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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 the beginning of another ten-to twelve-hour working day.
These were the sights and sounds of Red China this week in the midst of its "Great Leap Forward''—the sights and sounds of a nation in the throes of an economic and social convulsion unparalleled in modern history. Ten years ago, in what seemed only a provocative flight of fancy, left-wing British Author George Orwell conjured up in his novel 1984 a nightmare vision of the ultimate totalitarian state: "In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already . . . no one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth as one takes eggs from a hen . . . There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother."
Sorry Awakening. Today, a quarter of a century ahead of Orwell's timetable, a plump peasant who was born a subject of the Dragon Throne, is well on his way to converting Orwellian nightmare into reality in the world's most populous nation. In the past eight months, Mao Tse-tung has herded more than 90% of mainland China's 500 million peasants into vast human poultry yards called "people's communes." If Mao's historic gamble succeeds, the ordinary Chinese of day after tomorrow will have no fixed job, no home and no real family.
"Let China sleep," warned Napoleon nearly a century and a half ago. "When she awakens the world will be sorry." Eying the path along which Mao proposes to lead an awakened China, most of the world, if not yet sorry, is already apprehensive. In Warsaw recently a Communist editor nervously reflected that "the entire Polish nation represents little more than a slight miscalculation in Chinese population statistics for one year." In the U.S. some thoughtful men argue that within a generation the U.S. will be helping bolster Soviet defenses against Communist China. Writing in London's New Statesman, British Socialist M.P. Richard Grossman reports that he came back from a trip through Red China convinced that "Chinese Communism is far the biggest and far the most formidable mass movement in human history''—a movement which "within the next decade" may transfer the center of the world to Peking.