explosions. China-watchers also pick up clues from the non-American tourists and businessmen (about 10,000 a year) who are now permitted to go on strictly conducted tours arranged by the Red Chinese tourist agency Luxingshe. Though they carefully emphasize the more attractive aspects of Chinese life, the tours nonetheless reveal a good deal of its quality and detail. The accompanying color pictures, taken on one such tour, show smiling children in their best dress, model schools, other civic projects and an air of brisk, bright uplift —but they also make clear the ceaseless indoctrination, the careful regimentation and the firm discipline that pervade life in Red China. The volume of information about Red China has become so huge, in fact, that one of the major problems of both Government and academic Sinologists is how to handle, summarize and evaluate it all. Herewith, based on the best knowledge, deductions and estimates of more than 30 China experts interviewed by ten TIME correspondents in the U.S. and Asia, are the capsulated highlights of what the U.S. knows about Red China: ∙ THE REGIME. Seventeen years after its victory over Chiang Kaishek, the Communist regime is solidly entrenched on the mainland. The chance of an internal revolution that would overthrow the Chinese Communists, says Professor Robert Scalapino of the University of California, "seems remote, barring global war or some other major and unforeseeable crisis." Other China experts agree. The Communists have unified the provinces, centralized all authority and imposed a totalitarian administration that has steadily tightened its grip on all phases of government and life. Chairman Mao Tse-tung's chilling philosophy is that "all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The gun that ensures his control is held by the Chinese Communist Party apparatus, whose 19 million members make up the largest of all national Communist parties. At its apex perch Mao and his top comrades in a seven-member Politburo Standing Committee; beneath them are a twelve-member Politburo, then 94 Central Committeemen. From there the party descends into tens of thousands of local branches whose vigilance reaches into every city block and every village hut. This pervasive network controls all facets of existence, pulls young and old into the web of ideological influence and ensures that no "foreign" political concept can take root. ∙ THE MILITARY. Red China's armed forces of 2,700,000 men—roughly equal to the U.S.'s 2,935,562 and Russia's more than 3,000,000—is formidable, but not a modern force by American or Russian standards. The infantry, 1.8 million men divided into 35 field armies (110 divisions), is well trained and adequately armed with light weapons, but it is woefully deficient in transportation, maintenance, service, communications and medical branches. In addition, there are a million security police and a militia of upwards of 20 million, most of them armed with makeshift or hand-me-down weapons. The army could probably defend China well in any homeland war against an invader, but its deficiencies allow it little ability to move far beyond China's borders. The Chinese air force is second rate, consisting of about 175,000 men and 2,500 aircraft. Most of the jets (1,900) are obsolete for combat against the best U.S. and Russian craft. The country's navy is negligible by big-power standards: 140,000 men, 30 to 50 diesel-powered Russian submarines, one missile-launching sub, a few destroyers and a flock of motorized junks. Despite three test explosions, nuclear capacity is still elementary. About 1,300 engineers and 500 scientists are working on the bomb, and estimates are that there will be ten to 20 bombs by the end of 1967. But there will be no ICBM until at least 1970, and, unless there is a real forced draft effort, no serious ability to get a bomb on target with that missile until about 1985. ∙ THE ECONOMY. It is still quite a mess, but improving. China's gross national product is estimated at $70 billion (compared with Japan's $71 billion, Britain's $86 billion, the U.S.'s $714 billion). After a rapid expansion in the first decade of Red rule (the G.N.P. reached $85 billion in 1959), the economy was badly set back by the failure of the Great Leap Forward (backyard steel furnaces, instant communization), a monument to statist mismanagement. University of Michigan Professor Alexander Eckstein believes that the mismanagement of the Leap "cost the Chinese economy roughly a decade of growth." The economy has been improving for the last two or three years, but it is now approaching only its 1957 levels. (By contrast, little Taiwan's per-capita production is almost three times as large as Red China's.) Another indicator of the economy's state is the number of motor vehicles in Red China; the country's pitiful total of 236,600 compares with 5,782,085 for Japan, 4,391,000 for the Soviet Union, 830,063 for New Zealand. As for any comparison with the U.S., there are nearly three times as many cars and trucks in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (706,653), as in all of Red China. Mainland China remains largely an underdeveloped country, still at subsistence level. Its economy is still basically agricultural, and its agriculture is still largely primitive. Just to keep up with an annual increase of 15 million people in population, the regime needs to increase food production by 2% to 3% a year—a mark it has not yet attained. Concentration of food production has forced a cutback in the rate of new plant construction, and the removal of Russian aid and the high cost of nuclear development have also hurt the economy. ∙ LIVING CONDITIONS. No one is starving any more, and the average Chinese is better off than he was even five years ago. The standard of living is still low, but the people appear healthy and adequately fed and clothed. There are equal if slim rations for all: about 2,000 calories a day of food, two dresses or an equivalent two yards of cotton cloth a year, one bar of washing soap a month. An equitable rationing system of such basics as rice has been introduced. Wage levels and food prices are both low. Chinese earnings range from $8 a month for an apprentice to $24 for a skilled industrial worker, $80 for an engineer, $100 for a party big shot. A pound of pork costs 20¢, a pound of sugar 28¢, a pound of rice 5¢. Housing costs only $1.20 a room per month, but the accommodations are spartan. Flies, beggars and pickpockets have mostly disappeared—but so has something else. "There is no magic and no fascination," wrote Lorenz Stucki of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after a recent visit to Red China. "Life has become an abysmal bore." ∙ MORALE. The temper of the country is generally stoic; there are no signs of popular restiveness, but no signs either of a really contented people. The Chinese are proud that they have achieved unity and become a force on a world scale, after a rankling century of humiliation by foreigners. Now that the country has settled down internally, the party's big problem is to retain revolutionary momentum. This it seeks to do with regular campaigns of "rectification," which Mao defines as "one of the methods of evolving social contradictions in our country" but which is really a fancy word for purge. Though experts disagree about its extent, there is definitely dissidence and some underground opposition to the regime. In 1961 the army was ruthlessly purged of "corrosive and disintegrating influences." Peking is now cracking down hard on the country's 5,000,000 or so intellectuals, some of whom seem to be bothered by the deification of Mao and his thought, the implacable brainwashing and the minute surveillance and shepherding of individuals. The government continues the dreaded practice of shipping urbanites to the country or remote provinces as ideological discipline. ∙ THE LEADERSHIP. Mao Tse-tung is in his 73rd year, and his health seems ever more precarious. The Politburo averages 66 years of age, the Central Committee more than 60. Says Columbia University Professor A. Doak Barnett, a leading China expert: "This means that one can say, with actuarial certainty, that before very long virtually the entire top-leadership group will disappear during a relatively brief period, with results that will be felt at every level of the country." The leadership's ideas are also aging. Practically all of the top men are first-stage revolutionaries who made the Long March, the retreat from Chiang Kai-shek's armies for 6,000 miles from east China to the barren northwest in 1934-35. They are afflicted with the "Yenan complex"—a belief in absolute, rigid adherence to the methods by which they survived and ultimately attained power. There are some among the Chinese leadership who clearly have doubts about the present course of Chinese policy, which is leading to a growing isolation of China; most of them are among the "new generation" that is faced with the day-to-day problems of running the country. Mao and his men are out of touch with and unsympathetic to the younger generation of the party, and Mao has already groomed as his heirs-apparent men who will be dutiful preachers of the Maoist gospel. Among them are Party Doctrinal Elder Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, the party's powerful secretary-general, and Lin Piao, the Defense Minister (see THE WORLD). Eventually, though, the younger generation is bound to rise to leadership, and the China experts hope—but it is only a hope—that they will be more concerned with internal development and less intractable than the present leadership. A Certainty of Change As much as the U.S. knows about Red China, the experts are the first to recognize that there is a great deal that it does not—and should—know. Almost nothing is known, for example, about the exact process of decision making among Mao and his colleagues. Who are the Red Chinese hawks and who are the doves? Is there a show of hands in critical disputes, or does Mao decide by fiat? The hardest information to get is on the party's cadre organization, and only a minimum of biographical material is available on the leadership. The U.S. would like more information on agriculture and more reliable figures on the economy. It is particularly wary about a precise population count; the experts estimate the present population at 750 million, but concede that it could be as low as 650 million or as high as 800 million. China-watching will become increasingly important as the old leaders fade back and the new ones come onstage. Says M.I.T. Professor Lucian Pye: "Though Chinese Communism is here to stay, it is certainly going to change greatly." There are plenty of important clues for the China-watchers to keep their eye out for. They will watch for signs that the younger technocrats in the Chinese government are making any headway against the insistence on doctrinal purity, as the technocrats have done in Russia. Will the successors of Mao, involved with their own problems, retreat in the face of American power in Viet Nam, seek a compromise with the Russians, adopt a less inflammatory international stance, be less adamant about Taiwan? Though no one is certain that a new generation of Chinese leaders would be any more moderate than the Maoists, the U.S. is already directing its policy more at the future generation than at the present regime. Well before the Fulbright hearings, the Administration had been constantly reviewing its China policy. Though the term "containment without isolation" is now in vogue, the U.S. has actually been pursuing such a policy for some time. If China is isolated, she has herself to blame. While opposing China's designs on Southeast Asia by arms, the U.S. has made several overtures—and been rebuffed. It offered, for example, to exchange newsmen and scholars. It still keeps up diplomatic contacts with the Red Chinese in Warsaw. If all of this has done no good so far, most Sinologists feel strongly that it is well worth the effort. Columbia's Barnett describes it as a process of "slowly involving Communist China in more patterns of international intercourse." Says Harvard's John Lindbeck: "One of our obligations as world citizens is to help the Chinese to become more sophisticated." Another Sinologist in his own right, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, speaks eloquently of a latent force that may be at work deep in the body of China as a modifying influence—"the pragmatic genius of the Chinese people." These are the people whom Americans have known and befriended for more than a century, in missionary, educational and trade relations and as allies in a great war. Therefore, says Rusk, the U.S. does not assume that there is anything "eternal" about the "state of hostility" between the U.S. and Red China. "We must continue to explore and analyze all available information on Communist China and keep our own policies up to date." In other words, neither China-containing nor China-watching can be relaxed. *A term that properly applies to the study of traditional Chinese scholarship, but is popularly used today to embrace all studies of China.

TIME on China Apr 9, 1965 - Red China: The Busy Travelers

Friday, Apr. 09, 1965

Red China: The Busy Travelers

Pakistan seems to have a special fascination for Red China's leaders these days. Foreign Minister Chen Yi spent five days there last week, signing a new border agreement with the government of President Mohammed Ayub Khan, and engaging in such tourist antics as a jolting ride atop a camel.
Chen also caused a diplomatic stir in an interview given to a Turkish newsman in Karachi, informing him that Ayub Khan had promised his "good offices" in an effort to bring China and Turkey closer together. Chen Yi thought both countries had a lot in common since Turkey "takes its past from Asia." He added, "China is an injured country. As far as I understand, Turkey has not been free from suffering in her relations with the great powers."
Let Down. It was a shrewd ploy. Turkey had been cold to the idea when it was first broached by Ayub Khan last year. Since then, the Turks have been more ready to listen to Pakistani suggestions of an independent and self-serving foreign policy. Both nations feel a bit let down by the U.S. In Pakistan's case, it is the old grievance over arms shipments to India; in Turkey's, the U.S. position on Cyprus, which Turks regard as pro-Greek.
Several Turkish newspapers were eager for a break with Formosa and recognition of Peking, and even Ankara officials were talking about closer cultural and economic ties with Red China. Understandably well pleased, Chen Yi returned home by way of Nepal, stopping off in Katmandu to inspect a shoe factory built by Chinese technicians and to exude peace, friendship and coexistence.
Floodlit Formal. As Chen Yi left Pakistan, China's Premier Chou En-lai arrived. He had flown to Rumania for the funeral of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, stopped at Tirana, capital of Albania, Peking's most distant and tiniest ally, and jetted on to Algeria and Egypt where he reportedly urged Ahmed ben Bella and Gamal Abdel Nasser not to invite Russia to the second Bandung-style conference of Afro-Asian nations scheduled for June in Algiers. Chou's point: despite its possession of Siberia, Russia is essentially a European country.
In Karachi, Chou got red-carpet treatment, though his name was misspelled "Chau" on a welcoming banner. He had a long and private talk with Ayub Khan, and a formal dinner at the President's floodlit house. Next day a Pakistani spokesman said the discussions had concerned the "tense and delicate situation prevailing in Southeast Asia, with special reference to Viet Nam." Pakistan hoped that "all nations, large and small, Asian and non-Asian, will play their role in bringing tranquillity and peace to that unfortunate country that has seen warfare for over two decades." Ayub was clearly enjoying his new Nehru-like role as world statesman and mediator. Two hours before Chou En-lai left Karachi, Ayub Khan was off on travels of his own—an eight-day state visit to the Soviet Union.

TIME on China Feb 26, 1965 - Asia: A Test for Tigers

[1965.02.26] Asia: A Test for Tigers

Friday, Feb. 26, 1965

Asia: A Test for Tigers

(See Cover) 

Out of Peking's Forbidden City, once the seat of China's emperors and now the headquarters of its Red masters, stomped an angry man in dark sunglasses. He was Marshal Chen Yi, Foreign Minister of the Chinese People's Republic and spokesman for Chairman Mao Tse-tung. "United States imperialism is the most ferocious enemy of the world's people," Chen declared in a speech at the Soviet embassy. "Peaceful coexistence is out of the question. Only in concrete action against the U.S. and its followers can the Chinese-Soviet alliance be tested and tempered."

Moving on to Nepal's embassy, Chen got even more excited. "Sheer drivel!" he cried when asked about U.S. demands that Communist guerrilla attacks in South Viet Nam be stopped. "There will be no peace in Indo-China," prophesied Chen, "so long as the aggressive forces of U.S. imperialism hang on there." Later, Chen told a touring Swiss journalist: "The Chinese people will not stand idly by as North Viet Nam is attacked. China and North Viet Nam go together like teeth and lips."

In that odd, oral simile Chen neglected to say who was the teeth and who was merely the lip. But Peking's friends provided plenty of lip service. From Djakarta to Caracas, mobs led by Chinese Communist and other "students" smashed U.S. embassy windows, burned cars, ripped American flags, winged inkpots, and howled for Lyndon Johnson's blood. Back in Moscow after his eleven-day swing through Asia, So viet Premier Aleksei Kosygin at least partly echoed the Peking line; he promised "appropriate" military aid to the North Vietnamese, and his propaganda machine threatened dire consequences unless "American imperialism" withdraws from Indo-China. On the surface at least, the divided Communist giants were closing ranks.
The Real Issue. Even in the paralyzed U.N. General Assembly, Peking's pals were busy raising a final bit of hell before adjournment. In Cambodia, Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk, who long ago decided that the Red Chinese are bound to win in Asia, is convening an Indo-Chinese People's Conference, at which many of the area's Communist and pro-Communist groups will no doubt demand the withdrawal of the U.S. "aggressors." Sihanouk's scheme was dignified by a letter from Charles de Gaulle, whose Foreign Minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, was in Washington pushing the French line about neutralization of Southeast Asia.

In South Viet Nam itself, the mood oscillated between faint rays of optimism and farce. The U.S. retaliatory air strikes against the North had lifted Saigon morale, and there was some feeling that continued U.S. pressure—rather than just tit-for-tat response—might create a climate of hope in which some political stability could be achieved. But while a new civilian government was trying to set itself up in business, the army engaged in another disheartening series of coups and countercoups (see South Viet Nam). On the military side, things looked a little better. For the moment, the Viet Cong were quiet. Presumably they had been given pause by the U.S. raids of Feb. 7 and 11. And besides, they were tired from the ferocious pace they had set for most of that week: they lost 795 men, more than in any earlier period, while taking 37 American and 290 South Vietnamese lives.

But beyond Saigon politics, beyond the agonizing guerrilla war, beyond the question of further air strikes against North Viet Nam, loomed the basic issue: the U.S. confrontation with Red China. Mao Tse-tung professes to take an unhurried view of the matter. "The Americans will tire," he told U.S. Journalist Edgar Snow recently. "They don't have the patience for this."
Perhaps not. But that is what the conflict comes down to: a test of patience, of will, of strength involving the whole balance of power in Asia.

Foothold on the Rim. In the vast sweep of country from Angkor Wat to the Great Wall, from the Yellow Sea to the Pamirs, Red China seeks hegemony. There is little doubt that Peking has two long-range objectives: 1) to drive the U.S. from the Asian mainland and eventually out of all Asia and 2) to re-establish Chinese borders as they were under the 18th century Manchu Dynasty.

China's borders then penetrated deeply into what is now Soviet territory, both on the west and beyond the Amur River to the north. Manchu China en compassed all of Mongolia, Korea and Taiwan. To the south, China either extracted tribute from much of the IndoChinese peninsula or else dominated trade so thoroughly that tribute was unnecessary. All this made the Chinese hated, feared, but nonetheless respected in the region. Since then, history has not favored Chinese ambition. First the colonial powers of Europe, then the Japanese conquerors early in World War II, and finally the U.S.—after assuming France's responsibilities in 1961—denied China control over the rice bowls of Indo-China. South Viet Nam, Malaysia and Thailand represent salients on the edge of China's sphere of influence.

So the Viet Nam battle comes down to the basic question: Can the U.S. and its allies retain their foothold on the rim of Asia, or must they eventually give way to China's insistent pressure?
Western Force. In one sense, it is absurd that the question should be posed at all, because the Western side is overwhelmingly stronger. If Peking's famous propaganda phrase is applicable to anyone, it is not the U.S. but Red China that is the "paper tiger." 

The U.S. and its allies in the Western Pacific are deployed in a highly mobile, heavily armed arc of military power around China (see map). Carriers, cruisers and attack transports of the U.S. Seventh Fleet range the bulge of Asia from the bleak Kuriles north of Japan to the "gong-tormented" South China Sea. Three Polaris subs recently attached to the fleet add a 48-missile nuclear punch with a range of 1,500 miles, thus freeing the carriers from strategic responsibilities and allowing them to support Viet Nam operations. 

The U.S. Air Force keeps 32 tactical squadrons of strike aircraft, ranging from Japan to the Philippines, while two squadrons of Strategic Air Command B-52s are on station at Guam. Air Force transports could carry a sizable force from Okinawa or Hawaii into Thailand within 24 hours. Since 1962's Laos crisis, which brought U.S. marines into Thailand, the U.S. and the Thais have been busy creating a military infrastructure that would make Thailand a final redoubt if the rest of Indo-China were to be abandoned. Three all-weather, 10,000-ft. jet strips have been built, and the hardware and ammunition needed to supply a brigade of U.S. troops is stockpiled in the countryside. The U.S. has even implemented its own psychological-warfare campaign among the Thais: USIS and Thai Mobile Information Teams produce films in the popular Mohlam style, with pro-Western propaganda messages insinuated in the love lyrics sung by the Mohlam actors.

Also, the British. Off Southeast Asia, a Marine Corps ready force of 1,500 men is embarked continuously, some aboard amphibious landing ships, some on carriers. In addition to its own force of 222,000 men, the U.S. can count with some surety on the support of 550,000 South Korean troops in the event China carries through its threats in that peninsula. The R.O.K. forces have recently been equipped with the latest in American weaponry: Hawk antiaircraft-missile batteries, Northrop F-5 supersonic "Freedom Fighters," and 175-mm. cannon that pack a harder, flatter wallop than anything North Korea possesses. A real showdown would release Chiang Kai-shek's wellarmed, tautly disciplined 600,000-man force, and in that eventuality the U.S. could probably also count on 40,000 SEATO-allied Filipinos. 

Far to the southwest, the British have beefed up their forces to counter Indonesia's Peking-leaning President Sukarno, who threatens to "crush Malaysia." The 70,000 British and Commonwealth troops—including 50 Royal Navy men-o'-war and some 250 bombers—might not join a U.S.-Chinese fight directly, but they could be counted upon to defend the left flank from any incursion.

What can China offer in response? Mostly size and mass. Mao must rely on his powerful, ponderous infantry of 2,500,000 troops, backed by 12 million militiamen.

Well trained in both conventional and guerrilla warfare, the Chinese foot soldier is amply armed with Chinese-made automatic weapons—usually a stamped copy of the Russian World War II vent-barreled burp gun. He is supported by light and medium mortars, bazooka-style rocket launchers, recoilless rifles, and artillery that in performance ranks with the best in the world. As to armor and transport, Mao's millions are woefully underequipped. Some 4,000 Russian T-34 tanks are still operating, but though that machine was first-rank armor during the Korean War, it is now obsolete. Still, armor would be of little use to any army fighting in Southeast Asia, an area about as conducive to good traction as a rumpled rug on a waxed floor.

Weakness in the Air. Though China's air force ranks third in size in the world (behind the U.S. and Russia), its 2,900 planes are mostly obsolete MIG-15s and 17s. Western experts prediet that China will soon start turning out a few advanced MIG-19 and 21 jets on its own, but production will be slow and light. In any air clash with U.S. Navy and Air Force jets over Southeast Asia, Mao's planes would certainly be swept from the skies in a matter of days. Even the Chinese Nationalists, flying slow F-86 Sabre jets armed with Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, were able to shoot down 32 Red Chinese planes during 1958's Formosa Straits dustup. Since then, Red jets have rarely appeared over the Taiwan Straits. Moreover, military experts in Asia note that Chinese jets have not left their borders, even to make a show of force over North Viet Nam.

Of bombers, China mounts 300 Russian-built IL-28 twin-jets, but these planes are incapable of supersonic flight and thus become easy prey for U.S. air defense. China's navy is strictly a coastal-defense outfit, although its 28 submarines—if committed in a surprise thrust against the U.S. Seventh Fleet —could do some damage.

Theoretically, the Chinese might diffuse Western forces by fighting in half a dozen places at once, from Korea to India. But, given their immense logistical problems and other weaknesses, most military experts are sure that the Chinese could not possibly mount a multiple-front war.
Land v. Sky & Sea. In sum, while the U.S. still fears a land-based entanglement with China's vast army, American military superiority is overwhelming in any situation where air and seapower can be brought to bear. Mao Tse-tung seems determined to avoid any such situation. Protesting a little too much, an editorial in People's Daily last week asked: "What is naval and air superiority after all? Even if twelve American aircraft carriers are deployed in this area, it would only mean twelve more airports on the ocean. What can they do, since the outcome of the war in Viet Nam must be decided on the ground?" 

Almost unanimously, military experts believe that Mao wants to avoid any direct encounter with the U.S., if he can possibly help it. His first aim clearly is to continue guerrilla war and subversion, where air-and seapower are least effective — even if the U.S. were to overcome moral and political scruples and use such power fully. Next, Mao wants to use other people's ground forces. As one observer puts it: "He wants the Vietnamese to fight the Americans, and he wants the Laotians and Cambodians and Thais and Burmese and anyone else Peking can subvert to fight the Americans." After his first audience with Mao Tse-tung, the new French ambassador to Peking reportedly cabled Paris in some horror that Mao "regards human life as part of his inventory of resources and is perfectly willing to spend it." But he plainly does not want to start spending the inventory unless he has to. 

Slow Creep Forward. Perhaps the most vulnerable part of China is its economy, which would suffer disastrously in any war. Mao tries to divert Chinese attention from the weakness of the economy by harping on austerity as a kind of ethic. Last week, fearful that the traditional Lantern Festival with its fireworks, kite flying, dragon and lion dances would evoke memories of long-gone "golden eras," the regime sent cadres of girls to block celebrators from entering Shanghai's Temple of the Goddess of Mercy. Shop windows wore posters calling on people to end superstitious practices (one showed a coin on a coil of burning incense, implying that money spent on joss sticks is money profitlessly burnt). Traditional "round-ihe-Kang"* murals no longer depict scenes of filial piety but show "realistic" revolutionary hardship. In Peking, where chrysanthemums and purple cabbages once added daubs of color to the overwhelming grey of the city, the only flowers to be seen are in parks, under signs that read "The Chrysanthemum Is a Collective Flower." The cabbages are being salted down in jars in backyards—a sign that the Chinese believe vegetables will be scarce in the spring.

During the slow creep forward from the disastrous Great Leap six years ago, China's recovery has been uncertain all the way. Western economic analyses show China today at about the same level as 1957—with seven years of population growth adding to the burden. In most areas, the Chinese are still trying to transform a medieval economy into a late 19th century one. Typical of Chinese improvisation is a clever device recently developed for "mechanized" plowing of rice fields: the plow is dragged back and forth by barges sailing in canals at either end of the field.
Although China produces about as much food grain as the U.S., its population (700 million) is nearly four times as large, and Mao's regime must import 6,000,000 tons of grain a year merely to keep its people at subsistence level. Each year fully a third of Peking's convertible foreign exchange is spent on grain.

Aid from Trade. Still, Mao's hard-handed central planners have engineered some striking .gains in industry. Since the Korean War, steel production has increased 800% (still only a low 8-10 million tons a year, v. almost 40 million tons for Japan), coal output has tripled, and petroleum production is 20 times what it was then. As a result, China could within the next few years hope to produce enough fuel to keep its 2,900-plane air force flying for a change. In fact, Western intelligence sources claim that Red China's planes have been much more active in train ing flights over the past six months, indicating that fuel production has already increased considerably.

China has also received an economic boost from the West—through trade. Business between Red China and the non-Communist world rose 30% last year and now comprises more than half of China's total trade. Despite 14 years of U.S. objections, many of Washington's allies are serving Mao's purposes as suppliers and customers. Canada leads the imports list with $155 million in China trade, while Hong Kong and Malaysia took the largest amount of Chinese exports ($340 million). Japan, the object of much Chinese wooing over the past few years, bought $146 million worth of goods from Peking last year, while exporting $143 million to China. France, Britain, West Germany, Australia and Argentina also ranked high in trade with Peking.

Help from Puritans. This recovery from the Great Leap has emboldened Mao to draw up another Five Year Plan (after a three-year lapse) due to begin next year. But Mao knows that the greatest internal danger to his economy is population growth. Each year the Chinese increase in number by roughly 12 million—the equivalent of the population of Taiwan. To cut back on this score, China is once again advocating birth control, and early marriages are frowned upon. Couples who marry too early, in the Party's opinion, are likely to find themselves working hundreds of miles apart. Chinese "puritanism" helps too: boys and girls sleep in segregated dormitories, and block wardens keep a sharp eye out for hanky-panky in hallways or back alleys.

For all his slowly healing economy, Mao is hell-bent on developing a costly nuclear-strike capability. As Marshal Chen Yi once put it: "We'll build atomic bombs, no matter what—even if the job makes it necessary for us to go about without wearing pants." Last week Washington called a second Chinese bomb test imminent, and although the State Department remarked that the second bomb "would appear as of now to have no more military significance than the first," the Chinese might very-well drop the next bomb from a TU4 bomber rather than explode it on a test tower. That would give Mao a great psychological boost in the eyes of already intimidated Asians, hinting at the threat of Chinese delivery capacity.

All this aids Peking's most powerful weapon—subversion. The central agency for foreign subversion is the Party's United Front Work Department. Divided into internal and external, political, economic and military sections, U.F.W.D. seeks to win the favor of nonCommunist nationalists abroad, organizes innumerable friendship associations and cultural societies. As a rule, Peking avoids blatant takeovers of national movements, prefers to give them financial and arms support and help agitate against "imperialist" rule.

Being relatively new to the subversion game, Mao's men frequently make mistakes and are caught in embarrassing situations. In Burundi this month, a high-handed, totally undiplomatic Chinese embassy was expelled lock, stock and barrel, thus depriving Peking of its most important Central African base. But closer to home, China has done well, thanks to a small, skillful group of tirelessly traveling diplomats, headed by Premier Chou En-lai and his substantial shadow, Foreign Minister Chen Yi.

The Hatchet Man. Chen's personality is ideally suited to Peking's purpose: mercurial, cultured, tough, he can referee a pingpong match between Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Chou at Accra, dance with Mrs. Sukarno or talk "NEFOS" and "OLDEFOS" (New Emerging and Old Established Forces) with Mr. Sukarno in Djakarta. In Katmandu some years ago, he flew into a top-popping rage at an Indian reporter who was needling him about Tibet. Another time he delighted Japanese businessmen by mimicking Nikita Khrushchev—Chen's girth made him good casting for the part—growing Red-faced as he repeated Nikita's crack that China was "a mass of human flesh and nothing else." A U.S. reporter once buttonholed Chen and asked him whether China intended to recognize the U.S. Chen's answer: a jolly "No!"

In a sense, Chen Yi, 64, is an outsider who made it into the ranks of Red China's leadership by dint of energy and courage. The hard-core Chinese leaders—Mao, Premier Chou Enlai, President Liu Shao-chi, Marshal Chu Teh—all took part in the Long March, Mao's epic retreat from the Nationalist Armies in 1934. Chen stayed behind, south of the Yangtze River, hence never acquired that special patina of heroism of the Long Marchers. Chen was left behind for good cause: in the early 1930s, he supported an anti-Mao faction in Kiangsi province, and although Chen shrewdly changed horses later, Mao took a long time to forgive him.

As Mao's Kuai-tsu-shou (hatchet man), the rehabilitated Chen quelled a revolt in which hundreds died; during World War II he led Mao's Fourth Army across the Yangtze, later won several major victories in the Civil War, and in 1949 emerged—thanks to Mao —as the "conqueror" of East China. His tough, agile infantrymen chewed up dozens of Nationalist divisions. But for all his military success, Chen was afflicted with what the Chinese Communists call "liberalism"—a certain in ability to adapt to Mao's hard-boiled personal asceticism. Chen prefers Western suits to the stern, closed-collar pajamas affected by Mao, Chou and Liu, plays go (a Japanese game of strategy) like an expert—though one Japanese master found him "too hasty." In Shanghai some years ago, Chen's friendliness with Chekiang Opera Star Yuan Hsueh-feng was the talk of the Bund. He once said: "Without women, a guerrilla unit has no soul."

Like Mao, Chen is a poet, but his verses tend less toward ideology than his master's. In Geneva during the 1961-62 Laos peace talks, he wrote:

With the waters of the Rhone as my pillow
And facing the mountains of France,
Under the delectably cold moonlight
I forget my long trip.

The Options. Against this complex enemy, what are the U.S. choices? Despite Charles de Gaulle's belief that the U.S. and China are a pair of rigid giants locked in relentless struggle, the actions available are both multiple and mutable:

∙U.S. WITHDRAWAL from South Viet Nam would of course leave all of mainland Indo-China within Peking's reach. The U.S. might fall back on Thailand and still make quite a stand there, together with the plucky Thais and backed by U.S. offshore power. But this would depend on Thailand's willingness to bet its existence on U.S. determination and skill. After a U.S. retreat from South Viet Nam, not many would care to make such a bet. In short, withdrawal would largely destroy American credibility as a reliable anti-Communist ally—in Bangkok, in Seoul, in Manila and elsewhere. It would push Cambodia and Indonesia completely into China's lap. Malaysia would catch the brunt of this power realignment, thus forcing the British into a narrow, nasty corner. According to many experts, Russia would regret this move as much as the U.S., since it would immensely strengthen Peking's pretensions to the leadership of world Communism.

∙NEGOTIATED NEUTRALIZATION would only delay the effects of complete withdrawal. Right now, what is there to negotiate? The U.S. would have to insist on a non-Communist South Viet Nam. and this probably could be obtained only by 1) a foolproof international control, which is almost impossible to achieve; and 2) exclusion of the Communists from future South Vietnamese government, since "coalitions" including Reds usually end up all Red. But at present neither the Viet Cong nor their mentors in Hanoi or Peking have any reason to accept such terms. Thus any neutralization formula now possible would sooner or later deliver the Indo-Chinese peninsula to Communist domination.

∙TIT-FOR-TAT RESPONSE against North Vietnamese Communist nations and staging areas might inhibit both the Viet Cong and Hanoi to some extent. But essentially the policy of hitting North Viet Nam whenever the Viet Cone get too nasty leaves the initiative to the Communists and might at best maintain a shaky status quo. By itself it certainly could not change the course of the guerrilla war in the South sufficiently to send the U.S. into negotiations with a real, strong hand. Some of the top-ranking U.S. military commanders in Asia think it is high time the U.S. engaged in a little "tit-tit-tit for tat."

∙MEASURED RESPONSE aimed at hurting the North Vietnamese enough to keep them from supporting the Communist guerrillas in the South might show important results. This would necessitate more U.S. raids over the 17th parallel, launched 1) at will and not merely in retaliation; 2) at major targets, though perhaps still short of Hanoi. Such attacks would make sense only if coupled with hard, tough fighting against the Viet Cong. This might demand something close to the 10-1 troop ratio with which Britain beat the Reds in Malaya, hence additional U.S. ground forces in South Viet Nam. Judging by available intelligence, China is unlikely to join battle if U.S. troops enter South Viet Nam in force, though the North Vietnamese well-trained, 225,000-man army might. U.S. air and naval power could interdict the entry routes effectively enough to bloody the North Vietnamese army's nose, and the threat of bombing Hanoi—and the country's hard-won industrial complex along with it—might possibly keep the North Vietnamese out.

∙ATTACKING NORTH VIET NAM by bombing all major targets, including Hanoi, plus possibly sending in U.S. ground forces, would probably bring in the Chinese, if only for face reasons, and would probably also draw at least greatly stepped-up help from Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, some U.S. military men feel that the U.S. would be in a far better position than it was in Korea to fight successfully in North Viet Nam, and they favor such a course as the only one that would hurt the Communists badly enough to make, them accept an international deal the U.S. could tolerate.

∙BOMBING CHINA and its fledgling nuclear-production centers sounds tempting to some but is not now advocated by serious policymakers or experts. Whatever may be said in favor of "getting the war with China over now," before Peking achieves an effective nuclear-retaliatory force, such preventive war goes too heavily against American morals. Besides, Russia probably could not tolerate such a move despite its differences with Peking, and total war could result.
A Question of Patience. Letting go —either with all its force or through withdrawal—is clearly not the answer to America's Asian dilemma. No one relishes the risks involved in the var ious options available to the U.S. But to maintain its position in Southeast Asia, and ultimately perhaps in all Asia, the U.S. may sooner or later have to take the risk of war with China—care ful and calculated but still a risk. The U.S. held on to West Berlin and ejected Soviet missiles from Cuba only by a calculated risk of war with the Soviet Union. Short of an all-out nuclear holocaust, which would level American cities, China after all stands to lose much more from a war than the U.S. So long as the U.S. creates the impression that it will do anything in Southeast Asia short of facing the real enemy—either militarily or diplomatically—China can simply sit back and wait.

For 15 years the principal U.S. stand toward China has been not to recognize its Red regime. While there is no reason to change that stand at present, nonrecognition is no substitute for a policy. Since Korea, the U.S. in fact has developed not a China policy but a China mythology. One side of the myth holds that China is remorseless, implacable, omnipresent and possessed of warriors who love nothing better than to die in "human sea" at tacks. The other side holds that, like Russia and the satellites with whom the West has learned to live, Chinese Communists will in time grow softer, more reasonable. They may, although European Communism, superimposed on viable economies and workable political structures, is vastly different from the Asian variety. What is at stake in Asia is an undeveloped, politically shapeless region full of people who deserve better than the absence of chrysanthemums. 

The West certainly cannot impose capitalism or democracy on Asia with the air of a crusader. But it can work toward building free economies and free societies, even if socialist concessions have to be made. Malaysia and Thailand represent viable, hopeful alternatives to Tibet and Burma. In the meantime, the U.S. must hang on—and then hang on some more—in Southeast Asia. The operative word is patience, and essentially, patience is an Asian word.
^{* The Kang is a raised, brick bed under which a fire is lighted to warm peasant homes; homey murals bedeck the surrounding walls.}

TIME on China Dec 1, 1958: The Year of Leap

Monday, Dec. 01, 1958

The Year of the Leap

(See Cover)
At night the sky over ten thousand villages glows red and gold with the glare cast by countless primitive blast furnaces of mud brick. In the fields lanterns as numerous as fireflies cast a softer light over "shock troops" fighting "night battles" to bring in bumper crops of rice, sweet potatoes and cotton. By 6:30 in the morning the clean-swept streets of the teeming cities resound to the chanting of millions of voices as clerks, factory hands and bureaucrats, all clad in blue boiler suits, perform the mass calisthenics that herald the beginning of another ten-to twelve-hour working day.
These were the sights and sounds of Red China this week in the midst of its "Great Leap Forward''—the sights and sounds of a nation in the throes of an economic and social convulsion unparalleled in modern history. Ten years ago, in what seemed only a provocative flight of fancy, left-wing British Author George Orwell conjured up in his novel 1984 a nightmare vision of the ultimate totalitarian state: "In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already . . . no one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth as one takes eggs from a hen . . . There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother."
Sorry Awakening. Today, a quarter of a century ahead of Orwell's timetable, a plump peasant who was born a subject of the Dragon Throne, is well on his way to converting Orwellian nightmare into reality in the world's most populous nation. In the past eight months, Mao Tse-tung has herded more than 90% of mainland China's 500 million peasants into vast human poultry yards called "people's communes." If Mao's historic gamble succeeds, the ordinary Chinese of day after tomorrow will have no fixed job, no home and no real family.
"Let China sleep," warned Napoleon nearly a century and a half ago. "When she awakens the world will be sorry." Eying the path along which Mao proposes to lead an awakened China, most of the world, if not yet sorry, is already apprehensive. In Warsaw recently a Communist editor nervously reflected that "the entire Polish nation represents little more than a slight miscalculation in Chinese population statistics for one year." In the U.S. some thoughtful men argue that within a generation the U.S. will be helping bolster Soviet defenses against Communist China. Writing in London's New Statesman, British Socialist M.P. Richard Grossman reports that he came back from a trip through Red China convinced that "Chinese Communism is far the biggest and far the most formidable mass movement in human history''—a movement which "within the next decade" may transfer the center of the world to Peking.
Exaggerated though such fears may be, they are not frivolous. As recently as World War II Winston Churchill could impatiently dismiss as "unrealistic" U.S. insistence that China have big-power status. Yet today, barely 15 years later. Red China is universally acknowledged as the most formidable military power in Asia, can throw into action at any time more jet planes (over 2,000) and more troops (over 2,000,000) than all the rest of the East Asian powers combined. Within the Communist bloc, when China speaks, Khrushchev listens.
The Glowing Image. More than any other government in the world today. Red China is the long shadow of one man. At 65, Chairman-Mao Tse-tung is at once China's emperor, pope and father image. Like Stalin in his heyday, Mao is quoted as the ultimate authority on ideology, military science, steel production, poetry, art, and the uses of fertilizer. Every proclaimed achievement begins with the phrase "Thanks to Chairman Mao." His public appearances arouse excitement bordering on hysteria, evoke near tearful tributes to his "affectionate and kindly gaze.'' Nor are foreigners immune to his spell: Brazilian Sculptor Maria Martins recalls him as "a glowing image—a genius in terms of 20th century politics and a sage out of ancient China."
When he is not touring his domain dispensing advice to athletes, farmers and lady cops, Mao lives with his fourth wife, exActress Lan Ping, and two teen-age daughters in the Imperial City's "Perpetuating Harmony House." No lover of regular office hours, he works either at home or, in good weather, in a tent set up in the park outside. Once a heavy smoker (50 or more British 555s a day), he now, on doctor's orders, confines himself to a pack a day, keeps fit by swimming in a luxurious pool in the Imperial City. For relaxation he writes classical Chinese poetry—a pastime his regime is otherwise discouraging by switching Chinese from their traditional ideographs to a Romanized alphabet.
For all his scholarly air, Mao is almost totally ignorant of science (which he dislikes) and, by the testimony of one of his former teachers, is "terrible at mathematics." Except for whatever he may have picked up on two brief trips to Moscow, he knows the world outside China only at secondhand, and according to Chang Kuo-tao, once his colleague on the Chinese Communist Politburo, he is a poor administrator ("Vague about details and has a rather poor memory about people who are not constantly around him"). Essentially, Mao's world is an imaginary one—a curious melange of Chinese monarchical concepts and Marxist ideology. And behind the benevolent, Buddha-like gaze lie vast personal ambition and ruthless purpose. To a sentimental intellectual who once suggested that "Communism is Love," Mao replied: "No, comrade, Communism is not love; it is a hammer which we use to destroy the enemy."
The Cave Dweller. Mao Tse-tung, who was born in the farming village of Shao Shan in the "rice bowl" province of Hunan, hated his father, a "rich," i.e., solvent, peasant who beat his sons often, gave them, as Mao bitterly remembers, "no money and the most meager food." After drifting through half a dozen schools. Mao at 24 got a job as assistant to Li Ta-chao, the Marxist librarian of Peking University, and finally found his hammer. In May 1921, he was one of twelve men who met in Shanghai to organize the Chinese Communist Party, though, according to one of his cronies, he "seemed to know little about Marxism."
In 1924 when the Chinese Communists, at Joseph Stalin's order, formed a coalition with the Kuomintang, Mao went along dutifully enough. But he was not convinced by Stalin's insistence that the Communist revolution must base itself on China's negligible urban proletariat. And when Chiang Kai-shek in a lightning stroke against his erstwhile allies all but wiped out the Chinese Communist Party in April 1927, Mao set out for his native Hunan to test his heretical belief that a successful Communist revolution in China must be based on the peasantry.
Mao's first, unauthorized attempt to organize a peasant uprising promptly got him expelled from the Chinese Communist Politburo. But within four years his "Chinese Soviet Republic," headquartered in a Buddhist temple on rugged Chingkan Mountain in Kiangsi province, was the most powerful Communist force in China. Five times Chiang Kai-shek's armies launched "campaigns of extermination" against the Communists; finally, in 1934, Mao's troops broke through the Nationalist lines and began their epic, 6,000-mile Long March to desolate Yenan in North China. When they reached their remote destination after fighting their way over 18 mountain ranges, less than a quarter of the 90,000 men who had begun the march were left. Of this remnant—and hence of the Chinese Communist Party—Mao was the unchallenged leader.
In the early Yenan years Mao, like most of his followers, lived in a cave. But from this rude lair, Mao succeeded in forcing Chiang Kai-shek to accept the Communists as allies in the "patriotic war" against Japan. Mao himself was primarily interested in profiting from chaos. "Our determined policy," he explained, "is 70% self-development, 20% compromise, and 10% fight the Japanese." Result was that in 1945 when Chiang Kai-shek emerged from his wartime back-country capital of Chungking, his power was largely confined to China's big cities; Communist forces, now over a million strong, roamed the countryside almost at will. The U.S. spectacularly failed in a politically naive postwar effort to bring Communists and Nationalists together, and by December 1949, what was left of Chiang's shattered armies was fleeing to Formosa.
The Creation of Peace. The nation that Mao had seized was devastated by twelve years of war and revolution, and it was cursed with a primitive economy—though not so primitive as China's present masters like to pretend. Mao inherited from the Japanese a major coal and steel complex in Manchuria and from the Nationalists considerable light industry as well as the Yumen oilfield—still China's biggest. Under Nationalist rule China's industrial production had risen 80% between 1933 and 1945. By the time Mao appeared, the stage was set for a Chinese industrial revolution comparable to that experienced by Japan in the 1880s or Germany under Bismarck. All that was missing was peace and a strong, central government.
These conditions Mao proceeded to create. In late 1952 Communist Minister of Finance Po Ipo publicly admitted that the Reds had liquidated 2,000,000 "bandits" in the preceding three years. Some Western experts calculate that 14 million Chinese were executed during the land-reform campaign of 1951 alone.
Today, with that sort of wholesale terror past but still a vivid memory, China is ruled by a weapon sometimes called "brute reason"—the knowledge that each man has no alternative. On trains, in city squares and village centers, loudspeakers blare away from dawn till midnight, urging China's millions not to spit in the street, and to "work hard for a few years, live happily for a thousand." In schools, factories and offices the walls are plastered layers deep with painstakingly handwritten posters of exhortation and criticism: "Professor Chen's teaching methods are strictly reactionary."
To ignore this barrage is impossible, since privacy has all but disappeared in China. One Shanghai factory manager during last year's "rectification" campaign spent four hours of every working day in group political discussions. And every Chinese city dweller lives under the baleful eye of a "street committee," most often run by a self-important woman. Wives are encouraged to write posters drawing attention to their husbands' shortcomings—and do. With depressing frequency newspapers throughout China carry reports such as the following: "Young Wei Kuo-chu, a student at Shin Tung High School, Shanghai, is cited and congratulated for having denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary.''
Once uncovered, a "reactionary"' is subjected to "re-education." His neighbors, his friends and his professional colleagues all "reason" with him, urge him not to drive them to the extreme step of ostracizing him. One particularly stubborn Shanghai writer managed to stand up to ten such sessions before he caved in.
The Crucial Question. While making his subjects more malleable under the never-ending blows of the Communist hammer, Mao also went to work on the Chinese economy. In exchange for technical help and machinery, he shipped out to Russia antimony, tin, tungsten and, above all, desperately needed food. Of the $2.2 billion in "aid" that China has received from the U.S.S.R. since 1950, almost none of it was a genuine gift; the $300 million surplus that China expects to run this year in its trade with the U.S.S.R. will go to pay off past Soviet loans.
By last year the combination of Russian machinery and Chinese toil had boosted China's steel production from a prewar peak of 1,800,000 tons to 5,350,000 tons, raised coal production from the Nationalist record of 62 million tons to 130 million tons. And this, according to Peking, is only prelude. Hailing 1958 as the year of "the great leap forward," the Chinese Reds took as their primary slogan: "Overtake Britain in production in 15 years." and after revising production targets ever upward, claimed that by the end of this year China would have produced 10.7 million tons of steel—double last year's figure. More breath-taking yet was their claim that production of edible grains would soar to 350 million tons, 90% over last year.
Peking's statistics are suspect, but 1958 figures, noted a British economist, "defy belief and baffle logic." But even if Communist figures could be trusted, Red China still has a long way to go before claiming to be a modern industrial state. Mainland China's rate of industrial growth last year was only half that of Japan's. By the end of its current six-year plan, Japan will have acquired new productive capacity greater than that of all the industrial plant Mao's China now has. The Chinese Communists have yet to produce an all-Chinese jet; their vaunted Manchurian "Detroit" still builds only a few thousand trucks a year, plus an occasional prototype "East Wind" automobile. And despite boasts to the contrary, all indications are that Chinese petroleum reserves are painfully scant. (Production last year: 1.46 million tons v. the U.S.'s 353.6 million tons.)
China's overriding economic problem is not its scarcity of resources but its oversupply of people. Population, now put at 653 million, is increasing by about 15 million a year. At this rate, there will be a billion Chinese by 1980, more than 2 billion by the turn of the century. In terms of per-capita production, Mao's China still lags far behind Japan or Formosa (see chart). Worse yet, despite mammoth irrigation and reclamation projects, population growth has cut the amount of cultivated land per person in Red China from .462 acres in 1953 to .429 acres in 1958.
Mao and his planners first sought to arrest China's inexorable march of population by birth-control propaganda, loudspeaker exhortations and traveling exhibits that featured crudely explicit diagrams and extolled the virtues of contraceptive devices, including something called "Healthy Pleasure Honey." All this hue and cry had no appreciable effect on the birth rate. Soon birth-control advocates found themselves accused of the heinous crime of "neo-Malthusianism," and China's teeming manpower became officially no longer a problem but the nation's greatest asset.
The Volunteers. To feed so many mouths, and to get work out of so many bodies, Mao decided on the ruthless and revolutionary device of the people's commune—a system of forced collectivization of human beings which the Russians abandoned as impractical in 1933. Rural people's communes, the first of which appeared in Honan province last April, sometimes have as many as 300,000 members, in most cases absorb the whole population of a county—peasants, traders, students, officials and professional men. Upon "volunteering" to join a commune, members turn over to it virtually all their private property, including homes, garden plots and heavy tools. Once in the commune, members cease to have a regular trade, become all-purpose production units. In Honan's pilot Sputnik Commune (which occupies an area two-thirds the size of Long Island), 43,000 members are divided into 27 "production corps" and 87 smaller "production battalions." At harvest time almost everyone is sent into the fields. In slack agricultural seasons or in their "spare time" they are put to dam building, construction of primitive factories, or industrial labor. All members of the commune get regular military training, and even when not on duty they must move by the numbers. At Chao Ying commune in Honan, according to an enthusiastic Red newsman, "assembly bells ring and whistles blow at daybreak. In about a quarter of an hour the peasants line up. At the command of company and squad leaders, the teams march to the fields, holding flags. One no longer sees peasants in groups of two or three smoking and going slowly and leisurely to the fields. The desultory living habits of thousands of years are gone forever."
Gone, too, is any notion of personal life or freedom of choice. Instead of a share of what they produce, commune members get wages fixed by a ruling committee of party activists. At Sputnik Commune, 260 mess halls have been set up where members are fed free rice. These communal kitchens, plus communal nurseries and "mending brigades," relieve the wives of members from "dull and trivial housework," transform women, too, into all-purpose laborers. (The sole concession made to femininity: pregnant women get a month off work with half pay.) Even the old folks, for whom the commune has established "Happy Homes," are kept busy with scheduled chores, such as feeding the chickens. And in at least one Kwangtung commune, when the inhabitants of the Happy Homes die, their bodies are dropped into a chemically treated pool and converted to fertilizer.
By last week,there were nearly 25,000 communes; their membership, at least on paper, comprised more than 90% of China's peasantry. The movement is now spreading to the cities. At Yangchuan coal mine in Shansi province, where more than 28,000 miners and their families formerly lived in "an unorganized, undisciplined manner." i.e., scattered around as they chose, workers have now been assigned to living quarters according to their work areas and shifts; according to Peking's People's Daily, "the head of a mine pit is simultaneously company commander of the militia and head of a row of rooms in the living quarters." Meanwhile, the miners' wives and teen-age children have been put to work running 40 new "industrial enterprises," including a cement factory. Logical next step at Yangchuan (and already in operation in some Red Chinese factories) is the "Saturday-night system," under which a married woman worker lives in a factory dormitory, is alone with her husband only on the odd Saturday night when she has the use of a dormitory room all to herself.
Tartars & Tonnage. For Red China's agricultural planners the commune system has obvious advantages: constantly under the eye of the commune's "activists," Chinese peasants will no longer be able to evade forced deliveries of crops to the government. More important, all of China's farmers can be forced to adopt improved techniques, such as deep plowing (as much as 3 ft.) and massive use of natural fertilizer, which have given Communist experimental farms per-acre rice yields twice as big as Japan's highest.
Through the communes, Mao also hopes to solve China's serious underemployment by building up vast cottage industries. Communes are now in the midst of a mass drive to produce pig iron and steel in tiny handmade blast furnaces of a kind developed by Chinese artisans in the Middle Ages. In China's desolate northern marches Mongol and Tartar women sweat over more than 5,000 furnaces which they have built in the last few weeks, and in Honan 440,000 furnaces (operated by peasants who have already put in a ten-hour day in the fields) allegedly turned out 300,000 tons of steel in October alone.
Western steelmen find it hard to credit Communist claims that such operations accounted for 30% of Red China's steel production in October. They are convinced, too, that the steel produced by these methods is of a low quality suitable only for the most primitive construction and the manufacture of agricultural implements. But Red China is headlong in its ambition to do-it-yourself.
Kill That Tiger! The xenophobia that in 1793 led the Emperor Ch'ien Lung to consider British Ambassador Lord Macartney a "Red barbarian bearing tribute," is still very much alive in China. "Westerners," says Foreign Minister Chen Yi, smiling faintly, "used to say Chinese were dirty. We were called an inferior race. Are we inferior now?"
Inevitably the U.S., as the most powerful of Western nations, has been declared the focus of Chinese hatred and resentment. With an ignorant arrogance that could have disastrous consequences for the world, Peking's rulers dismiss the U.S. as a "paper tiger," pooh-pooh the U.S. H-bomb. Four years ago Red China's War Minister confidently told Sam Watson, former chairman of the British Labor Party: "Even if 200 million of us were killed, we would still have 400 million left." Mao himself makes no bones of his ambition to "drive the U.S. out of East Asia," recently told a Brazilian journalist: "We must attack the tiger again and again until we finally kill it."
All for Australia. Dangerous as it may be for the non-Communist world, Red China's rise to great-power status is no unmixed blessing to Soviet Russia. Many Chinese visibly resent their industrial dependence on the Soviets. Even Mao, by stressing the fact that all Russian "aid" has been paid for by China, emphasizes the U.S.S.R.'s niggardliness. The bellicose men of Peking also realize that Russia has not yet seen fit to supply them with atomic weapons.
Ideologically, too, there are tensions between Peking and Moscow. Chinese Reds privately consider Khrushchev a waverer whose understanding of Marxism-Leninism leaves much to be desired. "The Russians are always blundering," one Chinese Communist loftily told British Journalist Dennis Bloodworth. "Weak Soviet policy was responsible for the Hungarian revolution and the trouble in Poland." Not having been afraid of differing from Stalin, Mao has never hesitated to differ from the Johnny-come-latelys now in authority in Moscow. The Russians officially proclaim Mao to be "a major Marxist-Leninist theoretician,'' but his writings are not required reading among Russian party members, and his major pronouncements are dutifully printed without endorsement or criticism. An embarrassed silence greets Mao's current claim that his people's communes will bring true Communism to China in the foreseeable future, since after 41 years the Russians have yet to make such a leap to "true Communism."
What the Russians have to fear from Mao's China is not that it will desert to the West or "pull a Tito," but that it will one day seize leadership of the Communist world. In public, Russian leaders are determinedly cheerful about their relations with Peking, but three weeks ago U.S. Pundit Walter Lippmann returned from a trip to Moscow to report that Russian reactions to China's "great leap forward" varied between "awe and anxiety." The vast geographical vacuum between the two countries is being competitively filled—by Khrushchev's reclamation of the Central Asian "virgin lands," and by China's intensive colonization of Sinkiang province, once a Soviet zone of influence. When Britain's Sam Watson forecast to Khrushchev that the Chinese would one day flood either north into Siberia or south into Australia, Khrushchev's reply was: "I'm all in favor of Australia."
Diminishing Rice Bowl. The central fact about Mao's China today, however, is that the bogeyman that in varying degrees haunts both the U.S. and Russia is still largely a bogeyman. If Peking's current statistics are questionable, its basic economic assumptions are even more so. That cottage industry can ever play a major role in transforming China into a modern industrial state is doubtful. As Peking has begun to admit, many of the mud-brick blast furnaces are vastly wasteful of coal and are located too far from major industrial centers to be of much value. And the rosy agricultural future that Mao promises does not take into account the possibility of repeated bad harvests ("Weather no longer counts in China"), or the fact that there is presumably a finite limit to the amount of food a given area of ground can produce ("There are no low-yield crops, only low-yield thoughts").
Best guess of many Western specialists is that within a decade or so Red China will reach the day when its food supply is inadequate for its population, even by low Chinese diet standards. If the rice bowl grows much emptier, Mao's promises of a glittering future may cease to assuage his subjects.
The outburst of student rioting and anti-Communist statements that followed Mao's abortive "Hundred Flowers" attempt at liberalization last year (TIME, May 27 et seq.) was clear evidence that the regime had forfeited the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. Mao's response—to treat all intellectuals as suspect and force them into "remedial" manual labor by the hundreds of thousands—may produce obedience, but hardly provides the climate for intellectual creativity. The great, vast public, foreign observers report, seems more resigned to its lot, and even grateful for the orderliness that keeps warlords from swooping down on farmers to steal their harvests. But in a nation that has only a paper-thin economic surplus to invest in industrial growth, a loss of mass enthusiasm and a consequent drop in production could be no less deadly than active popular resistance.
At a diplomatic turnout in Peking a year ago, Mao peered up at a towering Briton and jovially remarked: "It's not that you are so tall. It is just that we, at the moment, are too short." That Mao has started China growing again is a fact of incalculable importance. If human beings can be reduced to mindless production-line cogs, Red China may one day achieve the stature for which its rulers yearn. But, so far. the crucial elements of Chinese Communist power are still supplied by Russia. It was not Chinese strength but the fear of Russian involvement that ultimately led the U.S. to deny itself the means to victory in Korea. The smattering of glittering modern factories in China is also courtesy of Russia. And as Mao Tse-tung himself said almost a decade ago, so long as China must rely economically on foreign countries it will not be truly independent, far less a great power.
^{—-An all-purpose title since Mao is simultaneously chairman of 1) the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 2) the Politburo oi the Chinese Communist Party, 3) the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, 4) the Council of National Defense.}