Word: china
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Military danger sometimes makes strange bedfellows, and for a while it looked as if Pakistan and India might patch up their differences in a defense agreement. Communist China's machinations in Tibet have had widespread effects, from the conciliatory talks in Karachi and New Delhi to proposals by Vice-President Nixon and Senator Kennedy that the U.S. boost India's rate of economic growth to that of China...
What Goes Up. Beneath this display of international arrogance and domestic boasts ran admissions that last year's vaunted gains had been barely enough to keep China on the economic rails. "Since the autumn of 1958," admitted Finance Minister Li Hsien-nien, "there has been tension . . . owing to short supply of some non-staple foods and manufactured daily necessities in the cities." One of the chief causes of these "temporary difficulties," conceded Li, was the upheaval created by "such a great social change as the people's commune movement...
Chou Enlai, too, reflected Peking's second thoughts about the economic impact of the people's communes: he made no mention of the once highly touted scheme to herd city dwellers as well as peasants into the communes. And he was clearly fearful that China's hard-pressed citizens in the cities might begin to ask why, if the countryside was producing such vast quantities of food, their rice bowls got no fuller. "It is also possible," warned Chou in what would have been heresy in a lesser official, "that output increases of certain industrial and agricultural...
...Irrepressible Hunch. Despite Chou's implicit admission that things were not so rosy as Peking's inventive statisticians made out, Red China was obviously, at a lower rate than the boasts, pushing forward industrially. The people might suffer, but for centuries China's people have known hunger and oppression; the people might be resentful, but never before, under any tyranny, had there been so systematic and efficient a thought-control system, so vast a network of informers patrolling home, church, school and work place...
...overworked, underfed, a trivial incident of defiance, a single lapse of authority-such as an army unit's refusal to fire on a handful of insubordinate peasants in a commune-might set off a chain reaction. No one saw such prospects now. Yet better than anyone else, Red China's outwardly confident rulers know that great leaps involve the risk of disastrous falls...