The God of Water

Where does the bumper harvest come from?

From the Communist Party. Insects and pests and diseases were eradicated.

The God of Water overpowered.

Hard work lasted 300 days.

Strength was turned into grain.

Thus, only six months ago, an imaginative member of the Chinese Politburo summed up his government's agricultural policies in a Peasant Poem, and no one inside China at the time was of a mind to doubt a single line of it. In 1959, Peking had declared, the nation's farms would outproduce by 40% even last year's staggering claim of 375 million tons of grain, which was already said to be nearly double the output of 1957. Western specialists were inclined to view this as exaggeration piled upon exaggeration (TIME, Dec. 1 et seq.), but still they were impressed.

More amazing still, for 1959's claims, was the boast that hardly an acre of additional land would have to be placed in cultivation. Red China had imported hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizer, sent its experts about the country teaching the intricacies of double cropping, closer planting and deeper plowing. "As great as the revolutionary vigor is," said the party to the peasant, "so great will be the yield."

Overzealous & Dishonest. But as time went by, a subtle change came over the agricultural pronouncements. Premier Chou En-lai hinted to the National People's Congress that "output for any particular year may be lower than in the previous year." Meanwhile, the kept press began to erupt with nasty comments about local functionaries who had been "overzealous" and even downright dishonest in their estimates of what their farms were yielding. Kwangtung province, for instance, had produced not 34 million tons of grain, as claimed, but only 30. There had been, said the People's Daily, "little, if any, increase'' in output over 1958 because of "impractical, inefficient and dangerous" close planting. In some places, added China Youth grimly, there had been no harvest at all.

The fact was that Mao Tse-tung's whole "year-of-the-big-leap" policy had been a fiasco, botched by bad planning, and straining fields, farmers and transport. Red China had already sheepishly begun to retreat from its propaganda claims when providentially the government found a way to shift much of the blame: nature this spring took a cruel hand in China, as it so often has before. While flooding rains fell over huge chunks of Central China, the provinces of Kirin and Hopei were parched by drought. In Szechwan, a force of 40 million Chinese was working desperately to keep a wheat crop, badly weakened by unseasonably warm weather in the spring, from toppling over. In Honan, 5,000,000 farmers were battling swarms of insects, and six other provinces were plagued by plant fungus. Finally, last week, came official reports that "the worst flood of the century" had been raging through the provinces of Kiangsu and Anhwei, Fukien and Kwangtung, then over Honan, swirling down the North and West rivers toward heavily populated Canton (pop. 1,500,000) itself. Hundreds of thousands of townspeople were pressed into working on the embankments, and the dikes of Canton held.

But in the surrounding Kwangtung province, said Peking, 187 people were dead, 200,000 were homeless, and 2,000,000 acres of land had been inundated. The local battle cry, reported the New China News Agency last week, was: "Nobody drowns while there are members of the Communist Party around." But there was less cocky talk now of overpowering the God of Water.

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