China: The Siege of the Ants

AFTER more than two decades of Communist rule, regimented pageantry has become China's highest art. To celebrate national holidays, the government often marshals tens and even hundreds of thousands of evenly spaced banner carriers and flag wavers. Schoolchildren throughout the country regularly practice precision marching (often with wooden guns), and even China's productive labor is sometimes carried out in a manner resembling close-order drill. Whatever the occasion, there is one standardized piece of equipment for China's nearly 800 million people--a copy of the little red book containing Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

The sweep and mass of "people's pageantry" was especially evident in Peking during last month's National Day parade, which celebrated the 21st anniversary of the Communist takeover. Normally a festival of empty rockets and loaded rhetoric, the event this year was an almost uninterrupted kaleidoscope of less destructive gear--balloons, pompons and brilliant fireworks (see color). If the emphasis was on anything, it was on the goal of practical "socialist reconstruction," as symbolized by gigantic sheaves of wheat drawn through the crowds by farm commune tractors.

Long Night. The change represented a new awakening for China. In economic terms, the world's most populous nation has lain asleep for the past dozen years. The long night began in 1958, when Mao launched his ill-fated Great Leap Forward. His nation had barely recovered from that disaster when the nightmare of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began. Now, Sinologists believe, China may be about to register its first real economic progress since before the Great Leap.

More important, 1970 seems to mark China's emergence from an almost unfathomable period of mass self-flagellation. Besides economic progress, there are several other important signs that China's rulers have finally cast off the demons of the Cultural Revolution and are committed to a period of relative calm and consolidation. After calling home all but one of its 42 ambassadors during the height of the frenzy, Peking has reassigned 28 to its embassies abroad. Relations were established with Canada in October, and last week with Italy (see box, page 43). Some time soon, Premier Chou En-lai is expected to make his first trip outside Asia in five years.

The new pragmatism, to be sure, has not yet affected much of the nation's life. China's once rich world of culture remains frozen. Exactly eight stage works have been approved for presentation since 1966--five operas, two ballets and one symphony, all of them bristling with revolutionary ardor (sample title: Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy). Not a single new song has been published since the Cultural Revolution. Political indoctrination in saturation quantities is still forced daily on everyone.

Rising Star. Nor has the new mood forced any change in the top leadership. At 76, Mao remains China's unquestioned ruler. Last month he was given the title "Supreme Commander of the Whole Nation and the Whole Army," and a new constitution will soon name him head of state, the title held by Liu Shao-chi until he was purged in 1966 as a Soviet-style revisionist. But beneath Mao and his heir apparent, Defense Minister Lin Piao, 63, China's leadership is rapidly changing. At almost every level of administration, the radicals who were riding high during the Cultural Revolution are losing power to Chou En-lai's pragmatists and, even more notably, to the army.

The military dominates the Revolutionary Committees that rule at the province and district level. Army officers occupy deputy posts in several of Peking's ministries and hold eleven seats on the ruling 21-man Politburo. The fastest-rising man in China is Army Chief of Staff Huang Yung-sheng (TIME, Aug. 24), who now ranks fifth on official lists. Some radicals, by contrast, have fallen from power, particularly those who gathered around Mao's wife Chiang Ching. Among those conspicuously absent from the National Day parade: Politburo Members Hsieh Fu-chih and Chen Pota, both powerful proponents of the Cultural Revolution. Army control, however, is far from complete, and the radicals have not given up.

Barefoot Doctors. Despite the infighting, China's planners have reached a consensus on one "great strategic plan." It is a blueprint for comprehensive reform designed to change social, economic and educational life for decades to come. Though the long-term goal remains industrialization, the plan calls for an initial revitalization of rural life by moving urban industries and vast numbers of people to the countryside.

Already, millions of city dwellers --students, Red Guards, factory workers, intellectuals--have been packed off to work in hinterland communities. Before all 840 of China's campuses were closed during the Cultural Revolution, there were 800,000 students. Now, with so many college-age youths down on the farms, China's college population stands at a mere 80,000 at about a dozen universities. Peking's rustication program has not pleased a good many citified professionals who are forced to become "barefoot" doctors and teachers.

The dispersion is aimed at making use of China's most abundant resource --manpower--in the areas where the country needs it most: food production and basic industries. The 1970 grain harvest, while it did not come anywhere near making China self-sufficient, is expected to be the most bountiful in China's history--about 200 million tons. The authoritative Hong Kong weekly, Far Eastern Economic Review, estimates that the overall economic growth rate could be as high as 10%, paced by chemicals, petroleum, iron, steel and electric power. In addition, some essential projects have been completed as a result of the sheer bulk of manpower. Provincial authorities in central China mobilized nearly half a million workers to build a 160-mile canal between Honan, Anhwei and Kiangsu provinces, linking several of central China's major rivers. In the Manchurian city of Anshan, 2,300 steel-mill workers and their families spread themselves along a 21-mile road and passed gravel to each other in bags and basins to lay a foundation for a new plant addition. People's Daily describes such shock tactics as "ants laying siege" to industrial projects.

Glory Rice. Parts of Mao's scheme, however, have proved wasteful or simply impossible. To make various sections of the country self-sufficient in case of attack--presumably by the Soviet Union--each of China's 26 provinces and regions has been forced to build at least one heavy industry and scores of light industries. One result of the decentralization program: a factory in Chinghai is assembling its own "Chinghai Lake"-brand trucks in a desert province inhabited mostly by yak-riding nomads who do not even need roads.

In addition, with factories going up all over the country and demanding quick delivery of parts and other supplies, China's inadequate distribution system is unable to cope. Peking, however, will not accept that as an excuse. "The idea that production is not possible when raw materials run short," said a memorandum, "is a cowardly, do-nothing attitude."

The great strategic plan is not designed with the welfare of the average Chinese in mind. Peking has said nothing about lifting the food rationing that has kept one-fifth of the world's population on a meager diet for 17 years. Housewives are forced to hold back several handfuls of "glory rice" or wheat at every meal against future shortages or wartime emergency. For most, life remains a dreary round of shopping for short supplies, endless political lectures and hard work. Not a few find it intolerable. As many as 10,000 escape each year, most by undertaking a perilous eight-hour swim across the Pearl River estuary to Hong Kong. Last week, with winter setting in, 200 made it. But in the waters around the British crown colony, police recovered the bodies of 32 Chinese who did not.

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