Word: china
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...