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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 1. March 2, 1959
New Spirit
New Spirit
"We stamp our feet, and the earth trembles;
We blow a breath, and the roaring river makes way;
We lift our hands, and mighty mountains shiver;
We stride forward, and none dare block our path;
We are the workers—our strength is inviolable."
The justification for this new found confidence lies in the achievements during the first Five Year Plan, above all. In the achievements of 1958, the "Year of the Great Leap Forward." Tree-planting on a vast scale, water conservancy projects designed to eliminate flood and drought, the extension of irrigation, new techniques in agriculture and new forms of social organisation—all these have contributed to the great expansion of food production. Grain output was doubled last year, and with the food problem solved the old feeling of helplessness, bred partly by malnutrition, has been replaced by an unbounded confidence in the future.
Much of China's rural poverty has been explained by geographers in terms of difficulties of the physical environment such as shortage of arable land, uncontrollable rivers, or the vagaries of the Chinese climate. These factors may have played a role, but their importance was aggravated by the defective organisation of society, by the instability and ineffectiveness of the Central Government and by a landholding system which facilitated the ruthless exploitation of the peasant.