Word: china
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fifteen months ago, when Mao first began to herd his subjects into the slavery of agricultural communes (TIME, Oct. 20), Red China's bosses joyfully proclaimed that the Marxist millennium was at hand. "We were told," said one refugee who made it to freedom in Hong Kong. "that once the commune got under way it would provide free meals for all. pay wages to all, take care of young and old and bring to the people many other blessings." But within weeks the food stocks that the government had hoarded in order to get the communes...
...badly that in Shensi province, members of four communes assigned to reap grain left nearly 300 tons of wheat to waste in the fields. Inevitably, too. the peasants lost interest in selling their crops; according to the Peking People's Daily, the amount of produce kept by China's peasants for their own use jumped 146% last year...
...Along with loss of incentive went gross mismanagement by party activists in the communes. Dutifully heeding Peking's clamorous cries for concentration on grain and on backyard steel production (since largely abandoned), commune bosses neglected vegetables, cloth and fiber crops. The result was a severe crimp in Red China's once booming export drive (TIME, Aug. 3), and a vegetable shortage so severe that last month China's cities were informed that henceforth they would have to grow all their own food except grain (TIME, July...
...commune members were found not to care very much about production quotas." By last June. Agriculture Minister Liao Lu-yen found himself obliged to report that, so far in 1959, land planted to food grains was running 1,300,000 acres behind 1958-a fact that promised to cost China's already hungry populace at least 14 million tons of grain this year...
...Bishop Lord and other Methodist leaders have many times proposed political action at variance with the established national policy, such as recognition of Red China or its admittance to the United Nations. Would you disobey the directives of your religious leaders and remain loyal to the traditional American policy...