Word: leapings
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...experiment is Vice Premier Li Fu-chun, the 61-year-old chairman of Red China's State Planning Commission. Thin, grey-haired, bookish and self-effacing, Li Fu-chun has been in charge of "squeezing" the peasants during the three bitter years, beginning in 1958, of the Great Leap Forward, which was aimed at giving China an industrial base greater than that of Britain. From Li's neat office in Embracing Kindness Hall-a two-story Manchu dynasty palace in Peking's Forbidden City-have poured the blueprints and directives that marshaled China's millions into...
...furnaces in their spare time. Millions of dazed peasants were regimented into the Great Leap. Banners called for 20 YEARS OF PROGRESS IN A SINGLE DAY! Accounting was ignored as a "headache that stands in the way of production." Women were freed from the "drudgery" of housework only to labor 18 hours a day in field and factory. Old folks were shut away in "happiness homes," babies in state-run crèches. In the nurseries. Chinese moppets sang...
...jade.' "** The first year of the Great Leap Forward seemed to prove that Mao Tse-tung had once again won his gamble. Peking shouted to the world an astonishing list of production figures, showing that, in factory and farm, the ambitious goals had been exceeded...
Finding Scapegoats. Instead of the whopping 375 million tons of food grains originally claimed, Peking admitted a harvest of only 250 million-and most Western experts scaled that figure down to 210 million, only 25 million more than 1957, the year before the Great Leap Forward. The cotton total was cut by a third. Of the boasted 11 million tons of steel, only 8,000,000 were found "usable in industry." By this summer, the figures had fallen so low that Peking refused to announce them, but even observers friendly to the Reds estimate grain production at a mere...
...offset the price imposed by Peking through oppression and misery. Today no one can be sure how many people share this misery.*** Virtually all Western experts agree that Red China's population is increasing more rapidly than its food supply. Peking seemed to agree until the Great Leap Forward; since then, the attempt to hold down the population through birth control has been virtually abandoned. To Red China's masters, the swarming masses, even hungry, mean military and industrial power. Says a U.S. agricultural expert: "Even if everything were done perfectly for the next 25 years, where would...