Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trouble down on China's farms was caused, as so often in China's history, by natural disasters-drought and insect pests in the northern provinces, floods along the southern coast. But nature's harshness was compounded by the adoption last year of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's "three-thirds" theory of agriculture, under which one-third of China's land was to be left fallow each year, one-third was to be given over to forest and the final third to be intensively cultivated Japanese-style...
Obedient to Mao's dictum. Red China's peasants in 1959 reduced the amount of land they sowed by nearly 10%, set out to make up for it by deep plowing and heavy fertilization. But in his theorizing. Mao had forgotten that China is desperately short of chemical fertilizers and even the simplest agricultural tools. Result was that although Peking's grain production target for 1960 is 300 million tons. China will be lucky to produce two-thirds that much. Admits the People's Daily: "If this year's summer harvest equals that...
When Red China's Mao Tse-tung decided two years ago to herd his 650 million subjects into beehive-style communes, nobody professed to be more appalled than Nikita Khrushchev. It wasn't the inhumanity he objected to; it was the dogma. Communes, Nikita told visiting U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, were "oldfashioned and reactionary." But what really irked the Kremlin was Peking's implicit boast that the commune system would propel Red China into the Marxist never-never land of full Communism ahead even of Rus sia itself...
...until 1980-85. And unlike Red China's jampacked, hardscrabble farms (see above), Russia's communes would be proletarian pleasure palaces whose 2,400 inhabitants would enjoy every amenity from lavish restaurants to beauty parlors for the ladies. Then, driving Nikita's stiletto deep into Mao's back, Economist Strumilin blandly opined: "Of course, such an honorable name as commune must be won by practical success in the real building of Communism. First, prove your ability-then stretch out your hand for the honored title...
There was one curious literary note that Mao Tun failed to mention. In 1958, the year of the great economic leap, the Writers and Artists Union announced plans for a literary leap as well. Mao Tun, like others, was assigned his quota: one long novel, two of medium length. As everybody in the audience knew, Mao Tun has produced no novel since. In fact, the pen of China's most important living novelist has been curiously still ever since Communism took over...