Red China: Another Leap?

Red China’s Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958, ground to a halt only three years later in a shambles of rusting backyard iron furnaces and neglected farms. The experiment set the nation back economically a full decade; yet last week the Red Chinese seemed to be gathering strength for another leap. The length and direction of the stride were far from clear in the murky prose pouring out of Peking. What was clear was that Mao Tse-tung was rallying Red China’s 700 million people for another supreme effort of some sort, and behind it all was the full force of Peking’s 2,500,000-man army.

Everyone a Soldier. For months, Peking-watchers have been expecting a drastic social upheaval. Since November, China has writhed under a purge of “antiparty monsters” that has swept away many high-ranking party officials, journalists and artists. Peking propagandists have been praising Mao to the skies, whipping up much the same frenzied atmosphere as that preceding the 1958 leap. Mao himself added a mysterious element by disappearing from public view for six months and reappearing only in mid-May.

Last week an editorial in Peking’s People’s Daily explained that Mao had withdrawn from public view to “provide the scientific answer to the question of how to prevent the restoration of capitalism.” The answer: “Turn everyone into a soldier.” People’s Daily exhorted the army “to turn China’s factories, rural communities, schools, trading undertakings, service trades, and party and government organizations into great and truly revolutionary schools like the liberation army itself.” How the army would go about providing the schools has not yet been spelled out. Perhaps the army, with its highly developed political and counter-intelligence services, would provide cadres to swarm across China, carrying the Mao message.

Revolutionary Meals. The call to take on expanded tasks was not limited to the army. While the main job of workers remains in industry, Mao has called on them to study military affairs, culture and, whenever possible, engage in agricultural production. Though the peasants’ main task remains farming, they too should study military affairs, politics and culture and, if possible, “collectively run small plants.” In addition to being a teacher, the army can engage in farming and “run some small or medium-size factories.”

To spur the nation, Mao clearly wants to re-create the spirit of Yenan, where he and his followers in the 1930s holed up in caves and nurtured the revolution that was later to overrun the country. In Yenan, intellectuals served as peasants, peasants as workers, workers as soldiers. Mao’s great fear is that young Chinese who, in his words, “have never fought a war or seen an imperialist,” will fail to inherit the fiery revolutionary zeal that marked his early followers.

Mao is spreading his zeal in a particularly unpalatable way. In the past few months, the regime has been pushing a program to get the populace to eat an occasional “revolutionary meal” or “bitter-herb meal,” made up of unhusked rice, wild-grown vegetables and leaves—the type of food that Mao and his fellow revolutionaries sometimes subsisted on during the Long March and the years in Yenan.

Ousted Executioner. The army’s elevated role has moved Defense Minister Lin Piao, 59, into favored position to succeed the 72-year-old Mao. Lin’s position was buttressed by last week’s announcement that Marshal Lo Juiching, chief of the army general staff and leader of the massive executions in the mid-1950s (TIME cover, March 5, 1956), had been replaced by a Lin protégé and thus presumably purged. Lo made the mistake of arguing that the army should stay out of politics.