Word: communal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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According to the Red Chinese themselves, 1958 was a bumper year down on the communal farm: 375 million tons of grain produced, more than double the 1957 output. The farmers of Yunnan province were reported floundering in grain. With storehouses bulging, tubs of wheat had to be crammed inside peasants' homes...
...have actually improved their material position." Their women were also freed, he pointed out, for more work on the collective. And in a significant echo of China's commotion, the Soviet Premier urged: "The time has come to organize, not only in towns but also in collective farms, communal dining halls, laundries, bakeries and nurseries...
...turned out to be no puppet. He threw Calles out of the country and carried on the revolution. He nationalized the oil industry, expropriated the huge haciendas. Peasants took the land that had fed the nation, used it at first to feed only themselves. Finally, the country's communal-farm system evolved...
Gone, too, is any notion of personal life or freedom of choice. Instead of a share of what they produce, commune members get wages fixed by a ruling committee of party activists. At Sputnik Commune, 260 mess halls have been set up where members are fed free rice. These communal kitchens, plus communal nurseries and "mending brigades," relieve the wives of members from "dull and trivial housework," transform women, too, into all-purpose laborers. (The sole concession made to femininity: pregnant women get a month off work with half pay.) Even the old folks, for whom the commune has established...
Private life, too, is not to last for long. Some communes are already planning to tear down' the houses of their members and use the salvaged brick, tile and timber to build communal barracks. In Honan two-thirds of the province's 10 million children are now being cared for in communal nurseries, and in some of the older communes "people's mess halls" have already become, the Reds boast, "almost the only place one can eat." Instead of turning to his wife when his trousers need mending, the good commune member now takes his problem...