Red China: The Slow Creep Forward

From Manchuria to the upper Yangtse, Red China lay snowbound. In the drought-ridden northwest provinces, hundreds of thousands of peasants, students, and Communist cadres in patched cotton tunics marched through the icy, windswept wheat and barley fields armed with buckets of water to pour on the parched acres. In Szechwan province, farmers gathered nitrogen-rich pig manure in an effort to make up for a woeful lack of chemical fertilizers. In barbershops and mortuaries, others gathered human hair for the foreign wig market (5,000 tons last year brought $5.5 million to China). And...

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