Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Sino-Soviet Alliance of February 1950 was accompanied by an economic development loan of $300 million and was followed by the arrival in China of a Soviet military mission of about 3,000 men, but all military aid was sold to China, and at high prices. These arms, which were entirely of obsolescent types, cost about two billion dollars over seven years, 1950-1957. No effort was made toward coordination of military exercises or training, in spite of the alliance of 1950; there was no coordination of air or sea defenses, and China was not brought into the Warsaw Pact. Moreover, the Soviet Union, by its exclusive control of the North Korean Army, built it up, launched it into the Korean War, and thus eventually dragged Red China into a war on which they had not been consulted and had no wish to be involved, but were compelled, in defense of their own security, to intervene. Early in 1955, the Soviet Union gave China some moderate help in starting a Chinese military industrial base, chiefly in the assemblage of light planes, tanks, and naval vessels, but the development of American and Soviet thermonuclear capacity and missiles left China even further behind. In November 1957, Mao Tse-tung took a delegation to Moscow and made a formal request for nuclear warheads, but was rebuffed. As a result, by 1958 Red China was embarked on the long and difficult task of seeking to make an atomic bomb of its own. This seemed such an impossible job that, almost at once, Mao began to issue public statements belittling nuclear weapons and promising that the enormous numbers of China’s militia would be able to survive any nuclear attack. The Quemoy crisis of August-September 1958 showed how little support the Soviet Union would give Red China on that issue and showed equally how divided the two countries were and how averse the Soviet Union was to China’s approach “to the brink of war” in the Far East.

The defensive power of Red China remains very great, chiefly because of its large population and the great distances in which it can maneuver, but its offensive power, except over the minor states on its borders, is small. Military strength in the Far East is still in the hands of the Soviet Union, which has no intention of allowing it to be used in that part of the world, except in the unlikely event that the United States made an all-out assault on Red China. Even in that remote case, the Soviet Union’s contribution would be limited, and its real strength would continue to be aimed at Europe, to be used there rather than in the Far East. Nonetheless, China’s power in world politics does not rest on its own military strength but on the nuclear stalemate of the Soviet Union and the United States, both of whom are immensely more powerful in a strategic sense than anyone else in the Far East.

Under cover of that nuclear stalemate and the high restraint of both Superpowers in the use of nuclear weapons, Red China is in a position to engage in local wars, “national liberation movements,” and “anti-imperialist” guerrilla activities all around its own borders, except along the frontier it has with the Soviet Union itself. These guerrilla adventures by Red China are correlated with domestic policy rather than with foreign policy, as the Quemoy crisis of summer 1958 was related to the “Great Leap Forward” of that year.

In this correlation of China’s domestic and foreign policies, a major role will be played by China’s most critical problem: the population-food-production balance.

This problem is probably more acute in China than in any similarly large area in the world. The Communist census of 1953 showed a Chinese population of almost 583 million, considerably more than had been expected. By 1968 this figure may have reached 800 million. With a birthrate of 35 per 1,000, China’s natural increase was about 2 percent, and gave the country about one-quarter of the world’s total population. Only about one-tenth of the land was arable, providing about 270 million acres, or less than an acre of cultivated land for every two persons. There has been some small success in increasing the area of cultivated lands, but obviously the problem can be solved only by slowing up the increase in population and by increasing the yields of crops per unit area of land. There seems to have been little success in either of these over the past decade or so. However, the centralized control of the Peking government over the Chinese people is so strong that it could probably bring the population explosion under control fairly quickly if a decision was made to do so. This would probably be achieved by supplying every woman with a birth-control pill at the noon meal each day, since that meal, for the majority of Chinese, is usually taken in a communal eating place where the process could be controlled as the authorities wished. The exclusive control of the state over information and public opinion, and its ability to mobilize local social pressures, increase its ability to carry out this policy.

This steadily growing crisis was brought abruptly to the acute stage by the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958, the first year of the Second Five-Year Plan. The earlier Five-Year Plan of 1953-1957 was based on the similar plan of the Soviet Union. It concentrated on investment in heavy industry, with little attention to consumers’ goods or agriculture. About $3.5 billion a year, probably 20 percent of national income, was allotted to investment, with another 16 percent assigned to the armed forces. If we can believe China’s own figures, the plan was a success, with output of coal, electricity, cement, and machine tools doubled and production of steel tripled. Total production of these commodities still left China largely unindustrialized, but by 1957 the government controlled 70 percent of all industry, 85 percent of retail trade, and almost all banking, foreign, and wholesale trade.

In the First Five-Year Plan, China was almost totally lacking in trained personnel, and was dependent for these, as well as for necessary equipment, on foreign sources. These could be found only within the Soviet bloc, but were not provided freely and had to be paid for, with settlement of accounts and new yearly agreements on an annual basis. The severity of the Soviet’s terms on aid to China were in sharp contrast to its more generous behavior toward some of China’s lesser neighbors and must have had an adverse influence on China’s attitude toward Moscow even from the beginning. However, the necessary help could not be obtained elsewhere, and the achievement of the First Chinese Five-Year Plan rested on this assistance. In addition to the loan of $300 million in 1950, the Soviet Union in 1953-1956 agreed to sell China $2 billion in equipment, and sent several thousand technical advisers to help build 211 major industrial projects.

On this basis, the First Five-Year Plan achieved an annual rate of increase in production of at least 6 percent. The effort was financed very largely by accumulation of surplus agricultural commodities from China’s hard-pressed peasantry and exchange of these for petroleum, machinery, and other commodities needed for the industrialization of China. Since these came largely from the Soviet Union and the European Communist satellites, 80 percent of China’s trade was with the Communist bloc at the end of this First Five-Year Plan.

It is possible that this process could have continued, but it is even more likely that the faster rate of increase of population in comparison with the rise in food production may have indicated that the process could not continue. In any case, the powers in Peking decided to do something about it. Although it is not completely clear what they decided to do, and even less clear why they decided to do it, the consequence was a disaster. The “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 became a great stumble. This was the third stage in the agrarian reorganization of China.