Too Much Too Soon

With good Marxist resolutions and a holiday cease-fire on the Quemoy "front," Red China last week marked the beginning of a new lunar year--the Year of the Pig. To Chinese, the pig is a symbol of prosperity. Given last year's vaunted "great leap forward" in the Year of the Dog in the production of everything from steel to sesame seeds, and given all their own hard work, mainland China's hard-pressed masses had every reason to expect to be eating higher on the hog. Instead, they are living through some of the hardest times since Mao Tse-tung took power in Peking in 1949.

The great leap was .accompanied by a mighty fumble. Last month, despite a claimed 102% increase in staple food crops, the grain ration was cut in China's cities and the lowly cabbage was put on the ration list for the first time. Since then, laundry soap has been added to the list and the monthly sugar ration has been slashed to slightly more than half a pound per person. In the great port of Canton there is a shortage of fish; in Shanghai, meat is all but unobtainable.

No Sale. Unlike many past shortages in Red China, these are not the result of a Spartan decision to export agricultural products in order to purchase machinery abroad. In the past few months Peking's trade offensive in Southeast Asia--which seriously worried the Japanese--has begun to falter badly. Fortnight ago Mao's government, despite its need for foreign exchange, canceled a contract to supply British firms with several thousand tons of cotton and cotton waste, and this breach of contract will jeopardize future negotiations.*

Last fall Red China was dumping cement in Hong Kong at uneconomic prices in an effort to drive Japanese producers out of the market; today Red Chinese cement cannot be bought in Southeast Asia at any price. Indonesia is told that it will get its promised 200,000 tons of rice this year not from China but through Russia, and that it must pay $8.40 a ton more for it. Everywhere Chinese Communist commercial agents are turning away orders for products that require extensive hand labor.

Shock Effect. Partly, the paradox of fewer available goods despite increased production comes from outright figure faking. A full quarter of 1958's bumper "grain" crop was not grain at all but sweet potatoes, which Chinese dislike, and eat only when nothing else is available. But the fundamental trouble is that in their headlong rush to convert China into a modern industrial power, Peking's planners have tried to do too much too soon.

In their drive to herd China's 500 million peasants into military-style "people's communes" and in their boundless enthusiasm for economic "shock programs," the Communists have come close to negating their nation's greatest economic asset--its teeming manpower.

Recent Western visitors to the Peking area saw cotton blowing away unharvested while the local peasantry concentrated on rebuilding Peking's showy Tien An Men Square. The great campaign to produce steel and pig iron in homemade blast furnaces created even more widespread labor shortages. Factories producing textiles for export were obliged to cut out a shift in order to free workers to stoke the ubiquitous furnaces.

Besides dislocating labor, the shock programs disastrously snarled Red China's transport system. In early December 70% of the railroad cars moving in and out of Shanghai were serving the blast furnaces. To provide the city with even the barest minimum of food, railwaymen were driven to perching live hogs or baskets of fowl atop cars already overloaded with ore, pig iron or coal.

Concept for Chaos. Late last month, apparently aware of the crying need for a sensible priority system in the allocation of labor and transport, Peking's bureaucrats ordered a cutback in the backyard blast-furnace campaign. But all signs are that the shock-program concept still prevails. Currently, Red China's masses are engrossed in a drive to collect and distribute 10 billion tons of fertilizer; the nation's steel production target for 1959 is set for 18 million tons, a 64% increase over alleged production last year. Says one Hong Kong hand: "If they got snarled up last year, think what's going to happen if they achieve these goals. The chaos that may set in is terrifying to contemplate."

* Communist China is Britain's best customer in the Communist bloc. Britain sold $75 million in goods to Red China last year--$8,400,000 more than to the Soviet Union.

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