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This collapse of the will to resist surprised even the Communists themselves, who suddenly revised their calculations upward. In July Mao predicted that the New China was about to witness the "high tide of the great socialist revolution." In January of this year he said the tide was running. Last July Mao announced that only 16.9 million of the no million "peasant households" had been forced into producer cooperatives; by December he was able to announce that "more than 60% of peasant families" were in cooperatives—an astonishing increase of 53.1 million peasant families in six months. Mao and his subordinate leaders presented other evidence of a widespread consolidation of Communist power and, elated by their success, announced a speedup in their socialization programs. Plans which were to have been accomplished in ten or 15 years were cut to five years. "The socialist revolution, in the main," said Mao, "could be completed on a national scale within about three more years."
The non-Communist world, which had not been able to prevent this vast upheaval, at least had a duty to understand it. The triumph was not the victory of the "Uncle Mao" of Peking propaganda, the benign statesman who has charmed such outstanding humanists as Attlee, Nehru and U Nu. It was the triumph of terror.
The Communist party's troubles in China are not over. An immense problem of organization and leadership now confronts it. There is evidence that millions of peasants and businessmen who have suddenly swarmed into rural cooperatives and urban state enterprises dislike and distrust the new order as much as they ever did. The same accounts attest that thousands of new organizations, brought into being to brainwash the new recruits, are little more than paper houses. It is predictable that within a few weeks or months the same leaders who now cry triumph will again be berating their terrorist cadres for "rightist lethargy."
That may well be the moment Lo Jui-ching rises to his greatest power. Said Lo last June: "Every step forward taken by our revolutionary cause arouses unrivaled hatred and frantic sabotage on the part of the external and internal enemies . . .
Counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries do not reconcile themselves to their ex tinction; on the contrary, it is precisely because of their impending doom that they put up resistance and carry out sabotage more desperately." The terrorist with the twisted mouth knows better than most that there will never be peace—must never be peace—in Communist China.
* During the 15 years in which the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia, an estimated 15 million Russians were killed or died of planned or accidental starvation.