The Chinese revolution is great, but the road after the revolution will be longer, the work greater and more arduous.
—Mao Tse-tung( 1949)
TWO decades after Communist soldiers marched into Peking to climax Mao Tse-tung's takeover of China, the road still seems long and tortuous, the struggle unremittingly arduous. Like many another reformer, Mao has found that building a country can be at least as difficult as making a revolution. Thus, when thousands of Chinese mass this week in the capital's great Tienanmen Square to hail the 20th anniversary of Communist rule, their celebrations will be tempered by the awareness of problems that are as immense as the vast land and as numerous as its people. This was to have been a "year of triumph" for Mao and China—with a victorious end to his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and a restoration of law and order throughout a badly fragmented nation. But the balance sheet is dismal for 1969—as it is for many of the years since 1949.
On its tenth anniversary, China seemed well on its way to becoming a world power. Now that prospect is remote. To be sure, the indexes of improvement over 1949 are impressive (see chart opposite). China has emerged as a formidable Asian power, a member of the nuclear club,* and an ideological challenger of the Soviet Union. But it also remains economically backward, militarily weak, politically divided and alienated from much of the world.
Of China's 760 million people—one-fifth of mankind—some 500 million are peasants, hardly a foundation for a superpower. Despite efforts to extend schools to the farthest reaches of the country, more than half the population is illiterate. Production on China's communal farms has almost kept pace with the population, but it takes 85% of the labor force to grow the food. While the economy spurted ahead during the Communists' first decade at an estimated annual rate of 10%, it has been growing a mere 1% a year since 1959.
Virtually Ungovernable. When the Communists took over in 1949, China could hardly have been in worse condition. It was in the midst of a great historic drama—and the U.S. watched it with deep concern, for China has always held a unique place in the American imagination. After two millenniums of maintaining an exquisitely sophisticated culture in relative isolation from the world, China was invaded by the West—by its traders, missionaries, soldiers and technicians. First under Sun Yatsen, whose revolution overthrew the Manchu empire, then under Chiang Kaishek, new leaders struggled to rescue the Chinese spirit from repeated foreign humiliations, and, above all, to push the nation into the modern world. After the Communists moved in to capture the nationalist revolution, a bitter civil war left China in chaos.
Quickly, the Communists moved to curb inflation, suppress bandits and warlords, rehabilitate industry and the transportation network, equalize food distribution, establish a tax system and bring the people rudimentary health care. For the first time in anyone's memory, an efficient, honest administration was in charge—though it could also be ruthless and even inhuman in its desire to impose unity on the land. By 1952, Mao had used persuasion and purge to consolidate his power, and China was ready to transform its economy.