Word: commune
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...vast stockpiles (TIME, Dec. 29 et seq.). And, as many Western observers had already suspected, the highly touted backyard steel furnaces proved a fiasco. None of 3,000,000 tons produced was usable in industry, confessed Peking. Between the lines could be read the bitter admission that the commune system had resulted only in pushing China's luckless peasants beyond their endurance. The report made sober reading for those Asians who had believed Red China's propaganda about the superiority of Communism as a way of swiftly industrializing a backward nation...
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...
...Cares? 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...
Worse yet, young Red "agricultural experts" set impossibly high production quotas for the communes, drove man and beast so hard that abnormal numbers of cattle and water buffalo began to die of overwork. As for the peasants, reported Canton's Nan-fang Duily sadly, "quite a few 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...
...characterized the mainland Chinese as humans reduced to the level of "inmates in a zoo," with the exceptions that they were required to work harder and were ruled by an ever-present loudspeaker. He felt that the regimentation had resulted in an unhappy splitting of families in the massive commune program, but had successfully created a picture of "American imperialists" in Chinese eyes...