And, treaty or no,
the Sino-Burmese question may be reopened one day, for Burma was
semi-dependent on China under the Manchu.

The build-up of heavy industry enabled China to conduct an aggressive
policy towards the countries surrounding her, but industrialization had
to be paid for, and, as in other countries, it was basically agriculture
that had to create the necessary capital. Therefore, in June 1950 a
land-reform law was promulgated. By October 1952 it had been implemented
at an estimated cost of two million human lives: the landlords. The next
step, socialization of the land, began in 1953.

The co-operative farms were supposed to achieve higher production than
small individual farms. It may be that any farmer, but particularly the
Chinese, is emotionally involved in his crop, in contrast to the
industrial worker, who often is alienated from the product he makes.
Thus the farmer is unwilling to put unlimited energy and time into
working on a farm that does not belong to him. But it may also be that
the application of principles of industrial operation to agriculture
fails because emergencies often occur in farming and are followed by
periods of leisure, whereas in industry steady work is possible.

In any case, in 1956 strains began to appear in China's economy. In
early 1958 the "Great Leap Forward" was promoted in an attempt to speed
production in all sectors. Soon after, the first communes were created,
against the advise of Russian specialists. The objective of the communes
seems to have been not only the creation of a new organizational form
which would allow the government to exercise more pressure upon farmers
to increase production, but also the correlation of labor and other
needs of industry with agriculture. The communes may have represented an
attempt to set up an organization which could function independently,
even in the event of a governmental breakdown in wartime. At the same
time, the decentralization of industries began and a people's militia
was created. The "back-yard furnaces," which produced high-cost iron of
low quality, seem to have had a similar purpose: to teach citizens how
to produce iron for armaments in case of war and enemy occupation, when
only guerrilla resistance would be possible. In the same year,
aggressive actions against offshore, Nationalist-held islands increased.
China may have believed that war with the United States was imminent.
Perhaps as a result of Russian talks w