The Year of the Leap

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At night the sky over ten thousand villages glows red and gold with the glare cast by countless primitive blast furnaces of mud brick. In the fields lanterns as numerous as fireflies cast a softer light over "shock troops" fighting "night battles" to bring in bumper crops of rice, sweet potatoes and cotton. By 6:30 in the morning the clean-swept streets of the teeming cities resound to the chanting of millions of voices as clerks, factory hands and bureaucrats, all clad in blue boiler suits, perform the mass calisthenics that herald...

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