The New Leap

Almost at once China put its border clash with Russia to use in a new domestic propaganda campaign. The aim is "to convert the workers' indignation at the Soviet revisionist armed provocation into revolutionary energy," as the official New China News Agency put it. According to the agency, miners promised to "produce more top-quality coal, so as to burn the Soviet revisionists, a paper tiger, into ashes." Workers at the Anshan Iron and Steel Company were reported so angry at the Russians that they opened a new furnace ahead of schedule.

Peking's exhortations were designed to rally fervor for China's latest economic venture. The project bears a striking resemblance to the Great Leap Forward of a decade ago, probably Mao Tse-tung's most ambitious scheme for China, and his most disastrous failure.

On Two Legs. At the height of that folly, smoke was belching from millions of tiny, homemade backyard steel furnaces stoked by peasants--a fantastic waste of manpower that eventually resulted in serious food shortages. When the do-it-yourself mania finally ran its course, China's economy had been set back by nearly a decade.

Although China has scarcely recovered from the Great Leap Forward and the more recent ravages of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the rhetoric today--"walking on two legs," "flying leap," "new leap"--is virtually identical with the admonitions of the earlier fiasco. As was the case then, agriculture will have to bear the main burden.

The new leap orders China's 74,000-odd communes to forget about any aid from Peking. They have been told that henceforth they themselves--not the government--must remunerate schoolteachers and medical personnel working in the countryside. Commune members are to make their own simple farm tools, freeing industry for more sophisticated production. Moreover, Peking is pushing a frugality theme to such a degree that celebrations for the New Year, China's biggest and happiest holiday, were woefully crimped last month.

Fighting Lethargy. The communes are already hurting: they have to feed an estimated 20 million former urbanites --including millions of now undesirable Red Guards--whom the regime has recently sent into the boondocks for lengthy spells of physical labor. The peasants' response to Mao's latest brainstorm so far seems to have been remarkably unenthusiastic: troops had to be sent to a commune in Szechwan province to "overcome local lethargy."

What seems to distinguish the new drive from the old Great Leap, however, is its flexibility. There has been some advance planning, and there appear to be no rigid output targets. In fact, Peking is admonishing local officials to "leave enough leeway." Though not too much, of course. The goal of the latest campaign, as Shanghai radio explained it recently, is "a fruit that can be picked by jumping and reaching up, not a fruit that can be taken by stretching out one's arm from a lying or sitting position."

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