The Loosened Rack

The hardest place to seek the truth these days is Communist China: John Foster Dulles won't let U.S. reporters in, and Chinese Communists won't let them roam. But all the signs--travelers' reports, refugees' statements, guarded Communist broadcasts--indicate that Red China is undergoing the worst agricultural crisis since the Communist conquest in 1949.

The food crisis is playing hob with Mao Tse-tung's ambition to transform Red China headlong into a major industrial power. He had set workers to mining twice as much coal as they ever did under the Nationalists, and producing more than 4,000,000 tons of steel last year--not much when set against 115 million tons in the U.S., but more than any other Asian nation save Japan. Yet, two months ago, in the full tide of this seeming triumph, China's rulers began to put the brakes on industry.

Behind this surprising reversal lay the fact that China, more than any other great power, rides on the back of her peasantry. Perennially short of both raw materials and fuel, China's burgeoning industry must import two-thirds of its oil, 40% of its machinery and much of its steel. More than half these vital imports are paid for with agricultural products--food ruthlessly snatched out of the mouths of its ever-hungry producers.

In steadily increasing numbers Red China's peasants have been slipping out from under this crushing burden. Early this year the Yangtze Daily reported that the Hupeh Province People's Committee had ordered "severe punishment" for anyone giving employment to refugee peasants, who "are flowing into the cities, causing serious effects on agricultural production." Despite such orders, the Peking People's Daily last month estimated that at least 50,000 peasants had drifted into teeming Canton.

Not a Cent. Cause of these mass migrations was a series of disasters, both natural and manmade. Two years ago Chairman Mao decreed that before the 1957 spring sowing all of China's 500 million peasants must be herded into cooperative farms. By last week Mao's order was 90% accomplished, but in the process many peasants had lost interest in efficient production--or in any production at all.

"In No. 4 cooperative of Yishing County," reported Nanking's Hsinhua Daily, "some members say: 'Even if we worked to death, we still wouldn't see a single cent to buy salt and oil with.' " To add to the peasants' (and the government's) woes, many cooperative-farm bosses, in their concentration on staple crops like grain, discouraged traditional side activities such as pig breeding. The result: a 20 million drop in China's hog population.

Wanda's Wake. Last August, just as the collectivization drive reached its peak, ten Chinese provinces--26 million acres of land--were ravaged by drought, floods and Typhoon Wanda. In Honan province alone, 2,000,000 homes were destroyed or damaged; everywhere cotton and grain harvests fell below expectations. By this spring, instead of being better off, millions of newly collectivized farmers were in the grip of famine. Suddenly, Red China's bosses were haunted by visions of all-out peasant resistance to collectivization, a resistance which would bring China's industrialization program to a dead stop.

For Agony, Aspirin. Faced with this threat, Mao and his colleagues hastily decided to backpedal. Two months ago, in an obvious effort to relieve food shortages, Vice Premier Chen Yun, Red China's chief economic planner, announced that exports of pork and edible oils would be cut by two-thirds. At the same time, to make more consumer goods available, one-sixth of China's investment funds for 1957 were earmarked for light industry. (Under the original terms of the First Five-Year Plan, the ratio of investment between heavy and light industry was set at eight to one.) And last week, in a move that will simultaneously cut urban food consumption and give the peasants more money for consumer goods, Peking raised the price of farm products. Something like this was needed to give the peasants a sense of incentive. But, like aspirin, Communist rulers never offer more than temporary relief. Once they are sure they have averted a major explosion, Peking's commissars can be expected to tighten the rack once again. Their ambition to pursue industrial power at whatever cost compels them to.

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