4,000 MILES OF CHINESE PUZZLES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000100050070-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Sequence Number: 70
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

? Approved For Release 2007/06/21 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000100050070-2 STAT
ARTICLE APPEARED
P , L -
POST
23 October -1977
C IiANGSHA, China-WVe had been in China for almost
two weeks when I caught my first glimpse of what
might have been a bulldozer. It was just a quick flash of a
hazy silhouette on a distant bill, -as our train rolled south
from Wuhan to Changsha. But it ended a long quest.
It was back in Peking that I had remarked, "Gosh, what
these people could do with a bulldozer." Wherever we
looked, we saw a building or street under construction by
straining men and women, with only wheelbarrows and
.shovels at their disposal. -
"They've got them," said George Bush, the former chief
of the U.S. Liaison Office in Peking and the head of our 13-
member touring party. "I saw them when we were here
two years ago."
-;` And so began the search. In Peking, there were trucks
sizes and descriptions. It was almost as if Chairman Mao
had left an instruction in his will, "Let no pile of earth
remain unmoved." But never a bulldozer. From the windows of cars and
trains, and every time we landed or took off in a plane, I
scanned the landscape. For three misty days on a Yangtze
River steamer, I went out on deck or stood at the cabin'
window, thinking surely one would appear in the fields.
But in more than 4,000 miles of travel through six
provinces in 16 days, there was only that one glimpse of
what might have been a bulldozer.
I dwell on that subject, because I came back'front this
first visit to China with the feeling. that its'future =and
the future of its relations with the United States and the
world -- is directly tied to the transition from human.
and buses galore. There were even a dozen street-sweep..' ? labor to bulldozers, the reach for a modern industrial
wg-and-washing machines out on Tien An Men Square to economy.
`clean up after a giant reception for a visiting Cambodian That is not to say that economics is more important than
leader: But not one bulldozer did we see.-.: politics; only that it is more visible. As a novice, I could not
mwe traveled across the country, we continued to'see~ judge what is happening politically in Gina a year after
{brigades of men and women, young and old, turning earth
with shovels and hauling it this way and that, in carts of all
Approved For Release 2007/06/21 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000100050070-2 -