Word: communes
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...more intimate account of life in the commune came from a young mother who managed to escape to Hong Kong, hollow-cheeked and scaly from bad diet. At 5 each morning, she and her husband were aroused for "mass sports" (i.e., calisthenics). Their only meal together with their two sons was breakfast. Her husband was sent off in one direction to work all day, she in another. They put their young sons in a common nursery (which charged for the privilege), and the children's 70-year-old grandmother worked on a "mending brigade." Among other conveniences...
...Herded. Red China's first "people's commune," a single unit of 9,300 peasant families organized along military lines, was set up in Honan province six months ago without fanfare. Early in September, apparently pleased with the results of the Honan experiment, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party gave the go-ahead for a nationwide switchover to communes. By last week Peking was boasting that already 90.4% of China's 500 million peasants had been herded into 23,393 communes...
...life that faces Red China's peasantry in the communes is regimented beyond the dreams of ancient Sparta. Each commune, averaging about 21,000 inhabitants, is ruled by a party committee that controls everything from food distribution to funerals. Organized into work brigades, the inhabitants of the communes mostly have no set jobs, can be shunted on a day-to-day basis from farm work to military or industrial duties. Ultimately, private property is to be utterly abolished and already the most "advanced" communes have compelled the peasants to surrender the personal garden plots they were allowed to keep...
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...
Most interesting thing in the seized papers was a L'Express article reporting that since De Gaulle's advent the army in Algeria had purged itself of all senior officers with "liberal" tendencies and had set up Committees of Public Safety in every Algerian commune. Behind these maneuvers, charged L'Express, was a youthful, fascist-minded "college of colonels" whose moving spirits had served against the Communist Viet Minh in Indo-China. From their enemy they were said to have developed an intense admiration for Mao Tse-tung's psychological techniques in controlling villagers. (Algerian rebels...