RED CHINA: Forward in Reverse

At a recent Communist Party meeting in Peking, an ambitious delegate who began to recite the once-obligatory eulogies to “the great agricultural leap” was harshly reminded by one of his colleagues that, after all, China’s Communists were “not like the legendary monkey god, Sun Wun Kung, who could pull out one of his hairs and with a breath create an army.” More bluntly yet, the Peking People’s Daily unprecedentedly admitted the possibility of famine “in certain areas of the country.” In face of the hunger that stalks mainland China for the third straight year, even Red China’s own propagandists could no longer manage to blink the fact that their country was in the grip of a major agricultural crisis.

Part of the trouble down on China’s farms was caused, as so often in China’s history, by natural disasters—drought and insect pests in the northern provinces, floods along the southern coast. But nature’s harshness was compounded by the adoption last year of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s “three-thirds” theory of agriculture, under which one-third of China’s land was to be left fallow each year, one-third was to be given over to forest and the final third to be intensively cultivated Japanese-style.

Obedient to Mao’s dictum. Red China’s peasants in 1959 reduced the amount of land they sowed by nearly 10%, set out to make up for it by deep plowing and heavy fertilization. But in his theorizing. Mao had forgotten that China is desperately short of chemical fertilizers and even the simplest agricultural tools. Result was that although Peking’s grain production target for 1960 is 300 million tons. China will be lucky to produce two-thirds that much. Admits the People’s Daily: “If this year’s summer harvest equals that of 1959 or is a little bigger—or even a little smaller—it will be a great victory for agriculture.”

In a desperate effort-to reverse this tide. Red China’s masters have switched the line to read “plant more and harvest more.” are plugging a crash vegetable-growing program. Kiangsi province has ordered 480,000 civil servants to the farm, Shansi province sent 400,000 “retrenched” industrial and dam workers to the countryside, and Kwangtung province promised 1,000,000 laborers who had “blindly immigrated to the cities.” To remedy the fertilizer shortage, commune dwellers are being urged to raise pigs for their own profit, following the slogan: “More pigs, more fertilizer; more fertilizer, more grain; more grain, a future infinitely beautiful.”

On the strength of these programs, Peking now talks reassuringly of a “bumper summer harvest next year.” But the fact is that after almost eleven years of Communist rule, China has gained not at all in the desperate race between food production and population increase. “Food is very scarce,” wrote a mother in Foochow to her son in Hong Kong. “Were it not for your remittance, we would not taste a piece of meat in a year.”