Word: tse-tung
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Comparative Miracles. At the moment of victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, Mao Tse-tung resolved that, after decades of devastation, starting from a primitive economy, China must industrialize-not primarily for a better life, but so that China could become a militant force in world affairs...
...gross industrial product increased by 123%, gross farm production rose a mere 26%, scarcely more than the eight-year population growth, by Western estimates. Common sense demanded that more help be given agriculture, even if it meant a pause in the forced drive toward heavy industry. But Mao Tse-tung treats economic problems exactly as he would an enemy's main line of resistance: by ordering forward a human wave to storm and overwhelm it. He conceded that the farms desperately needed chemical fertilizer, machines of all sorts and skilled labor. His solution: let the farmers do it themselves...
...wife headed back to China, and, at the party's orders, went their separate ways-Tsai Chang to Shanghai to agitate among the workers in the cotton mills, Li Fu-chun to Canton to become an instructor at Chiang Kai-shek's Whampoa Military Academy, where Mao Tse-tung was briefly chief of propaganda...
...Tse-tung's decision was for industry, not man, for greater tension, not less. The sloganeers took over from the economists. Without iron and steel, they shouted, China is "like a fat man-all flesh and no bone and muscle." Did the farms need fertilizer? Crowed an official: "I think of the stomach of every man and animal as a small fertilizer factory...
...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...