Word: communes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...capital's leading hairdressing salon announced that it would no longer give men permanents. Many of the first casualties were similarly obscure: a Peking shopworker who procured two illustrated sex manuals from a Hong Kong businessman and reproduced 7,000 lucrative photos of their choicest scenes; an enterprising commune in Fujian province that used its pooled resources to acquire twelve video recorders and 16 pornographic tapes, then charged viewers $5 admission (about four days' wages for the average urban worker...
...responsibility system" in Sichuan has demonstrated that peasants work best when they tend their own fields. For Westerners this recognition seems equivalent to the rediscovery of the wheel. But with a crucial difference. The state, via the commune, has replaced the old landlord. It owns the fields; the peasant rents an allotted share of land; if he meets the state's quota (once called the landlord's rent), he keeps the rest. This is progress. It is harsh; yet the Great Cultural Revolution was far more cruel...
...scholars suggested that the party too had to change. There should no longer be one total authority compelling every unit of the state, from commune to city to Peking, to zig or zag every time the party zigged or zagged. The party's function is to lead. The government has another function: to keep order. Enterprise has yet another function, from village field to factory floor: to produce. Now the entire country was living through experiments, said Huan, trying to separate party apparatus from governing apparatus...
...courtyard at 5 a.m. and there lay the bodies of the two teachers, beaten to pulp, dead. Another onetime student recalls: "My brother was at Peking University; he was beaten to death; then my mother committed suicide." I spoke to a brigade leader in a distant rural commune who had been hung from a stable rafter for days, suspended by his arms tied behind him, while Red Guards beat him with fists, sticks, irons. Finally his own peasants rescued him. In Chongqing, I spoke to the vice mayor, old beyond his years. He was sent down to an iron mine...
...countryside, farmers now sign contracts with a commune unit for a fixed quantity of produce to be sold to the state at the official price. Anything over the agreed-upon volume may be sold privately on the free market, and the farmer keeps the profit. Says a Western diplomat in Peking: "To all intents and purposes, collectivization is being abandoned...