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The Creation of Peace. The nation that Mao had seized was devastated by twelve years of war and revolution, and it was cursed with a primitive economy—though not so primitive as China's present masters like to pretend. Mao inherited from the Japanese a major coal and steel complex in Manchuria and from the Nationalists considerable light industry as well as the Yumen oilfield—still China's biggest. Under Nationalist rule China's industrial production had risen 80% between 1933 and 1945. By the time Mao appeared, the stage was set for a Chinese industrial revolution comparable to that experienced by Japan in the 1880s or Germany under Bismarck. All that was missing was peace and a strong, central government.
These conditions Mao proceeded to create. In late 1952 Communist Minister of Finance Po Ipo publicly admitted that the Reds had liquidated 2,000,000 "bandits" in the preceding three years. Some Western experts calculate that 14 million Chinese were executed during the land-reform campaign of 1951 alone.
Today, with that sort of wholesale terror past but still a vivid memory, China is ruled by a weapon sometimes called "brute reason"—the knowledge that each man has no alternative. On trains, in city squares and village centers, loudspeakers blare away from dawn till midnight, urging China's millions not to spit in the street, and to "work hard for a few years, live happily for a thousand." In schools, factories and offices the walls are plastered layers deep with painstakingly handwritten posters of exhortation and criticism: "Professor Chen's teaching methods are strictly reactionary."
To ignore this barrage is impossible, since privacy has all but disappeared in China. One Shanghai factory manager during last year's "rectification" campaign spent four hours of every working day in group political discussions. And every Chinese city dweller lives under the baleful eye of a "street committee," most often run by a self-important woman. Wives are encouraged to write posters drawing attention to their husbands' shortcomings—and do. With depressing frequency newspapers throughout China carry reports such as the following: "Young Wei Kuo-chu, a student at Shin Tung High School, Shanghai, is cited and congratulated for having denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary.''
Once uncovered, a "reactionary"' is subjected to "re-education." His neighbors, his friends and his professional colleagues all "reason" with him, urge him not to drive them to the extreme step of ostracizing him. One particularly stubborn Shanghai writer managed to stand up to ten such sessions before he caved in.
The Crucial Question. While making his subjects more malleable under the never-ending blows of the Communist hammer, Mao also went to work on the Chinese economy. In exchange for technical help and machinery, he shipped out to Russia antimony, tin, tungsten and, above all, desperately needed food. Of the $2.2 billion in "aid" that China has received from the U.S.S.R. since 1950, almost none of it was a genuine gift; the $300 million surplus that China expects to run this year in its trade with the U.S.S.R. will go to pay off past Soviet loans.