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By last year the combination of Russian machinery and Chinese toil had boosted China's steel production from a prewar peak of 1,800,000 tons to 5,350,000 tons, raised coal production from the Nationalist record of 62 million tons to 130 million tons. And this, according to Peking, is only prelude. Hailing 1958 as the year of "the great leap forward," the Chinese Reds took as their primary slogan: "Overtake Britain in production in 15 years." and after revising production targets ever upward, claimed that by the end of this year China would have produced 10.7 million tons of steel—double last year's figure. More breath-taking yet was their claim that production of edible grains would soar to 350 million tons, 90% over last year.
Peking's statistics are suspect, but 1958 figures, noted a British economist, "defy belief and baffle logic." But even if Communist figures could be trusted, Red China still has a long way to go before claiming to be a modern industrial state. Mainland China's rate of industrial growth last year was only half that of Japan's. By the end of its current six-year plan, Japan will have acquired new productive capacity greater than that of all the industrial plant Mao's China now has. The Chinese Communists have yet to produce an all-Chinese jet; their vaunted Manchurian "Detroit" still builds only a few thousand trucks a year, plus an occasional prototype "East Wind" automobile. And despite boasts to the contrary, all indications are that Chinese petroleum reserves are painfully scant. (Production last year: 1.46 million tons v. the U.S.'s 353.6 million tons.)
China's overriding economic problem is not its scarcity of resources but its oversupply of people. Population, now put at 653 million, is increasing by about 15 million a year. At this rate, there will be a billion Chinese by 1980, more than 2 billion by the turn of the century. In terms of per-capita production, Mao's China still lags far behind Japan or Formosa (see chart). Worse yet, despite mammoth irrigation and reclamation projects, population growth has cut the amount of cultivated land per person in Red China from .462 acres in 1953 to .429 acres in 1958.
Mao and his planners first sought to arrest China's inexorable march of population by birth-control propaganda, loudspeaker exhortations and traveling exhibits that featured crudely explicit diagrams and extolled the virtues of contraceptive devices, including something called "Healthy Pleasure Honey." All this hue and cry had no appreciable effect on the birth rate. Soon birth-control advocates found themselves accused of the heinous crime of "neo-Malthusianism," and China's teeming manpower became officially no longer a problem but the nation's greatest asset.