The Great Leap Forward has not only been measured by the claimed increases of grain and steel production by so many million tons. Peking boasts too that the Leap produced, in 1958 alone, millions and millions of poems and songs. These products, both in themselves as art and in their way and manner of accomplishment, should reveal a picture of how the mental life, or, more precisely, how the mental as well as physical energy, of the nation is being vigorously mobilised, organised and directed. For, as much of the steel was, regardless of its quality, produced in “backyard furnaces,” so are myriads of these poems and songs, regardless of their aesthetics, made by farm teams in the fields, workers in the factories, and labourers building roads or bridges. The people are goaded and urged, instructed and inspired by tireless party cadres who exhort all social and racial groups that, among other purposes, there has to be a new epoch of poetry production to celebrate the new era in Chinese history.

The events of the six months between October 1, 1959, and April 1, 1960—the period, roughly, between Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. and his visit to South Asia—clearly affected Communist China. What is not so clear is the direction in which China has been moved and the depth and duration of the influence which events have brought to bear on China's relations with the world around her.

Sinkiang occupies an important place in the vast arc of Inner Asia linking Russia and China. Over the past century, it has witnessed recurring political and economic tension between these two Powers. On one occasion, Sino-Russian co-operation suppressed anti-Chinese rebellion among its predominantly Moslem peoples. More frequently, however, Russian influence benefited from these results, to the detriment of Chinese power. In addition, Russian trade concessions during the nineteenth century, and Soviet mineral exploitation in the twentieth century, spurred economic penetration of China's largest province.

The present dispute between India and the People's Republic of China concerning the frontier between those two countries was, to a great extent, touched off by the developments in relations between Tibet and China, although there had been certain recriminations concerning alleged frontier crossings as early as 1954. Furthermore, a large part of the dispute relates to the boundary as established in accordance with the so-called McMahon Line, resulting from the alleged “treaty” of Simla between the United Kingdom and Tibet of 1904. It is therefore advisable to examine the legal status of Tibet itself.

Whereas throughout most of the world the results of the 1953 censusregistration of Communist China, reporting a population of 582·6 million, evoked anxiety and even alarm, the Communists expressed only pride and overwhelming confidence. As a people “liberated from the oppressive chains of capitalism,” Communist leaders felt that their horizons were unlimited and that feeding and caring for a population of this size presented no problems under a system in which people are “the most precious of all categories of capital.” The simultaneous release of vital rates which indicated a birth rate of 37 per thousand population and a death rate of 17 per thousand, further stressed the “great vitality of the people of new China.” The 2 per cent, natural increase (excess of births over deaths), resulting in an annual population growth of some 12 million, was declared, in line with Marxist doctrine, to be an asset in a country with vast new lands and unexploited natural resources, where additional people create additional wealth.

The early development of the Chinese communes was intimately linked with the decentralisation of the industrial and administrative machinery, foreshadowed at the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1956 and carried out during 1957. The rural communes provided the most efficient unit for the management of small-scale industry set up under this scheme, for mobilising manpower in irrigation, implementing repair and other capital works in agriculture, and for generating the internal savings needed to finance investment. Further, they could be used to free women from housework, through the communal facilities they provided, so as to supplement the labour force needed for such undertakings.

The Chinese poet's call to Bulgaria to follow China's path into a bright Communist future reflects a view of the relationship between the two countries, which towards the end of 1958 was widely held in the West. Bulgaria's “Great Leap Forward” and the methods used to mobilise the masses for the Utopian plan for the economic break-through were linked with the visit of two high-powered Bulgarian delegations to China and interpreted by some observers as signs that the Party leaders in Sofia were deviating from the Moscow course in an attempt to hitch their wagon to the rising star of Peking.

To the ordinary man in the drab East German street Communist China is a bore: it strikes him that the main use of this remote and shadowy ally is to help inflate the numerical strength of the “socialist camp” by a few useful hundreds of million souls. He realises that this is meant to overcome his feeling of isolation, to convince him that he is allied not only with a collection of uncouth Balkan tribes and formidable but unloved Russians, but also with a nation that can be claimed to be among the oldest civilised countries of the world, that had invented gunpowder long before even a German monk, Berthold Schwarz, invented it for the West. But on the whole the exploitation of the cultural prestige of the Chinese ally is poverty stricken and inept. Reprints of pre-war editions of a few Chinese novels like The Dream of the Red Chamber, an occasional art book of Chinese paintings or an edition by the publishing house of the Ministry of National Defence of an old Chinese Treatise on the Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated from the Russian, hardly carry great weight or conviction.

When, in the spring of 1949, the Chinese Communist troops captured Nanking in an impetuous surprise advance, there was a Peace Congress in session at Prague. The news of the fall of Nanking was greeted with a raging thunderstorm of claps and rhythmic applause. There followed an outbreak of promiscuous hugging all over the place. The Chinese delegates were carried on fervent shoulders all round the conference room. A Hungarian poet who attended the Congress as a member of the Hungarian delegation withdrew to a sound-proof distance from the jubilant crowd, only to return delivered of a poem written in honour of the Chinese People's Army. The fruit of his labours, entitled “Glad Tidings from Nanking,” was translated that very day into Russian, and later into Chinese. The era of the Grand Victory celebrations had begun.

In September 1956, Ochab, then the First Secretary of the Polish C.P., visited Peking to attend the Congress of the Chinese C.P. When the Soviet delegate, the “liberal” Mikoyan, reproached him abusively for tolerating “anti-Soviet ideas,” the Pole received words of support from his host, Mao Tse-tung. According to Warsaw sources, this was later confirmed in a special letter from Mao and is supposed to have played an important part in inducing Ochab to switch to Gomulka. Thus, the Chinese attitude helped to stiffen Polish resistance when in October 1956 the Soviet delegation headed by Khrushchev landed in Warsaw and threatened to intervene militarily. It is also said that some Chinese leaders in Moscow had argued against the use of force in Poland even before this.