RED CHINA: Ten Red Years

In Peking, Red China’s commissars scurried about putting the final touches on preparations for this week’s celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Communist takeover in China. On the broad avenues of the capital, thousands of workers, wearing white kerchiefs on their heads, marched and countermarched in rehearsal for the big parade. All along the parade route, every bit of bare wall was decorated with portraits of Red China’s leaders—Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-chi and Chou Enlai, in that order—and posters proclaiming that life is getting better and better in the people’s paradise.

In their anxiety to impress, Mao and his minions had made some eye-catching changes in Peking that were sure to evoke oohs and ahs from their hundreds of foreign guests, chief of whom will be Nikita Khrushchev. In the last nine months, the Reds have thrown up a spanking new Peking railroad station, capable of handling 200,000 passengers a day, and they boast that they are erecting enough other buildings to give the capital a total of 398 million sq. ft. of new floor space—more than 14 times that of all the office buildings put up in Manhattan since the war. In a three-day cleanup campaign, 1,000,000 Peking residents claim to have collected refuse, dirt and mud sufficient to build a wall “three feet wide and 21 feet high, running 1,200 miles from Peking to Canton.” And in an outburst of planned gaiety, the commissars had promised a brief bounty of meat, clothing, and children’s toys, including space rockets that trail sparks.

Along with all this went a persistent rumor that Red China was determined to fire a rocket that was not a toy—a Russian-supplied missile that might put a Chinese satellite in orbit around the earth. If the rocket failed, there was speculation that Red China might explode an Abomb, also borrowed from the Russians. One way or another, Red China this week plans to overawe its Asian neighbors and to serve notice on the West that it is a nation with the ambitions, if not the substance, of a first-rank power.