Word: mao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mao and his planners first sought to arrest China's inexorable march of population by birth-control propaganda, loudspeaker exhortations and traveling exhibits that featured crudely explicit diagrams and extolled the virtues of contraceptive devices, including something called "Healthy Pleasure Honey." All this hue and cry had no appreciable effect on the birth rate. Soon birth-control advocates found themselves accused of the heinous crime of "neo-Malthusianism," and China's teeming manpower became officially no longer a problem but the nation's greatest asset...
...Volunteers. To feed so many mouths, and to get work out of so many bodies, Mao decided on the ruthless and revolutionary device of the people's commune-a system of forced collectivization of human beings which the Russians abandoned as impractical in 1933. Rural people's communes, the first of which appeared in Honan province last April, sometimes have as many as 300,000 members, in most cases absorb the whole population of a county-peasants, traders, students, officials and professional men. Upon "volunteering" to join a commune, members turn over to it virtually all their private...
Through the communes, Mao also hopes to solve China's serious underemployment by building up vast cottage industries. Communes are now in the midst of a mass drive to produce pig iron and steel in tiny handmade blast furnaces of a kind developed by Chinese artisans in the Middle Ages. In China's desolate northern marches Mongol and Tartar women sweat over more than 5,000 furnaces which they have built in the last few weeks, and in Honan 440,000 furnaces (operated by peasants who have already put in a ten-hour day in the fields) allegedly...
...rulers dismiss the U.S. as a "paper tiger," pooh-pooh the U.S. H-bomb. Four years ago Red China's War Minister confidently told Sam Watson, former chairman of the British Labor Party: "Even if 200 million of us were killed, we would still have 400 million left." Mao himself makes no bones of his ambition to "drive the U.S. out of East Asia," recently told a Brazilian journalist: "We must attack the tiger again and again until we finally kill...
...Australia. Dangerous as it may be for the non-Communist world, Red China's rise to great-power status is no unmixed blessing to Soviet Russia. Many Chinese visibly resent their industrial dependence on the Soviets. Even Mao, by stressing the fact that all Russian "aid" has been paid for by China, emphasizes the U.S.S.R.'s niggardliness. The bellicose men of Peking also realize that Russia has not yet seen fit to supply them with atomic weapons...