Word: chou
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Educated Youths. Also in the countryside, as Chou noted at the People's Congress, are 10 million young people raised and educated in the cities. Most of them are students graduating from middle school, the rough equivalent in nine years of an American high school. They are required to do productive labor for at least two years before they can go on to universities. They constitute one of the largest migrations in history. The ostensible object of sending these hordes of educated youths to the countryside is to bring urban skills and culture to rural areas. The unspoken reason...
...time, which may be responsible for the revival of prostitution; isolated instances have been observed by visitors to cities like Canton and Shanghai. The attachment still shown by workers to those material incentives that Mao hates so fiercely is also bothersome to leftist ideologues, but less so to Chou's technocrats. Intelligence reports from Wuhan have recently told of labor disruptions by industrial workers demanding higher wages. Politburo Member Wang Hungwen last year complained of some workers: "They want to reintroduce payment by the hour and premiums. Then what was the revolution...
Disappointing Year. The greatest problem that Chou's new State Council will face, in fact, is in this very area: the economy. Despite its vast resources and a populace that is still remarkably well disciplined, China had a disappointing year in 1974. The People's Daily, whose New Year's editorial customarily lists economic advances at great length, limited itself this year to a terse one-sentence description: "The total value of industrial and agricultural output shows a fresh increase over the 1973 period." Secret Central Committee documents, released by Taiwanese intelligence but considered authentic...
Part of the problem was certainly the chaos caused by the campaign to criticize Confucius and Lin Piao-and by sly indirection, Chou En-lai-that peaked last year. Mass meetings, rallies and indoctrination sessions took workers away from production. According to the secret documents, workers made wage demands under the cloak of political grievances, and a number of cadres left their jobs to avoid getting involved...
Another problem is worldwide inflation. The Chinese have not been hit nearly as hard as most industrial nations and have, as Chou boasts, enjoyed "stable prices." Two years ago, Peking began to purchase whole industrial plants from Japan and Western Europe, mostly to produce badly needed fertilizer. As the buying spree went on into 1973, the Chinese ended up with a modest trade deficit of $80 million. Swallowing a longstanding aversion to taking credit, Peking had to accept what were euphemistically called "deferred payments" to finance the purchases. Now the foreign trade deficit has leaped forward to an estimated...