Word: communes
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Only 600 yards across the West River from the Portuguese colony of Macao lies a Red Chinese people's commune on Lappa Island, and across this narrow stretch of water last week could be seen a chilling glimpse behind the Bamboo Curtain...
...Volunteers. To feed so many mouths, and to get work out of so many bodies, Mao decided on the ruthless and revolutionary device of the people's commune-a system of forced collectivization of human beings which the Russians abandoned as impractical in 1933. Rural people's communes, the first of which appeared in Honan province last April, sometimes have as many as 300,000 members, in most cases absorb the whole population of a county-peasants, traders, students, officials and professional men. Upon "volunteering" to join a commune, members turn over to it virtually all their private...
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...
Tartars & Tonnage. For Red China's agricultural planners the commune system has obvious advantages: constantly under the eye of the commune's "activists," Chinese peasants will no longer be able to evade forced deliveries of crops to the government. More important, all of China's farmers can be forced to adopt improved techniques, such as deep plowing (as much as 3 ft.) and massive use of natural fertilizer, which have given Communist experimental farms per-acre rice yields twice as big as Japan's highest...
...year-old lady had her secretaries build a small furnace in the garden of her Shanghai home. There-said Radio Peking-the secretaries now toil blithely from dawn until evening, producing as much as 341 Ibs. of good-quality steel a day. Last week, according to commune knowledge, the lady joined the workers in the garden, saying: "Making steel also tempers people." As vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, sister of Nationalist China's Madame Chiang Kaishek and widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, she is an alloy herself-Madame...