Day after day last week Peking's red-pillared Hall of Encompassing Benevolence rang with the synchronized frenzy of the 1,200 trained seals who make up Communist China's National People's Congress. One subject not originally on the agenda caused the most heat. The subject: Tibet. "The Tibetan reactionaries," sneered Premier Chou Enlai, "often put on pious airs and express the hope that everyone will go to heaven. But they have turned Tibet into a hell on earth." Another speaker charged that "the British imperialists and Indian expansionists instigated the Tibetan upper-strata reactionary clique to carry out a traitorous armed rebellion . . . We want to warn the Indian expansionists . . . Please be more clear-minded; do not lift a rock that will squash your own feet."
Docile, and splendid in a silken robe, the captive Panchen Lama, 22, was trotted out to make the right noises for his Communist masters. "Tibet," he declared, "is always China's Tibet."
The mood of the Congress was of a Communist leadership feeling itself beset and bellicose. As an illusion of parliamentary government in action, the People's Congress was, of course, pure sham. But as a kind of distorted fun-house mirror of the condition of China after ten years of Communist rule, the "deliberations" of the Second National People's Congress had their uses.
Speed Gets 'Em. Western specialists on Chinese affairs regard Communist statistics about their great leap forward as blatantly inflated. But instead of modifying them, the Communists multiplied them last week, making vast progress by statistical exhortation. Blandly, Chou En-lai advanced the claim that Red China's industrial and agricultural output increased by 65% in 1958—"a speed which has never been attained and cannot be attained under the capitalist system." No less fantastic were the production targets announced for this year: 18 million tons of steel (up 54% over 1958), 380 million tons of coal (up 41%), 525 million tons of grain (up 40%), 40 million kilowatt-hours of electricity (up 45%).
What Goes Up. Beneath this display of international arrogance and domestic boasts ran admissions that last year's vaunted gains had been barely enough to keep China on the economic rails. "Since the autumn of 1958," admitted Finance Minister Li Hsien-nien, "there has been tension . . . owing to short supply of some non-staple foods and manufactured daily necessities in the cities." One of the chief causes of these "temporary difficulties," conceded Li, was the upheaval created by "such a great social change as the people's commune movement."