To Catch a Flea

"If a person tries to use ten fingers to catch ten fleas at the same time," warned Peking's People's Daily not long ago, "it is quite possible that he will not catch even one. Fleas must be caught one after the other." Last week, in deference to this folksy dictum, economic planners all over Red China were lowering their sights.

Red China's economic reassessment began last December when moonfaced Chairman Mao Tse-tung met with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in the bustling Yangtze River industrial complex of Wuhan. Although party propagandists were still extolling the miracles of production that had been achieved during Red China's "great leap forward" in 1958, the harsh fact before Mao and his colleagues was that the great leap forward had actually brought China close to economic chaos. By concentrating the nation's economic resources on a series of "shock programs" --above all, the great campaign to produce pig iron and steel in homemade blast furnaces--the Communists had created labor shortages in agriculture and industry, had so snarled China's inadequate transportation network that shipments of food and vital raw materials into the big industrial cities had dwindled to trickles.

Biggest trouble of all was in the hastily created people's communes, which showed signs of developing into self-contained economic empires. Some communes, "regardless of the state plan," refused to surrender any of their harvest for distribution in the cities. Complained Finance Vice Minister Wu Po: "There are even communes that make no distinction between their own property and that of the state. They freely use state materials stored in warehouses, eat state grain as they like, and take things from stockpiles without bothering to render receipts."

The Chess Game. To remedy all this, Mao and his colleagues brusquely ordered local Communist cadres "to tidy up the people's communes" before mid-April, when Red China's 1959 economic plan must be approved by the nation's pseudo-parliament. To acquire the additional activists desperately needed to tighten up government control over the communes, the Chinese Communist Party has recruited an estimated 1,000,000 new members in the last five months. Mao has also thrown into the communes army units of up to division strength to lend a hand with plowing, irrigation projects, training of technicians, and "education" (i.e., disciplining the dissatisfied).

With the "tidying up" of the communes has gone an all-out drive for sensible priorities in industry. "Take the whole country as a coordinated chess game," urges the People's Daily. "To guarantee construction of important projects, we must learn how to give up favorite local projects." The theoretical journal Red Flag demanded fewer shock programs, insisted that even during such programs, "sufficient labor should be reserved for normal production." In Manchuria, local planners, quick to take a hint, announced that railway laborers "drawn from the water conservancy and iron and steel battlefronts . . . will be asked to handle food shipments in the way they handled iron and steel."

Nirvana Postponed. China's economy continues to suffer from the dislocations created by the great leap forward. The People's Daily recently acknowledged that production of coal, iron and steel is "still unable to meet the demands." Accordingly, in the key provinces of Yunnan and Hupeh, Mao's government early last month reintroduced work norms and extra pay for "overfulfillment of the quota"--devices that had been abandoned in the heady, doctrinaire days of the great leap. This doubtless shocked the ideological zealots who only a few months ago were boasting that the slavery of the people's communes would mean realization of the Marxist ideal--"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" --ahead even of Russia. That boast is no longer heard.

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