suggest for a Chinese report that cultivated land in 1973 was 4.8 million hectares less than in 1957, is that Peking consciously reduced the cultivated arable land area in order to show improvements in agricultural productivity. Some Soviet specialists also believe that the low level of mechanization and the absence of large capital investment make it impossible for China to fully utilize even the area which was cultivated in 1957. They remind the reader that the battle against erosion and improvement of cultivated lands through irrigation, better drainage and leveling requires more than the hard work of peasants; it requires specialists with a good scientific and technical foundation, something the Chinese are very short of. The measures that did increase productivity in China's agriculture were, according to the Soviets, the improvement of seed varieties, the increase in the cropping coefficient and a greater utilization of chemical fertilizers. Table 2 presents some estimates of China's "agrotechnical level."

Note: It seems strange that the area under crops is larger than the tillable land area. It is difficult to say whether there is a reasonable explanation or the figures were simply inadvertently reversed.

Source: Petrov and Molodtsova, p. 134. Most of the figures for 1952 and 1957 are from "The Ten Great Years"; some of the figures for 1965 and 1970 are U.S. estimate; most of the other figures are estimated by Molodtsova.

Until the publication of Molodtsova's figures, all Soviet sources carried pretty much the same estimates of China's grain production: official Chinese statistics through 1957 and significantly lower estimates than by most Western specialists, since 1960 (see table 3, col. 1). The often drastic upward revision of the earlier Soviet estimates by Molodtsova (table 3, col. 2) more than closed this gap: for 12 of the 25 years covered by the estimates, her figures of China's grain production actually exceed the CIA estimates (table 3, col. 3). Her imaginative methodology (uncharacteristic for Soviet sinologists) for arriving at the grain estimates for the 1957-73 period is presented in table 4. The implications of the new figures suggest two somewhat contradictory observations. On the one hand, they tend to negate the universal Soviet contention of severe food shortages in China; on the other hand, by inflating the base 1949 grain production, the new estimates tend to reduce the average annual rate of increase in grain production over the 25-year period-placing it only slightly ahead of population growth.

TABLE 3. PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA GRAIN PRODUCTION: A COMPARISON OF U.S. AND SOVIET ESTIMATES

1 With the exception of 1976, the figures are from Z. 1. Muromtseva, "Agriculture," in M. I. Sladkovskiy et. al. (eds.) "Kitayskaya Narodnaya Respublika: politicheskoye i ekonomicheskoye razvitiye v 1973 godu" ("Chinese People's Republic: political and economic development in 1973") (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 153-164; the figure for 1976 is from 1. Korkunov, et. al., "China's Economy in 1976," "Far Eastern Affairs," No. 2, 1977, p. 24. Estimates are said to be based on Chinese and foreign sources.

2 Petrov and Molodtsova, p. 145.

Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Center, China: Economic Indicators, October 1977 (ER 7710508), p. 11. There are, of course, many other grain production series that might have been selected to illustrate the general magnitude of Western estimates.

TABLE 4.-EFFECTS OF WEATHER, TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL FACTORS ON CHINA'S

Source: Petrov and Molodtsova, p. 142. Molodstova uses 1957 as the average year for weather and production. She estimates a 2.6 ton increase in grain production for every ton of fertilizer applied.

C. Industry

The Soviets describe the development of China's industry as complicated and contradictory, and they divide it basically into just two periods: 1949 through 1957 and 1958 to the present time. The first period, which includes the First Five-Year Plan and followed the prescribed Soviet line, showed rapid industrial growth and "laid a most favorable foundation" for the future successful development of China's industry. Then came the "adventurist policies" of the Great Leap with its emphasis on "mass construction of handicraft industries" in key branches of industry (for example, backyard steel furnaces), a drastic reduction in the quality of production, overintensive use of existing industries to the point of deterioration, and the absorption into industrial production of large numbers of subsidiary workers at the expense of other branches of the economy-especially agriculture.

In the late 1950's the Soviets reported China's Great Leap economic statistics without any commentary. It is difficult to say whether it pained them to do so or they actually accepted these inflated data. Now, of course, they concur with what is common knowledge in the West-that the official production statistics published for the Great Leap were gross exaggerations. Nevertheless, they maintain (not unreasonably) that the growth which occurred in 1958 and 1959 was due primarily to the completion of enterprises that were earlier initiated with the help of the Soviet Union. Soviet specialists give short shrift to the 1962-66 period. They say that at least the gross mistakes of the Great Leap were corrected and that by the end of 1962 the downward trend in industrial production was reversed. In general, by the mid-1960's conditions in China for a return to planned economic construction were good.

The Soviets estimate that the Cultural Revolution set back China's industrial development by 2 to 3 years. Most affected were the coal, metallurgical, and electric power industries; labor productivity and quality of production were also sharply reduced. It was not until 1969 that production once again reached the 1966 levels, and even then not in all the branches of industry.

The process of overcoming the consequences of the Cultural Revolution was slow and painful and the plan to achieve a 10-percent annual growth in production was obstructed by continuing political campaigns and conflicts between the pragmatists and the Maoists. The overall goal was the development of a national military-industrial complex (i.e., heavy and modern industry) and to obtain as much scientific and technological assistance as possible from the advanced capitalist countries. While Chinese industry (both national and local) had experienced growth in the 1970's, Peking has not been able to solve many of the fundamental problems that affect industrial development, such as insufficient raw materials and energy, outdated industrial facilities, and the shortage of qualified specialists. As a result, between 1960 and 1975 the gross industrial production did not increase by more than 3 percent per year.

Although Soviet and Western estimates of China's production figures may differ, there is actually little disagreement about the overall strengths and weaknesses of individual economic sectors or the

specific problems facing the planners in Peking. The differences are in perspective, in emphasis, and in evaluations of the rationality (or muddleheadedness) of China's economic policies. The following review of the industrial sectors will be brief and dull; it will, where possible, emphasize the differences in Soviet and Western perceptions. The Soviets believe that fuel and energy resources continue to be the weakest of many weak links in China's economic development and they single out coal (China's most important fuel) as the primary culprit. Among the most important reasons why coal production has not kept pace with the gross industrial production is the low level of mechanization and automation in the large coal areas of the north. While much of the increase in productivity in recent years came from the small and medium-size mines around the country, China's efforts to make the provinces south of the Yangtse self-sufficient in coal have not been successful and despite the discovery of new deposits, the Soviets believe that the costly north-south transport of coal will have to continue.

Although oil output grew more rapidly than the rest of China's industry, it still accounts for only 12 percent of the country's fuel and energy resources. According to the Soviets, one of the reasons that China speeded up the exploration for and development of petroleum was "to make ends meet" in her trade with "imperialist monopolies." A more rapid development of oil resources has been hampered, however by the inadequacies of China's refining capacities, storage facilities, and transportation facilities both to the refineries and to the areas of consumption. The development of new oil fields and the building of additional pipelines continue, but even though China reduced oil exports in 1976, the total production of petroleum goods are far from adequate to meet her domestic requirement. The greatest shortages are evident in the transportation field where there is a perpetual shortage of liquid fuels.

The Soviets consider the insufficiency and inefficiency of electric power-80 percent of which is still generated by coal-burning installations-to be the greatest problem in China's energy picture. Prospects therefore, depend to a large extent on increased coal production and the results of China's current efforts to improve and expand the old facilities. The Soviets concede that the most rapid growth in electric power occurred in the hydroelectric sector, but here as in other industrial fields, frequent criticism focuses on the size of the installations. They clearly favor the large stations, like those which were built on the Huang Ho cascade, and think it is economically wasteful to scatter small hydro stations throughout the countryside.

Both political and economic factors explain the "stagnant" state of China's iron and steel industry. Most of the recent increase in the production of steel and pig iron came from the construction of small and medium-sized plants, while the construction of large new plants necessary for China to reach a production level of 30 million tons of steel annually is handicapped by limited capabilities in heavy machine building and by the shortage of qualified specialists. The Soviets do believe, however, that China is capable of constructing one enterprise with 1-million-ton capacity every 3 years and a large combine with a 3- to 5-million-ton capacity every 5 years. The growth of many branches of the economy is being held up because China's metallurgy does not

meet the country's needs in terms of quantity, quality or assortment of products. The Soviets conclude that even with the purchase of foreign metallurgical equipment, China will have to continue to import metals especially high-grade steel-from abroad.

Although hampered by a shortage of construction materials (especially rolled steel), China's machine-building industry has made great strides. Because of military priorities, the greatest progress was achieved in electronics and precision machine-tools. Other priority fields in which China has concentrated her machine-building efforts are the mining, petroleum, chemical, and power industries, as well as a variety of industries which produce equipment for agriculture. However, the production figures can be deceiving, say the Soviets, because most of the machine-tool production goes for replacement of obsolete equipment. Furthermore, although the situation with small machine tools is relatively good, the production of large, automatic, and semiautomatic machine tools suffers from lack of planning. The policy of self-reliance and the weakness of communication between enterprises causes every machine-building plant to attempt to be a producer of machinery and of parts and, at the same time, to be a repair station for the area it serves. This, say the Soviets, is inefficient. China's chemical industry has been emphasizing the production of fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fibers, drugs, and chemical products of military significance. By modernizing old enterprises, China's petrochemical industry has experienced good growth, but the quality of production is well below world standards. The Soviets are adamant in their criticism of China's policy of building the technologically backward, small-scale chemical fertilizer plants which use low-quality raw materials and consequently produce low-quality fertilizer. Because of China's purchases of whole fertilizer plants from "capitalist countries," the overall situation in fertilizer production is deemed to be "relatively good" by the Soviets. As a matter of fact, they say that the future of China's chemical industry in general will depend to a large extent on the purchases of chemical installations from abroad.

The differences in the Soviet and Western estimates of China's cement production are so striking that one immediately suspects a definitional problem. This is, in fact, the case, but only one source was located which clarifies the difference. Although one must assume that the Soviets recognize the importance of small cement plants scattered throughout the countryside to provide local areas with low-quality cement for irrigation projects, telegraph poles, conduits, tile, and so forth, they exclude the production of these enterprises of local significance from the national estimate of cement production. The Soviets include only the production of large factories (many of them built with the help of the Soviet Union in the 1950's) which provide cement for capital construction in the most important branches of heavy industry and for military industrial needs. They maintain, however, that probably because of the national fuel shortage, these large cement plants are not being utilized to capacity.

China's light industry has been growing about one-third as fast as her heavy industry. The Soviets give several generally accepted. explanations for this. Since light industry receives 70 percent of its raw materials from agriculture, any drop in the production of cotton,