RED CHINA: The Mechanical Man

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Atop the graceful, rose-colored Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking last week stood the two plump, 65-year-old men who rule one-third of the earth’s people. As lithe girls danced by to the rhythm of bamboo castanets, and nine huge cloth dragons whirled along in pursuit of 60 golden lions, Red China’s Mao Tse-tung beamed in the morning sunlight, bland and benign-looking as ever. Beside him, applauding energetically, was Nikita Khrushchev, ruler of all the Russias, who had arrived from Moscow by propjet the day before to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of Red rule in China. Just a step behind the two leaders loomed a tall, gaunt, grey-faced figure whose voice and countenance were far better known to the ruling circles of Communism than to the paraders below. His name: Liu Shao-chi. His rank: Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic. His potent role: the No. 2 man of Red China, and steely disciplinarian of the party.

A decade had passed since a crowd of shabbily dressed Communists gathered in Peking’s crumbling Imperial Palace to hear Mao proclaim the conquest of China and sound a warning: “Let reactionaries at home and abroad tremble!” Last week it was not the reactionaries but Nikita Khrushchev who seemed nervous. From the moment of his arrival in Peking. Khrushchev had been publicly pressuring his hosts to “do everything possible to preclude war as a means of settling outstanding questions”; five times in as many minutes he had sounded the call for “peaceful coexistence”; in pointed reference to his U.S. trip, he declared that “the leaders of many capitalist states are being forced more and more to take account of realities.” Mao smiled and applauded, but made no answer.

Yet Red China’s answer seemed plain. At the height of last week’s anniversary parade, 100 dark green tanks and 144 motorized artillery pieces clanked onto the broad square before Mao and Khrushchev. The pavement rang to the cadenced tread of 100,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, and nine massive columns of militiamen. From overhead came the whine and rumble of 155 Chinese-made jet bombers and fighters. The procession ended, heavy with menace, as 700,000 workers marched by, 100 abreast, shouting, “Liberate Taiwan!”

Fagade & Reality. Like the other guests of honor who had flocked into Peking from 87 countries, Nikita Khrushchev could scarcely fail to be impressed by Peking’s display of might and by the fireworks, the glittering banquets and the gleaming new buildings that Red China’s masters had conjured up to mark their tenth year in power. But behind the gala façade lay a grim reality: the world’s biggest and brashest Communist state was stumbling into the most critical year of its existence. Says a Western diplomat stationed in Peking: “The place is a monumental mess.”

Today Red China’s economy gasps and shudders like an abused donkey engine. The “great leap forward” that was to make China a major industrial power in the twinkling of an eye has instead produced something close to chaos. In the ant-heap rural communes that were to convert 500 million peasants into depersonalized, multi-purpose labor units, there is apathy and despair.

Internationally, too, Red China’s fortunes are at their lowest ebb since the Korean war. The rape of Tibet, followed up by Peking’s troublemaking in Laos and along India’s northeastern border, has at long last opened the eyes of Southeast Asia’s neutrals to the murderous imperialism that underlies Red China’s lip service to “the cause of peace.” In the U.N. neutral Ireland, which had previously supported resolutions calling for Peking’s admittance, now fights for a debate on the Tibetan situation. Even the U.A.R.’s Nasser has lost his patience: last week, irked by Peking’s sponsorship of Middle East Communists, Nasser’s government boycotted the anniversary party given by the Red Chinese embassy in Cairo, threatened to oust Peking’s diplomats from Damascus.

Peking’s response to its troubles has been a mixture of defiance and strategic retreat. For its foreign critics it has shown nothing but contempt; Nehru’s plaintive reproaches at Chinese violations of his border won him nothing but the reply that it was India, not Red China, that was the aggressor. At home, Peking’s commissars are meeting their problems with more suppleness. For the moment, China’s exhausted masses are enjoying a respite from the frantic work pace imposed on them during the great leap forward. But, as all Chinese are painfully aware, this is only a stay, not a full reprieve; it will last only until Red China’s masters have finished tuning up the instrument with which they control their sprawling nation —the 13 million-man Chinese Communist Party.

Needed: More Hells. In charge of the tuning-up process—on which the success or failure of Communism in China may well depend—is a shadowy, pallid figure who was once described as looking like “an underexposed snapshot.” As Chairman of the Republic, tall (5 ft. 10 in.), gaunt Liu Shao-chi is technically Red China’s chief of state; in fact, he is heir apparent to Mao Tse-tung’s power. Yet outside China he is virtually unknown, and even inside China he has so little identity that Red propagandists work overtime trying to give him a sympathetic public personality.

In this, Peking’s flacks have an almost impossible assignment. Liu’s most human traits are a weakness for women and tobacco. Though he has suffered off and on from tuberculosis, he is still a chainsmoker and cannot break himself of the habit. And, like Mao himself, Liu has a penchant for frequent marital shifts. His current wife (No. 4) is 25 years his junior, and a former coed at Peking University. Wife No. i died mysteriously—reportedly either a suicide or killed by the Nationalists. Wives No. 2 and 3 have been long divorced.

But in every other respect, gelid Liu Shao-chi is the perfect Communist—a mechanical man who comes close to realizing his own dictum: “A party member is required to sacrifice his interests to the party unconditionally.” Even the public appearances intended to humanize him invariably take on a grim tone. When a small child cut its hands tending potato vines in a commune, Liu’s reaction was hard advice: “Do not be scared by a little blood.” And when a Communist bureaucrat, whom he was lecturing on the need for working-class experience, observed, “There are still people who regard working in the boiler room as living hell,” Liu snapped back: “We need more such hells.”

Required Reading. So complete is Liu’s talent for fading into the woodwork that no one is even sure how old he is; he was born, probably about 1898, in Yin-shan in rice-growing Hunan province, not far from Mao Tse-tung’s own village. Liu and Mao, as sons of prosperous peasant families, attended middle school in Changsha, the largest city in the province, and a hotbed of radical nationalism. Though Mao was some four years older than Liu, they worked together on a left-wing student magazine, and by his early 205 Liu was a veteran of anti-imperialist student demonstrations. In 1920 a Soviet talent scout, encountering Liu in Shanghai, picked him as one of seven promising Chinese students to attend Moscow’s newly opened Far Eastern University.

During Liu’s absence in Russia, where he was both bored and homesick, Mao and eleven other comrades founded the Chinese Communist Party. On his return from Russia Liu promptly joined, and for the next 20 years he worked as a Red labor organizer—a job that occasionally landed him in prison. In 1934, when Mao led the Red army in its famed, 6,000-mile Long March from southern Kiangsi to the caves of Yenan in northern China, Organizer Liu went underground, remained behind as a Communist agent in Kuomintang territory.

To have missed both the founding of the Communist Party and the Long March might have put Liu far down the list of party hopefuls. Yet when he finally reached Mao’s Yenan headquarters in 1937, he quickly made up for lost time, moved nimbly through the party infighting. As a political commissar, he was assigned to investigate the army commanded by grizzled Peng Teh-huai, the Reds’ No. 2 military man and later commander of Chinese “volunteers” in Korea.

Unimpressive in appearance but steely cold in personality, Liu boldly accused Peng of “bureaucratism,” so overawed the burly soldier that ex-Bandit Peng went into a paroxysm of selfcriticism. Even his close association with Mao’s archopponent within the party, Stalinist Li Lisan, did not halt Liu’s rise. Thanks to his gift for translating Mao’s sweeping ideas into explicit political handbooks, Liu’s “literary” works (How to Be a Good Communist, On the Party Struggle) became must reading for all Chinese Communists.

At the Controls. By 1949, when Mao finally rode in triumph into Peking, Liu Shao-chi was firmly established as the man who sat at the control panel of the Chinese Communist Party. It was Liu who developed the subtle process that he calls “self-cultivation” but that Americans during the Korean war came to know as “brainwashing.” It was Liu who in 1954 served as Mao’s hatchetman in the great internal party fight that ended with the suicide of Kao Kang, the Red boss of Manchuria—an act described as “the ultimate betrayal of the party.” Above all, it was Liu who trained the party’s cadres, viewing them, says a leading U.S. expert on Communist China, South Carolina’s Professor Richard L. Walker, “as just so many bodies to be transformed into parts of an organizational structure which will function automatically, yet with enthusiasm.”

In pursuit of this ideal, Liu put his cadres through one “rectification” campaign after another, obliged luckless party members to admit to such sins as formalism (“holding meetings in a perfunctory way”), commandism (“the political disease of haste”), adventurism (“acting in an arbitrary fashion”), warlordism (“regarding the army as a special power standing outside or above the people”), subjectivism (“bourgeois liberal ideas”), sectarianism (“excessive use of party jargon”), or other misdeeds such as acting the hero, tailism, mountain-topism and closed-doorism. To Westerners such charges had an Alice-in-Wonderland ring. To Mao Tse-tung they were proof that Liu was on the job, honing the edges of the world’s “purest” and -most massive Communist Party.

Not by Fervor Alone. Characteristically, when Mao last year decreed the big leap that was to enable Red China to “surpass Britain” as an industrial power, Liu was in the front rank shouting slogans. Government administrators and industrial managers protested that the method of “blindly advancing” was wasteful of manpower and resources. Liu sneered back that they were “failing to see the wood for the trees.” And when Mao made his momentous decision to herd China’s peasants into 26,000 military* style communes, Liu was right behind him once again. With the help of the communes, glowed Liu, “we shall realize true Communism very soon.”

In fact, the creation of the communes was motivated less by ideology than by a desperate desire to harness China’s greatest natural resource: people. In the dreams of the Red planners, the communes loomed as at least the beginning of an answer to all China’s economic problems. Did China need more pig iron? It was smelted in backyard blast furnaces the length and breadth of the land. More coal? New mines were hastily dug. Shock brigades of peasants shuttled wearily from fields to furnaces and back again, working late into the night “fighting production battles.”

Incredibly, among Red China’s teeming millions-a manpower shortage developed. Stevedores were shifted from the ports to the paddies, and unloaded ships piled up in the harbors. Railroad workers were rushed to the docks, and train schedules became chaotic. Office workers went to the farms, and commerce staggered. Instead of performing military duties, soldiers were put to work digging ditches and raising pigs. Even the wives and children of army officers and enlisted men hoed cabbages and spread fertilizer.

But fervor was not enough. Wheat had been so closely planted that it toppled over or died of contagious rust. Newly dug potatoes rotted in the fields while peasants were rushed off to erect dams. Jerry-built mines collapsed, and backyard iron proved worthless for industrial use. In the cities there was noisy talk of a bumper harvest, but long queues of housewives found the stores empty.

Clearest symptom of the chaos was the sudden and steep decline in China’s exports. In 1958 Peking had begun to invade the markets of Southeast Asia with a flood of inexpensive bicycles, textiles, rice. By underselling Japan, Red China increased its exports to Singapore and Malaya by 23%, nearly doubled its trade with Thailand and Ceylon. But by this spring Red China was unable to fill even longstanding orders. At the annual trade fair in Canton last May, export sales were down 56% from the previous year.

Tidying Up. For months after it was apparent that the great leap was turning into a frightful fumble, the propagandists in Peking continued to shout: “There is no low-yield land—only low-yield thinking.” Trembling at these injunctions, local party bosses tore up honest production figures and conjured up new ones likely to please Peking. But by last October the Red leadership was beginning to realize that the only alternative to total collapse was relaxation. Meeting in the industrial center of Wuhan, Mao and his satraps decided on their line of retreat. The communes would remain, but they would be “tidied up.” Peasants would be “entitled” to money wages and eight hours’ sleep a night, were even told that “individual trees around their houses, small farm tools, small instruments and small domestic animals and poultry” would no longer be taken from them. Red cadres were scolded for having been “overeager,” and grimly warned to stop exaggerating production totals.

Nor did Peking’s retreat end there. By August of this year, there was no avoiding the most humiliating and face-losing necessity of all: public revision of the inflated 1958 production claims. With only five weeks to go until the tenth anniversary of Communist power in China, Peking was obliged to admit to the world that the big leap had fallen painfully short, and that production goals for 1959 had been sharply reduced (see chart).

The Old Gambit. The men responsible for the big stumble did not suffer. Mao Tse-tung retained the all-powerful chairmanship of the Communist Party, and, though he did step down as chief of state, he was replaced by Organization Man Liu. But there were scapegoats. Three weeks ago, 200 middle-echelon planners and administrators, who were guilty of accurately predicting the failure of the big leap, were dismissed from their posts.

And along with the shakeup in the civilian hierarchy went one in the army. Liu’s old opponent, Marshal Peng Teh-huai, was dismissed as Defense Minister, as were two of his top aides, because they had protested the use of troops in labor battalions. Into the chief of staff’s post went General Lo Jui-ching (TIME cover, March 5, 1956), bloody-minded former boss of the secret police, who could be depended upon to ferret out any more “incorrect thinking” among the military.

But another purge in Peking was scarcely enough to take the peasants’ minds off their woes. For that purpose, Mao & Co. raised the cry that “foreign imperialists” were threatening peace-loving China. It was a hoary gambit, especially for Peking. In 1950 the Communists had helped consolidate their initial conquest of China by intervention in Korea. The bombardment of Quemoy in 1958 had helped reconcile China’s masses to the strains of the big leap. Now, to divert attention from its failure, Peking could point to the bloody revolt in Tibet, Indian “aggression” along the Tibetan frontier, and “the plot of the U.S. imperialists” in Laos.

But though this clumsy troublemaking helped out at home, it was disastrous abroad. In its ten-year existence, Red China had acted aggressively from Korea to Kashmir (see map), and always, in their deep suspicion of “white imperialism,” the newly independent neutrals of Southeast Asia had made excuses for Peking. But with the savage repression of the Tibetan revolt, and deliberate provocation of India, Southeast Asians were taking seriously the threat of “yellow imperialism.” Burma, which had formerly refused U.S. aid, now recoiled at the thought of loans from Peking. Thailand’s Marshal Sarit had placed an embargo on imports from Red China and Malaya closed down two Red Chinese banks as centers of smuggling and espionage. And though India’s Nehru, true to his nature, continued to vacillate, hostility toward Red China was rampant among the Indian masses.

Nothing But a Line. No less important was the fact that Peking’s mulish behavior both at home and abroad had strained relations with its Soviet Big Brother. Devoutly Communist as Peking professes to be, there have always been tensions between Russia and Red China—a fact that emerges clearly from the comments of Russian technicians who have worked in China. “In little ways,” says a Soviet chemist, “the Chinese showed us up, and sometimes behind our backs they called us Big Noses, as if we were no better than oldtime imperialists.”

The seeds of conflict are visible, too, in Russians’ acute awareness of the 5,000-mile border between underpopulated Siberia and jampacked China. Khrushchev’s pouring of more than 1,000,000 young Russians into the lands beyond the Urals is almost certainly designed in part to populate the empty reaches of Siberia before Red China grows much moire powerful. Nor does the Kremlin make much effort to disguise the fact that it would be happier to see China expand toward Southeast Asia than toward the north.

But north is where the Chinese are going: in ten years the population of Manchuria has doubled to some 45 million, and even desert-dotted Sinkiang has grown by almost a million people. In the Soviet satellite of Outer Mongolia, Peking has succeeded in infiltrating 20,000 Chinese laborers. “What are you worried about?” a Russian engineer asked an American not long ago. “You have the whole Pacific between you and China, while we have nothing but a line drawn on a map.”

These tensions, though held within bounds by a common ideology and by Red China’s technical ineptness, have clearly been increased by Nikita Khrushchev’s U.S. tour last month. In his half-dozen private meetings with Mao last week, as in his public speeches, Khrushchev seemed to be saying that, for the moment at least, he wants to concentrate on relaxing tensions between Moscow and Washington. Presumably, too, he made it clear that, even though Peking has dropped its irritating claim that Red China will reach the final stage of Communism ahead of Russia, Moscow still disapproves of Mao’s communes. Khrushchev may even have repeated, in politer fashion, his snorted comment to U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey eleven months ago: “Communes are oldfashioned; they are reactionary. We tried that after the Revolution. It doesn’t work.”

“They Don’t Understand.” But whether Nikita’s strictures will have much effect on Mao is doubtful. Even before the Soviet leader’s big TU-114 landed at Peking Airport last week, Liu Shao-chi had undermined part of Nikita’s mission by raging against U.S. support of the Chinese Nationalists and crying, “We Chinese people are determined to liberate our territory of Taiwan, the Pescadores, Quemoy and Matsu.” As for abandoning the communes, the Chinese answer is implicit in Liu’s unconcealed belief that the trouble with the Russians is that “they don’t understand the Chinese.”

Neither these nor any other visible points of discord are likely to bring an open breach between Red China and the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future. Peking desperately needs Russia as its only source of military, economic and technical help. Russia cannot afford to lose the alliance with Red China, and with it the claim to leadership of a bloc of nations that covers a quarter of the globe. But with Red China in the hands of men like Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi, who believe that economic power can be created and a world won on the basis of fanaticism, slave labor and bellicosity, the tensions between Moscow and Peking seem unlikely to diminish. In days to come, despite the show of solidarity that they staged in Peking last week, both Russia and Red China may even come to look back on the first ten years of Communist power in China as the easiest.

* The size of mainland China’s population has long been in dispute. The last official count made by the Nationalists in 1947 gave the figure as 456,500,000. In a “direct census” taken in 1953, Chinese Reds claimed a population of 582,600,000. Some Chinese authorities believe that the true total is much lower.