CHINA'S TWO DECADES OF COMMUNISM

The Chinese revolution is great, but the road after the revolution will be longer, the work greater and more arduous.

--Mao Tse-tung( 1949)

TWO decades after Communist soldiers marched into Peking to climax Mao Tse-tung's takeover of China, the road still seems long and tortuous, the struggle unremittingly arduous. Like many another reformer, Mao has found that building a country can be at least as difficult as making a revolution. Thus, when thousands of Chinese mass this week in the capital's great Tienanmen Square to hail the 20th anniversary of Communist rule, their celebrations will be tempered by the awareness of problems that are as immense as the vast land and as numerous as its people. This was to have been a "year of triumph" for Mao and China--with a victorious end to his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and a restoration of law and order throughout a badly fragmented nation. But the balance sheet is dismal for 1969--as it is for many of the years since 1949.

On its tenth anniversary, China seemed well on its way to becoming a world power. Now that prospect is remote. To be sure, the indexes of improvement over 1949 are impressive (see chart opposite). China has emerged as a formidable Asian power, a member of the nuclear club,* and an ideological challenger of the Soviet Union. But it also remains economically backward, militarily weak, politically divided and alienated from much of the world.

Of China's 760 million people--one-fifth of mankind--some 500 million are peasants, hardly a foundation for a superpower. Despite efforts to extend schools to the farthest reaches of the country, more than half the population is illiterate. Production on China's communal farms has almost kept pace with the population, but it takes 85% of the labor force to grow the food. While the economy spurted ahead during the Communists' first decade at an estimated annual rate of 10%, it has been growing a mere 1% a year since 1959.

Virtually Ungovernable. When the Communists took over in 1949, China could hardly have been in worse condition. It was in the midst of a great historic drama--and the U.S. watched it with deep concern, for China has always held a unique place in the American imagination. After two millenniums of maintaining an exquisitely sophisticated culture in relative isolation from the world, China was invaded by the West--by its traders, missionaries, soldiers and technicians. First under Sun Yatsen, whose revolution overthrew the Manchu empire, then under Chiang Kaishek, new leaders struggled to rescue the Chinese spirit from repeated foreign humiliations, and, above all, to push the nation into the modern world. After the Communists moved in to capture the nationalist revolution, a bitter civil war left China in chaos.

Quickly, the Communists moved to curb inflation, suppress bandits and warlords, rehabilitate industry and the transportation network, equalize food distribution, establish a tax system and bring the people rudimentary health care. For the first time in anyone's memory, an efficient, honest administration was in charge--though it could also be ruthless and even inhuman in its desire to impose unity on the land. By 1952, Mao had used persuasion and purge to consolidate his power, and China was ready to transform its economy.

The Great Leap. With patience, some economists believe, Communist China could have been very largely self-sufficient by about 1967. But Mao, with his rigid dogmatism, was impatient. In 1957, he launched his Great Leap Forward--a single heroic burst that would overnight transform China into a modern nation. The targets were preposterous--e.g., a 33% annual increase in industrial production--and so were the demands made on the people. "In those days, the workers never went home," a factory manager told Austrian Journalist Hugo Portisch. "They stayed at their machines twelve, 14, 16 or 20 hours at a time. They had only one goal: to do all they could." Vast armies of blue-tunicked men and women toiled over irrigation projects, dams and thousands of backyard steel furnaces. In less than two years, it was clear that the Great Leap had thrust China backward.

Mao was shunted aside in the intraparty battles that followed the failure. A group of more pragmatic men, led by President Liu Shao-chi, set out to repair the damage. They were on the way to succeeding when Mao began stirring again. "Those in China now under the age of 20 have never fought a war and have never seen an imperialist or known capitalism in power," he told American Author Edgar Snow in 1965. He feared that the young, without the rigors of revolution to test them as he had been tested, were getting soft. The ideological split with the Soviet Union was by now forbiddingly wide, and Mao feared that China would eventually follow the Soviet example: a revolution that had been sold out, turning bourgeois in its concern for consumer goods and comforts rather than self-sacrifice and struggle. His antidote, the prescription of an aging revolutionary romantic, was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Like the Great Leap, it was a quixotic undertaking, one that was intended not only to rid him of rivals like Liu and break up the fossilized party and state bureaucracy, but also to radicalize China and revitalize its revolutionary ardor.

Mao launched the great purge in

1966, and the whirlpool quickly engulfed the nation. Under the assault of the youthful Red Guards, Mao's fanatic shock troops, the party and government bureaucracies were badly battered and leaders like President Liu Shao-chi were humiliated and ousted. The economy ground down. Schools were closed for almost two years; when

Asahi Shimbun Correspondent lyeshige Akioka visited Tung Chi University in Shanghai this month, he discovered that there would be graduating classes this year and next--but none after that. No one seemed to know when enrollment would resume. Factional clashes became brutal; at one point in the struggle, corpses floated down the Pearl River from Canton and washed ashore in Hong Kong. Mao finally backed down and called in the army to restore control.

Big Cleanup. Once unleashed, however, the forces were difficult to harness. To this day, the nation remains in disarray. Last month, with the aid of the army, the regime launched a "big cleanup." Since then, there have been reports of mass arrests, public trials and even executions of "factionalists, reactionaries, anarchists, saboteurs and opportunists." It is unclear whether the campaign is intended simply to put China's house in order for the Oct. 1 anniversary or whether it is part of the army's larger, long-range drive to restore peace and order.

Factional fighting still flares frequently in the provinces. In Shansi, troops have had to be called in from elsewhere to still rioting. In Tibet, small guerrilla clashes are said to be frequent, and there are reports that the Panchen Lama, once considered a willing tool of Peking, has escaped from prison. In Szechwan, one of China's rice bowls, an armed group calling itself the "Red Worker-Peasant Guerrilla Column" is said to be roaming the hills. In Hunan, Chairman Mao's home province, authorities complain that "the trend of anarchism ran rampant" all last summer. In Kiangsu, Maoist cultural cadres are vociferously denouncing "rock-'n'-roll crazy dances and vulgar and revolting actions in some so-called revolutionary dances."

Many members of China's younger generation seem disaffected--some because they want no part of Maoist puritanism and idealism, others because they feel that the Chairman has not gone far enough in his efforts to regenerate the revolution. Indeed, throughout the population, the Cultural Revolution seriously undermined respect for authority. Abroad, China's position is not much better. Peking has lost much face in Asia and Africa. Once the Third World carefully watched the competition between India and China. India still has trouble aplenty, but economic planners no longer seriously consider the "Chinese model." Albania is China's only real friend, and Peking has but a few close acquaintances--Pakistan, Rumania, Syria, Nepal, Tanzania, Mali, Guinea. Peking has diplomatic relations with only 46 countries, and at present keeps ambassadors in 18 of them. During the Cultural Revolution, all but one of them were recalled to Peking.

Many experts assume that when Mao dies, his anointed heir, Defense Minister Lin Piao, will take over the chairmanship of the party. His rule will most likely be only temporary; behind the scenes, the country may well be run by a collective leadership. Challengers are likely to rise from the radical left, headed by Mao's wife Chiang Ching and such Cultural Revolution stalwarts as Ideologue Chen Pota. Eventually, however, more moderate forces may prevail, perhaps clustered around Premier Chou En-lai and the politically savvy Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Huang Yung-sheng.

Defensive Stance. The chants and the rhetoric will initially be pure Mao, but the leadership's preoccupation will be with such necessities as the restoration of law and order, the rehabilitation of the economy, a toning down of the conflict with the Soviets. There may even be concessions to private incentive. The compelling need to restore domestic calm might be enough to keep the nation out of foreign adventure. China's military stance is therefore likely to remain defensive for some time--provided the feud with the Soviets does not get out of hand. The dispute between the two nations is at an extremely sensitive juncture. For roughly three months, the Soviets have been exerting strenuous efforts to draw China into negotiations on border problems; to give their attempts muscle, they seem to be implying that unless the Chinese agree to a resumption of talks, Moscow might settle the issue by force, perhaps by a preemptive strike against China's nuclear installations.

Sick Fifth. Whatever the complexion of the post-Mao leadership, some very basic problems facing China will not fade away in the foreseeable future. The country will have a population of 1 billion by 1980, yet still lacks the solid industrial base that is a must for any modern power. Somehow, Peking will have to reassert the central government's authority over the vast hinterlands--something it lost during the Cultural Revolution. At the same time it will have to determine whether it should soften its standoffish attitude toward the rest of the world. Eventually it will no doubt have to consider toning down its hostility toward the U.S., which has moved from a romantic and sometimes patronizing vision of China to one of exaggerated fear, abetted by China's unyielding animosity. Washington could aid a change in Peking's posture by breaking down some of its own barriers against China and venturing a more conciliatory attitude.

"In the long run," says Harvard's Edwin O. Reischauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo, "the chief problem that China presents may not be the danger that it will be so rich and strong, as well as hostile, that it menaces our basic interests, but rather that it may fall so short of meeting the economic needs and aspirations of its people that it remains an unstable and sick fifth of humanity." Not until Peking's leaders begin to busy themselves with the task of satisfying those basic needs will China be able to set out on the long road that Mao talked about 20 years ago.

* Peking has an estimated 100 nuclear devices, including hydrogen bombs, but it is only now developing and testing the medium-range missiles needed to deliver them. Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun reported that the Chinese had conducted an underground nuclear test early last week; the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had no comment.

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