Although rationing of cotton cloth persists, clothing standards are generally perking up. Synthetic fabrics are becoming more widely available, for example, and adult garb is gradually departing from monotonic blue or gray. Housing also shows improvement, especially in rural areas. Members of successful communes are moving up in large numbers to brick and stone houses through the use of local materials and their own labor. In urban areas, apartment blocks are being raised near the new factory buildings, and the stock of old housing seems to be maintained satisfactorily through a combination of private and collective effort. The pace of improvement is probably most noticeable in the ownership of consumer durables-bicycles especially, and watches, transistor radios, cameras, and sewing machines. China manufactures five million bicycles a year, and the total number now in operation may be about 40 million. Rudimentary health services are being extended to back areas through "barefoot doctors," the young medical corpsmen with 3 to 6 months' training. The goal of universal primary education is gradually being realized as 5-year primary schools are being set up in even the most remote villages. The number of small freedoms of choice is gradually expanding. Nonetheless, the basic pattern of consumption continues to be closely regulated by a host of Government and quasi-Government bodies. Finally, the picture of consumption painted by recent visitors to China usually applies only to favored industrial workers and to members of well-to-do communes; it does not accurately reflect the conditions of life of many workers and their families in handicrafts, local industry and transport, and in backward communes. X. POPULATION: No SURCEASE-AS YET Data on China's population and on the current population control program remain so fragmentary that precise numerical estimates are impossible. The figure of 920 million people, used in this paper for mid-1974, implies an annual average growth of 2.2 percent since 1957. To illustrate the wide range of uncertainty in population figures, Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien's statement made in mid-1971 to a Cairo journalist is worth repeating: 6 *We have been racing against time to cope with the enormous increase in population. Some people estimate the population at 800 million and some at 750 million. Unfortunately, there are no accurate statistics in this connection. Nevertheless, the officials at the supply and grain department are saying confidently, "The number is 800 million people." Officials outside the grain department say the population is "750 million only" while the Ministry of Commerce affirms that the "number is 830 million." However, the planning department insists that the number is "less than 750 million." The Ministry of Commerce insists on the bigger number in order to be able to provide goods in large quantities. The planning men reduce the figure in order to strike a balance in the plans of the various state departments. The population series used in this paper is one developed several years ago for general U.S. Government use by the Foreign Demographic Analysis Division of the Department of Commerce. Other estimates imply average growth rates for recent years as low as 1.7 percent. Cairo Al-Jumhurivah in Arabic, p. 9. as reported in FBIS-CHI-71-238, 10 December 1971. A8. (Throughout this paper the abbreviation "FBIS-CHI" refers to the index title of the Daily Report: People's Republic of China, Foreign Broadcast Information Service.) In his January 1975 report, Chou illustrated the looseness of the PRC's own population figures by alluding to both (a) a population of "nearly 800 million," and (b) an increase in population of 60 percent "since liberation," or 878 million, using the regime's figure of 549 million for 1949.7 Strong factors favoring high fertility are at work in present-day China: Improved nutrition; continued gains in public health, now aided and abetted by the legions of barefoot doctors; the presence of large and growing numbers of women in the childbearing age groups, a result of the baby boom of the 1950's and 1960's; the settled societal conditions of the Fourth Five-Year Plan period; and ingrained attitudes favoring large families, which the immensely improved lot of children in contemporary China has strengthened in some respects. The present population control program, which is much more determined than the campaigns of 1956-58 and 1962-66, has been in effect only since the Cultural Revolution and has only begun to penetrate rural areas. The author doubts that it has had appreciable effects on demographic rates, or rather, he doubts that it has done any more than offset the strong pronatalist currents noted above. In any case, the data are not available to judge between those who feel that population has continued to grow at perhaps 24 percent and those, like Orleans, who feel that population in recent years has grown at 134 percent. The Chinese Government now appears committed to a determined effort to bring the rate of population increase down to 1 percent or below within the next few years. China is beginning to master steroid chemistry and other fields related to birth control technology. Little of this technology was available at the time of the first two birth control campaigns. The account by Djerassi 10 of the amazing progress made by the People's Republic in developing and distributing oral contraceptives is "must reading" in this regard. The main feature distinguishing China's population control effort, however, is not the grim determination of the policymaker, nor the change in social attitudes as helped along by Government propaganda, nor the availability of new birth control technology-it is the tightknit organization of Chinese life under the Party. The current birth control campaign has begun the use of "baby quotas" "1 for low-level social units. Under this system, a target is set for the number of births by women in a village or urban block. The quota is discussed, presumably under the usual rules of the game, i.e., "democratic centralism." Women with two or three children normally are not authorized to have additional children; those with one are eligible; and those with none are offered, we are told, medical assistance if they wish off A yearend figure of 548.77 million is given in Ten Great Years, Peking. Foreign Language Press, 1960. p. 8. Contrary to Chinese pronouncements in the past, which suggested that basic public health problems had been solved throughout the whole country, many backward areas still exist. In these areas, the efforts of the barefoot doctors will at first raise population growth rates. for example, through encouragement of better sanitation practices. For a summary of Orleans' views and for references to other materials on the subiect. see China's Experience in Population Control: The Elusive Model, prepared for the Committee on Foreign Affairs. U.S. House of Representatives by the Congressional Research Service. Library of Congress. Washington, September 1974; in the foreword, Leo A. Orleans is identified as the author of the publication. 10 Carl Djerassi. "Some Observations on Current Fertility Control in China." China Quarterly, No. 57, January-March 1974. nn. 40–62. 11 For an account of baby quotas, see Han Suyin Population Growth and Birth Control in China, a paper prepared for the International Industrial Conference jointly sponsored by The Conference Board and Stanford Research Institute Sept. 17-21, 1973, in San Francisco, Calif. spring. Each layer in the bureaucracy, where the system is being installed, has begun setting up birth control committees, establishing targets, holding conferences and expanding the distribution of birth control materials. The introduction of the "baby quota" system illustrates the organizational power of the Party, the practicality of the leadership, and the difference between China and other societies, say, the U.S.S.R. and India. If Peking were to give highest priority to the sharp curbing of the birth rate over the next decade, it has the organization in place, the technology at hand, and changing social attitudes on its side. Since its reinvigoration after the Cultural Revolution, however, the birth control program has not been pushed in a harsh manner. Furthermore, administrators at all levels have a host of other programs competing for their attention. XI. EDUCATION: CHANGES TOWARD THE PRACTICAL The commitment to universal education has been one of the brightest aspects of the quarter of a century of revolutionary rule in China. But education for what? By whom? To what level? As part of the wholesale adoption of the Soviet model in the 1950's, the new Chinese regime installed a wide ranging education system designed to bring literacy to the mass of the Chinese and to train the hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians needed for forced-draft industrialization and the ultimate building of advanced weapons. The result was an enormous increase in the number of students, teachers, and administrators at all levels and, soon, an outpouring of technical graduates of all kinds. During the Great Leap Forward, the educational system was thrown into disarray by shortcut methods of instant education. It recovered with the rest of the economy when the Leap was abandoned. Chairman Mao rightly regarded the restored educational system as patently subversive of his revolutionary goals. The education system, particu larly in its higher reaches, (a) relied on the written authority of deceased foreign scholars, (b) accustomed students to the use of the latest laboratory and hospital equipment (far beyond China's means), (c) put technical expertise to the fore at the expense of ideological fervor, and (d) accustomed a privileged class of young people to a life divorced from productive effort, keeping them in student status often through their late twenties. It was no accident that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution with a broad attack on the educational and cultural bureaucracy and that the institutions of higher learning were shut down for 4 academic years, 1966-70. The Cultural Revolution was in part Mao's last great attempt to (a) reimpose his authority on an increasingly technocratic and independent bureaucracy, and (b) reinvigorate the revolutionary movement with its original spirit of unquestioning loyalty, self-sacrifice, plain living, and egalitarianism. Insofar as this was the case, Mao won his share of battles-but not the war-because he could not, or would not, dismantle the society sufficiently to destroy its deepening technocratic roots. In education, however, Mao gained many of his objectives. As shown in table 4, the educational system of the past 5 years differs markedly from the older system, especially in the higher ranks. The system reflects Mao's prescriptions of shorter courses, a student body with work experience, a revolutionly faculty, a practical curriculum, and continuous political indoctrination. TABLE 4.-China: Change in educational system Pre-Cultural Revolution System 1. 6 years of primary school, 6 years of middle school, 4-5 years of college, graduate training in variety of fields. 2. Preponderance of college students from urban bourgeois background. 3. Core of college faculty with background of Western humanist tradition. 4. Maintenance of much of the elitist, lily-white hand tradition of prerevolutionary Chinese scholarship. 5. Emphasis on "expertness," i.e., on ability to perform as a scholar, scientist, or official. Post-Cultural Revolution System 1. 5 years of primary school, 5 years of middle school, 2-3 years interval of labor or military service, 3-4 years of college, severely restricted graduate training. 2. Preponderance of college students from ranks of young workers, peasants, or soldiers. 3. Thin remnant of college faculty with background of Western humanist tradition. 4. Emphasis on the combining of classroom work with manual labor and practical experience, all in a spirit of "integrating with the masses." 5. Emphasis on "redness," i.e., on political attitude and willingness to to serve the revolutionary system. These Maoist educational standards could not be introduced fullbloom when the universities and technical institutes began to resume operation in the fall of 1970. At first, only a fraction of faculty and student slots were filled, and the curriculum was in turmoil. In the opening rounds of the anti-Confucius campaign, attacks were made on the examination system as a means of determining the suitability of students. Rusticated youths who had spent their time feeding hogs and attending political meetings were praised at the expense of those who had spent their time studying for examinations. This element of the anti-Confucius campaign has been muted in the last few months. In the current academic year, the situation is still unsettled. A system of recruiting students from factories, communes, and military units is in operation. At the same time, a small number of exceptionally gifted youth are being plucked out of the normal track and given special training in mathematics and other scientific disciplines. The appointment at the National People's Congress of a Minister of Education who was closely connected with pre-Cultural Revolution educational practices suggests that a seeping back of technical and theoretical courses is now in progress. At the primary level, the goal of universal 5-year education has new impetus. Schools are being established farther out in the countryside, manned by rusticated middle-school graduates. Training of millions of teenagers and young adults in industrial skills, agrotechnology, and paramedical skills has been stepped up in these last few years. The People's Liberation Army takes in roughly 1 million 18-year-olds annually and cycles out a million men with various skills. In general, the educational system is being fattened at the bottom and middle and narrowed at the top; and the distinction between education and training is being blurred. Of course, not all these educational programs are accompanied by the euphoria portrayed in the official press. Nonetheless, momentum does exist in education, and higher education moves along a distinctly different track from the pre-Cultural Revolution period. Certain of the changes are responsive to at least the short-term needs of the economy: The problem of illiteracy is being attacked on a broader front than ever before; this is an economy where peasants have to read instructions on fertilizer bags and workers have to read signs on machinery. The economy must benefit strongly from the "investment in human capital" represented by practical courses in cultivating cotton and raising pigs, in running a lathe and operating an oil derrick, in commune bookkeeping, and in preventive rural medicine. The economy benefits when the brightest lad or lass in a rural village is selected to fill the annual slot in a national or provincial college; the older system was, as Mao said, a class system. The emphasis on practical work experience as a college entry requirement, the practical slant of the new curriculum and the new textbooks, and the general dovetailing of educational and productive needs are all pluses for the economy. Even the shortening of undergraduate and graduate courses and the narrowing of education at the top will benefit the economy if the forgone classroom hours were, as Mao charged, merely a prolongation of isolation from useful work. Over the long run, the reformed system does not seem capable of supplying adequate replacements for the several hundred top-drawer scientists, now elderly, who received their advanced training in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other centers of advanced science. The Government will find itself more and more pressed to restore some of the elitist aspects of the old system if it is to meet the more difficult technological challenges of the future. In the meantime, China still retains much of "the advantage of being behind," that is, the opportunity to benefit from high-technology methods and products on which others have paid the cost of pioneering. XII. PROSPECTS: TECHNOCRATIC FUTURE One of the most striking paragraphs in Chou's speech to the Fourth National People's Congress dealt with the future prospects for the economy: 12 On Chairman Mao's instructions, it was suggested in the report on the work of the Government to the 3d National People's Congress that we might envisage the development of our national economy in two stages beginning from the third 5-year plan: The first stage is to build an independent and relatively comprehensive industrial and economic system in 15 years, that is before 1980; the second stage is to accomplish the comprehensive modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world. The economic progress of the People's Republic in the first quarter of a century has been a mixture of palpable successes, partial failures, and unfinished tasks. The economy has showed undeniable strength in its ability to feed a huge population, expand industrial capacity 12 FBIS-CHI-75-13, Jan. 20, 1975, D23. |