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Chou Enlai, too, reflected Peking's second thoughts about the economic impact of the people's communes: he made no mention of the once highly touted scheme to herd city dwellers as well as peasants into the communes. And he was clearly fearful that China's hard-pressed citizens in the cities might begin to ask why, if the countryside was producing such vast quantities of food, their rice bowls got no fuller. "It is also possible," warned Chou in what would have been heresy in a lesser official, "that output increases of certain industrial and agricultural products—particularly certain agricultural products—may in one particular year be lower than the previous year."
The Irrepressible Hunch. Despite Chou's implicit admission that things were not so rosy as Peking's inventive statisticians made out, Red China was obviously, at a lower rate than the boasts, pushing forward industrially. The people might suffer, but for centuries China's people have known hunger and oppression; the people might be resentful, but never before, under any tyranny, had there been so systematic and efficient a thought-control system, so vast a network of informers patrolling home, church, school and work place.
By all the signs, Mao's government was more firmly in the saddle than any government the Chinese people have known for two centuries past. Yet the undertones of uneasiness occasionally audible in the proceedings of the National People's Congress carried with them the possibility that in some circumstances unforeseeable now the whole thing could come a cropper: a desperate people, overworked, underfed, a trivial incident of defiance, a single lapse of authority—such as an army unit's refusal to fire on a handful of insubordinate peasants in a commune—might set off a chain reaction. No one saw such prospects now. Yet better than anyone else, Red China's outwardly confident rulers know that great leaps involve the risk of disastrous falls.