Word: commune
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...fought alongside Mao Tse-tung during the famed Long March in the '30s, Peng was the leader of the conservative faction of the Chinese politburo. While on a trip to Albania in May 1959, he secretly told Nikita Khrushchev of his strong opposition to Mao's agricultural commune system. With Khrushchev's encouragement, Peng returned to China and denounced Mao's Great Leap Forward as "petty bourgeois fanaticism." At a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee in August 1959, Peng said that the communes had been set up without adequate preparation, scored...
...accused of joining the Communist Party only out of opportunism. Condemned to a period of intensive reindoctrination, Peng recanted, asked for the opportunity to rehabilitate himself by working as an ordinary peasant. Mao benevolently excused him from manual labor, exiled him to obscurity as a superintendent of a commune...
...cruel rigidity of the commune system was conspicuously softened. The workday was cut to ten hours. Husbands and wives were to be permitted their own room, the unappetizing mess halls were shut down, and commune members were allowed to keep such personal belongings as "houses, bicycles, clothing, blankets, quilts, radios, watches and bank deposits." There was even a typical, doublethink explanation for this return to capitalism. "The small freedom within the big collective-this is dialectical unity...
...encompass the whole of it. While food is short everywhere, some provinces are far better off than others. Though most factories are badly run, all are not, and despite fatigue there is a slowly growing competence among skilled laborers. The Communists have even found a sunny side to the commune experience. Explained a Red official: "It wasn't production, it was education. Our people were in awe of technological processes. Now they have learned not to be afraid of 'technique.' It has lost its mystery. People who have actually poured their own steel and made things with...
...Shanghai, where failure of the cotton crop has paralyzed textile mills, unemployed workers are being used as street cleaners. And it is becoming hard even to die. In one Kwangtung area, the commune provides one coffin per month, first come, first served. Other corpses must be buried in paper cartons, though some families scrape together enough wood to make triangular coffins, saving on corners...