Word: communings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...Hsien-nien, "there has been tension . . . owing to short supply of some non-staple foods and manufactured daily necessities in the cities." One of the chief causes of these "temporary difficulties," conceded Li, was the upheaval created by "such a great social change as the people's commune movement...
...them the possibility that in some circumstances unforeseeable now the whole thing could come a cropper: a desperate people, overworked, underfed, a trivial incident of defiance, a single lapse of authority-such as an army unit's refusal to fire on a handful of insubordinate peasants in a commune-might set off a chain reaction. No one saw such prospects now. Yet better than anyone else, Red China's outwardly confident rulers know that great leaps involve the risk of disastrous falls...