Word: bumpers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
According to the Red Chinese themselves, 1958 was a bumper year down on the communal farm: 375 million tons of grain produced, more than double the 1957 output. The farmers of Yunnan province were reported floundering in grain. With storehouses bulging, tubs of wheat had to be crammed inside peasants' homes...
...soil bank program (which was not extended by the last Congress), as much as $179 million on rural electrification, and a big chunk of the $250 million being spent for agricultural conservation. Moreover, the Agriculture department's surplus estimates are based not on the balmy-weather bumper crops of 1958 but on the ornery-weather average of other years...
...five years, said Khrushchev, collective farmers had had it good because the state offered them fancy prices. But, he added, "the control of the ruble" works both ways, and now that the virgin lands are turning out bumper crops and the state can store some grain, the state will be able to buy "wherever it is cheaper." This year's decision to break up the state Motor Tractor Stations and sell their equipment to collectives, he said, "marks the beginning of a new stage in economic relations between the state and collective farms. Henceforth, the principle of free sale...
...party conclaver comrades were told that 99% of the peasants are now in communes, i.e., jammed into barracks (TIME, Dec. 1). But plainly, things had gone too fast. And though the Reds proclaimed a bumper crop of 375 million tons of grains, there was a serious shortage of food in the cities. This could be partly explained by the fouled-up transportation system. Under the forced industrialization drive, trucks and trains that might have transported food were kept busy rushing from place to place with loads of pig iron ineptly made in thousands of primitive village smelters...