Red China

MENASED by the most serious famine since the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949, 700 million Red Chinese are now struggling on the brink of starvation. Although the Peiping government has used its scarce credits to purchase millions of tons of grain from Western countries, recent reports reaching Hong Kong and Macao attest that the food shortage is now more serious than ever before. Unrest and dissatisfaction have penetrated every corner of China.

Officially, the famine has been attributed to a series of unprecedented natural calamities, including a bad drought, which have occurred without respite since 1959. The New China News Agency reported that some 60 million hectares of arable land, or more than half of China’s total farmland, have been seriously affected, and some land has produced nothing.

The real factors related to the current famine are far more complicated than the Communist Party reports. One of the most important of these was the erroneous estimate of grain production in 1958 and 1959. In April, 1959, the State Statistical Bureau published a communique recording an increase from the 1957 harvest of 185 million tons to a 1958 production total of 375 million tons. This allegedly enormous harvest represented a 100 per cent increase in a single year. The falsity of this picture was revealed in the Communist Party Central Committee’s confession in August, 1959, that the previous figures were an ‟erroneous estimation.” Although the Party revised these figures to only two thirds of the original totals, the report still overestimated the actual situation.

Because of this arbitrary overestimation of 1958 grain production, government procurement far exceeded the amount that the farmers were able to produce. After fulfillment of the state purchasing plan, famine occurred in many areas. According to Chou En-lai’s report, in the spring of 1959 about 5 per cent of the mainland area had grain shortages. In Hopeh province, for example, it was officially reported that per capita grain rations were reduced from .6 to .4 kilograms daily.

From mid-1959 through the first half of 1960, the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council once again asked the people to be frugal in grain consumption. In the final months of 1959, a vast campaign was launched to persuade the people to include wild vegetables as part of their daily diet.

At the same time a ‟backyard furnace drive” removed some 60 million farm laborers from agricultural production to industry. The countryside naturally developed manpower shortages, estimated at 30 to 50 per cent of actual needs.

The further reduction in food rations and the prolongation of working hours in the commune system induced go-slow strikes on the part of the farmers. A survey published by the Communist Party organ, the People’s Daily, revealed that great areas of cultivated land had been deserted or devastated by the farmer. In the provinces of Heilungkiang, Liaoning, Shantung, Hopeh, Kiangsu, Shensi, and Honan, this amounted to one tenth of the cultivated land. In Shantung province, a third of the rice paddies were overrun by weeds.

The peasant did not limit himself to passive resistance. Sabotage became a real threat to subsidiary production. Thus, a People’s Daily editorial of July 16, 1960, disclosed that farmers were destroying half of the total number of newly born pigs. This destruction was officially attributed to the insufficient food supply and certain ‟bad elements” in the hog farms. These various factors have made the effects of the current famine far more serious than those of any previous one.

Restoring incentive

In early 1960 the Communist regime launched a “Whole Country Support Agriculture” movement. Beginning in August, some ten million cadres, government functionaries, and People’s Liberation Army personnel were transferred to the rural areas to strengthen the communes’ controls. In Inner Mongolia, for example, Ulanfu, First Secretary of the Autonomous Region’s Party Committee, led 170,000 functionaries who were assigned various offices, ranging from deputy director to mess-hall supervisor, in the communes. This measure enabled the Party to exercise greater control over food consumption.

But control cannot stimulate production, nor can it ease popular unrest. The Party was forced to devise some means of inducing increased productivity. The most important step was the introduction of the three-level system of ownership based on the production brigade. Under this system, ownership and authority have been shifted from the commune to the production brigade unit, which is similar to the advanced agricultural cooperative or the Soviet collective farm.

The commune retains ownership only of certain large farm machinery and cannot transfer the brigade’s productive means without consent. With regard to the management of production, the commune may still make certain demands on the brigade and necessary readjustments of brigade production plans, according to state needs. However, it must first consult all the members of the commune. The brigade generally controls distribution of products. A brigade may sell or retain its surplus grain after it has fulfilled state requisition quotas, and the cash income of the commune is distributed at the brigade level.

In conformity with the strengthening of the brigades, individual members have been encouraged to engage in subsidiary family production and to keep their own animals and poultry, provided that this private operation does not interfere with collective production. The small plots of land which the advanced cooperatives permitted to be privately owned, and which were pooled together after the communes were established, have now been redistributed for private use.

The system of remuneration has also undergone substantial change. In the communes, which carried out the free-meal system, wages generally constituted less than 20 per cent of the total remuneration. This practice encouraged idleness. Present Party orders require that food rations be kept within 30 per cent of the total remuneration, while the remaining 70 per cent is to be paid in the form of wages calculated according to the individual’s amount of labor. Under this policy, industrious workers receive more money.

In accordance with the practice of encouraging the commune members to till private plots of land, the Peiping government also restored the rural market throughout the countryside. Now subsidiary products produced by commune members, as well as by production teams, are allowed to be marketed at rural fairs. After three years of experimentation, the agricultural system has been returned to its original pattern.

The economy declines

The famine adversely affected the entire national economy. Setbacks have been particularly serious in the branches of light industry which depend chiefly upon agriculture for raw materials. Hence, in 1960, such major items as cotton textiles, knitted goods, cigarettes, vegetable oils, and sugar failed to reach production targets. This affected the national income and capital investment.

Statistics for the past decade reveal that, despite substantial industrial progress, agriculture remains the foundation of the Chinese national economy. Half of the mainland’s industries still require agricultural products as their source of raw material. In light industry, this need mounts as high as 80 per cent. More than half of the country’s total revenue is derived from agriculture, and more than 70 per cent of its export commodities are composed of agricultural products and goods processed from them.

Throughout the decade from 1950 to 1960, there was a close relationship between the year’s agricultural output and the national income of the following year. In 1950 the rate of increase in agricultural output was 17.7 per cent; the rate of growth in national income was 17 per cent for 1951. When the rate of increase in agricultural output declined to 3.1 per cent in 1953, the rate of increase in the subsequent year’s national income was but 5.7 per cent. In 1956, when the rate of agricultural increase was 4.9 per cent, it was reflected in 1957’s rate of increase of national income, 4.6 per cent. These figures show that China’s economic growth depends upon its agricultural harvest.

The poor 1959 and 1960 harvests, therefore, had a negative effect on capital formation. The Ninth Plenary Session of the Communist Party Central Committee was forced to abandon its plans to continue the Big Leap Forward. The session decided that capital construction for heavy industry would have to be reduced for 1961 and the rate of development readjusted for concentration on agricultural production.

The Ninth Plenary Session presented no economic plan for the year 1961. Up to the middle of December, no targets had been revealed for industrial and agricultural production by either the CP Central Committee or the State Council. The National People’s Congress, which usually convenes between February and July to approve the state budget and national economic development plan for the current year, did not convene. To justify the abolition of the Big Leap Forward, the Party provided a new approach which holds that the pattern of national economic development consists of a wavy motion of alternating highs and lows rather than of the straight line suggested by the Communist authorities during the 19581959 Big Leap Forward period.

In its communique, the Central Committee admitted that approximately 10 per cent of the Chinese population remain strongly antiCommunist. Included in this category are former landlords in the rural areas and bourgeois capitalists in the cities. The Central Committee indicated that the reactionaries were actually exploiting the great famine to undermine the Party’s authority. Furthermore, the ranks of the Party itself harbor 10 per cent of members who are the loyal allies of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. To prevent the possibility of these forces’ uniting in revolution, the CP Central Committee ordered the reestablishment of six regional bureaus in north, northwest, east, centralsouth, northwest, and southwest China. While this directive enforces the control over the regional branches of the Party, it also indicates a decentralization of the Party machine and reflects the Central Committee’s inability to cope with the situation.

The initiation of the Big Leap Forward and the commune system actually led to a lessening of Mao’s prestige. This was reflected in his resignation as Chairman of the People’s Republic in April, 1959. Four months later, at its Eighth Plenary Session in Lushan, the Central Committee adopted a resolution cutting down the 1958 economic achievements and reducing the targets for 1959. The Eighth Plenary Session also called for a nationwide campaign to eliminate rightist influences within the Party. After some three months, the campaign was suddenly suspended without having accomplished anything. It would seem that Mao bowed to the rightists within the Party.

The gloomy prospects

The immediate problem remains. Mao must find ways to feed 700 million people while at the same time maintaining Party and Army morale. During the past half year, Peiping has exhausted its foreign exchange and credit to purchase grain and wheat from Canada, Australia, Burma, and France. The six million tons of imported food supported only about one month’s consumption, provided the per capita rate did not exceed a half pound per day for a minimum level of subsistence. Communist China now produces sufficient food for only nine months of the year; to fill the gap, it must import more grain. Neither the means of payment nor the condition of transportation permits it to obtain such huge quantities of food from abroad. The famine is expected to continue until next summer. If there is no effective international assistance, millions of Chinese will starve.

A more serious problem confronting Mao Tse-tung is the decay of morale in the Army and cadres. Recent reports from Communist Chinese militia in the rural communes show signs of a wavering in Party policy. Pessimism and defeatism prevail within the ruling class.

A new rectification campaign is under way in the rural districts. The spring of 1962 may well be critical for the Chinese Communist regime.