Word: mao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Khrushchev a waverer whose understanding of Marxism-Leninism leaves much to be desired. "The Russians are always blundering," one Chinese Communist loftily told British Journalist Dennis Bloodworth. "Weak Soviet policy was responsible for the Hungarian revolution and the trouble in Poland." Not having been afraid of differing from Stalin, Mao has never hesitated to differ from the Johnny-come-latelys now in authority in Moscow. The Russians officially proclaim Mao to be "a major Marxist-Leninist theoretician,'' but his writings are not required reading among Russian party members, and his major pronouncements are dutifully printed without endorsement...
What the Russians have to fear from Mao's China is not that it will desert to the West or "pull a Tito," but that it will one day seize leadership of the Communist world. In public, Russian leaders are determinedly cheerful about their relations with Peking, but three weeks ago U.S. Pundit Walter Lippmann returned from a trip to Moscow to report that Russian reactions to China's "great leap forward" varied between "awe and anxiety." The vast geographical vacuum between the two countries is being competitively filled-by Khrushchev's reclamation of the Central Asian...
Diminishing Rice Bowl. The central fact about Mao's China today, however, is that the bogeyman that in varying degrees haunts both the U.S. and Russia is still largely a bogeyman. If Peking's current statistics are questionable, its basic economic assumptions are even more so. That cottage industry can ever play a major role in transforming China into a modern industrial state is doubtful. As Peking has begun to admit, many of the mud-brick blast furnaces are vastly wasteful of coal and are located too far from major industrial centers to be of much value...
Best guess of many Western specialists is that within a decade or so Red China will reach the day when its food supply is inadequate for its population, even by low Chinese diet standards. If the rice bowl grows much emptier, Mao's promises of a glittering future may cease to assuage his subjects...
...outburst of student rioting and anti-Communist statements that followed Mao's abortive "Hundred Flowers" attempt at liberalization last year (TIME, May 27 et seq.) was clear evidence that the regime had forfeited the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. Mao's response-to treat all intellectuals as suspect and force them into "remedial" manual labor by the hundreds of thousands-may produce obedience, but hardly provides the climate for intellectual creativity. The great, vast public, foreign observers report, seems more resigned to its lot, and even grateful for the orderliness that keeps warlords from swooping down on farmers...