RED CHINA: The Numbers Game

Barely two months ago, in a moment of unwonted honesty, Red China’s braggart overlords admitted that the economic achievements of 1958’s Great Leap Forward had been vastly inflated, and revised their 1959 production goals downward. But the price of truth proved too painful. Fortnight ago, during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Red takeover in China, Premier Chou En-lai complained: “The imperialists ridicule our adjusted 1959 plan as a ‘big leap backward’ . . . Obviously, it is a continued great leap forward on the basis of the exceptionally big leap forward [the year before].” Last week, quick to take a hint, Peking’s trained-seal statisticians announced in advance the overfulfillment of 1959 targets.

“How is our country’s economic situation today?” crowed the People’s Daily: “Excellent, excellent, excellent.” And out poured the mixture as before—a jumble of percentages with no base points and wildly improbable production figures. The new claims: for the first nine months of 1959, industrial production was running 45.6% higher than last year, steel production 67% and coal production 72%. Ironore production, added Peking, stood at 76.5 million tons, three times the figure for all of 1958. And just to show that nothing is too small to be transformed by the Marxist miracle, Mao’s drumbeaters reported that near Dairen in Manchuria there stands a marvelous tree laden with 12,175 apples—somehow counted though still unpicked.

Almost without exception, responsible Western economists recognize that to deny that Red China is growing economically would be selfdelusion. At a fearful price in oppression and human suffering, the Chinese Communists have, as Chou En-lai claims, made “earthshaking changes” in the Chinese economy in the last decade. But faced with the phantasmagoric nonsense emerging from Peking last week, even those Westerners most ready to be impressed by Chinese Communist accomplishments could do nothing but shrug: “Here we go again.”